Oh My Gosh

The garage sale. You guys. I haven't even updated you all about that yet! I have to start by saying that our Life Group is incredible. We are so grateful to have them all as part of our extended family! They not only gathered their own belongings and decided to host this garage sale and put all of the profits toward our adoption, but they also planned and organized the whole thing! Our friend Erica even told some of her coworkers, and one of them donated a BUNCH of stuff. All of the girls gave their Friday night to sort and price and organize and make signs. We all went home around midnight that night. And, after all that, everyone also showed up at 5:30 the next morning to work the sale!

Despite not having many big ticket items, we managed to sell a lot of stuff! One of my mom's employees runs a weekend bakery and generously donated cookies for us to sell (and they were DELICIOUS). We also sold hot chocolate and bottled water. It was really a sweet event for us all around. It's such a blessing to see how much our friends care about us and our boys. Also, Drew's mom and her husband drove in that morning to donate more stuff and brought us some delicious cookies!

And now for the total. Thanks to many generous friends and strangers, we raised $1265!

Thanks for the pictures, Rachel!

Seriously. I don't know how to put into words how incredible it is to see how God has moved through people during this adoption process. We have developed many new friendships, been blessed by old friends, been blessed by new friends, and have even been blessed by strangers.

Speaking of which...We received a check in the mail this week from a church in Texarkana. I visited Texarkana only one time during my life -- at the beginning of this year to visit my best friend and her husband after they moved. During the two days I was there, I met her friend Anna and visited the church that they all attend. Well, long story short, this sweet new friend has been following our adoption story since that time. On adoption Sunday, they talked about many different ways to support adoption ministry. One of the ideas presented was to support a family in the adoption process, and they spoke about our little family. That day, they not only prayed for our family, but they also had many people donate.

And now here I sit, bewildered by the amazing ways God works, with a check from Christ Community Church of Texarkana in my hands. This sweet congregation blessed us with $1,120 toward our adoption! I can't wait to visit my friends again and introduce our boys to this church community that has already loved them from afar.

Waiting, Preparing and a Birthday

A little family update for anyone interested -

September:
Our house was overwhelmingly quiet the first month after O had to go back. It made us miss him all the more. Drew had a rather hectic work schedule with the start of football season. At the beginning of the month, I traveled to Michigan to help clean out and pack my Grandpa's stuff to move him down south to be closer to my parents. We also managed to complete all of our adoption paperwork and send it over to O's country to be translated and submitted to the government.

October:
Our paperwork was submitted to the government! This puts us on a timeline to hopefully travel in December or January to finish the adoption. My mom published her first novel, which would make a great Christmas gift or stocking stuffer! ;) We started working through Jen Hatmaker's 7 Experiment with our Life Group and we're loving the challenge and growth!

Today:
Today is our Little Man's birthday. We never could have imagined all of the challenges and changes we would face during the past year. It was sad to know that no one was celebrating our boy as he turned three, but we were buoyed by the thought that it would be his last birthday without family. And now, the reality is that we do not know when or if we will ever be allowed to bring him home. We still pray for our Little Man daily and know that God loves him more than we ever can.

 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LITTLE MAN! WE LOVE YOU!

Saturday (11/9/13):
Our sweet Life Group is hosting a Garage Sale to help raise donations for our adoption. They all bonded with O this summer, and it's such a blessing to know that they already consider him to be part of our family! Short notice, but if you're local and have anything to donate or would like to come by to say hi, just let us know!

Ps. Feel free to have some guilt-free cookies, ice cream, brownies, cupcakes, or candy in honor of Little Man's birthday!

Progress

We made some real progress this past week! Here is the week in photos. Stay tuned until the end, and I will fill in the gaps with words.

One day last week, I spilled coffee all over my shirt --> right as I walked into the office. Good thing I had on a sweater to button up...

I've been goofing around making a playlist for Little Man's musical enjoyment and education. So far, he has a lot of his grandfather's favorites. We are taking suggestions.

We finished the online portion of our parent training! Phew!

Drew had all of our documents apostilled (which is the fancy way of saying our notary stamps basically have to be re-notarized by the state). Everything is in the mail to our agency, so we're just waiting on trip one dates!

We hit 2000 pageviews last week! Woohoo!

 The next two are not very clear pictures -- camera phones have limits. Sorry.

We went to watch one of our favorite college students perform in a University-wide talent show this past weekend! In this act, Landon played guitar while his friend performed a comedic improv song.

In this act, he sang and played a song on acoustic guitar. Landon has amazing talent! He was one of only two freshmen chosen to perform.

We were lucky to have Landon's family stay at our house while they visited for the weekend and went to see the performance. Landon's younger brother, Grayson, made himself quite comfortable! (As it should be.) We just love this family and feel blessed to be able to offer them a place to stay!

So to fill in some little details: If you gathered from the fourth photo, we are getting VERY close to finding out when our first trip will be to meet our son! As soon as we have dates, you can bet your bottom dollar we will be telling everyone we see! [Two points if you can name the bottom dollar reference. (note: points have no monetary value and are non-redeemable)]

We will be taking orphange donations with us on our first trip, so keep a lookout for a post on what they need most! On a similar note, I have finally worked out descriptions of most of our costs for this process. Click on "The Costs" tab at the top to see an estimate of all our fees, the money we have raised thus far, and our remaining fundraising needs!

This Week

So, I had this post pretty much ready to go, but then yesterday afternoon was a bit rough. Don't worry! Everything will work out. We just got some news of a slight delay with our training, and this mama does NOT like more time being put between her and her son! We talked through all of our options though, and I know we are going to be just fine. After Drew got home and talked me down, the rest of the evening was actually fairly relaxing. So anyways, that was just a little look at the emotions that come along with this process, and we will now move on to other news.

After the garage sale, Drew put several of the remaining large items on Craigslist. We had to sell off enough of the items on Monday and Tuesday to be able to return one of the box trailers on Wednesday morning. We managed to empty the trailer on time and made about $340 dollars. Not too shabby. For the most part, we just listed the furniture at the same price marked during the garage sale.

We still have several items to go, but it's nice to see progress. Once everything is out of the bonus room, we will finally get to set up Little Man's new room. The plan is to move the guest room out of the second bedroom and create a guest/game room in the bonus room. This may just be a paper pregnancy, but I have been dying to get his room all set up for him! The nesting bug has definitely hit our home.

This weekend, the plan was to meet with a family friend to try to get our required face-to-face training out of the way. She is a licensed social worker and had generously offered to put something together for us to cover this new requirement. It turns out, however, that we are going to have to wait for a different scheduled training that our agency has selected. We are not super happy about this (thus my emotional breakdown yesterday), but we will do whatever it takes. These hours are the last big item we need before we can submit to get our first trip dates. And you know what that means...we finally get to meet our Little Man!! Drew and I both cannot wait for that day to come!

And what's a post without pictures?

Seriously. How cute was he as a puppy?!

Garage Sale

So, we had our garage sale on Saturday. It was raining the WHOLE time. Pretty much the garage sale host's worst nightmare. Luckily, we live on a pretty popular street for attracting garage salers, so that helped make up for the rain. We had two big box trailers full of furniture for the sale, and we also had 4 - 10x10 tents and the bonus room was still full. Some of the stuff got a little wet, but nothing was really ruined. We set up a desk in the bonus room so that people could pay inside. It really worked out pretty well. I couldn't take photos in the dark that morning, but there were still a good number of items when I finally did get around to taking pictures.

We have a LOT of people to thank for our success! As far as donations, Mary, Drew's mom, did a fantastic job of spreading the word. A huge portion of our donations came from her friends and neighbors. Thank you Mary!! Most of the furniture came from the ranch house on my parents' property. They are getting ready to sell, and they were kind enough to donate all of the old camp house furniture to our garage sale along with items from their home and my grandmother. Several of our friends and coworkers also made generous donations from their homes.

In addition to donating items, our Life Group also volunteered an evening helping us fold and sort the clothing and begin pricing. We are so grateful to have such a great group! Jonathan and Leah helped us many times throughout the process, as they always do! (They are going to make a great fake uncle and aunt to Little Man.) They were here before, during AND after the garage sale. My mom and our friend Jordan were here to help on the day of the sale as well. Also, my dad and his friend Bruno spent a day at the ranch loading the furniture on a trailer.

And now for the two biggest thanks. First, Nate Kamphuis is a grad student at A&M who attends my parents' Thursday Night Dinner. Nate spent several hours out at the ranch helping my dad and Bruno load tons of furniture onto a trailer on Friday. He THEN drove the trailer up to Waco, because my dad couldn't make it that day, and helped us UNLOAD all of the furniture into the trailers we had set up in the yard. His sweet girlfriend, Tiffany, also generously helped us. (Sorry, Tiffany! We normally make better first impressions! Next time you come over, we promise you don't have to get sweaty!) We are so, so appreciative of Nate's willingness to serve us in such a generous way for nothing in return!

I am also very grateful to my sister, Avery. She came in on Friday afternoon and completely filled in for all of my garage sale failings. Where I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of items and the inability to ever completely organize everything, Avery stepped in and spent hours directing us in pricing and organization. Not only did she stay up until almost 3am on Saturday morning to finish, but she also woke up at 6:30am, worked alongside us all day, and then stayed for part of the afternoon to help me with the post clean-up and organization as well. I couldn't have been blessed with a better sister and best friend, and Little Man will be so blessed to have her in his family as well! Oh, and a shout-out also goes to Spencer, my brother-in-law, for loaning us his wife AND sending one of his loaves of homemade bread with her as well.

 

So, I know you really just want to know the total, right?! Sorry. Sorry. Well, rain and all, we brought in about $1,234.25! Not too bad. Drew is working to list and sell the remaining valuable items on Craigslist and eBay. Once everything is gone, I will be sure to post about that as well!

We are one step closer to bringing home our son!

August and September in a Flash

Don't worry! We're still chugging along! We've been plowing through so much, in fact, that we forgot to take time to update you all.

August:
- Leah and Jonathan, some of our best friends, got married.
- The items stored up for the garage sale doubled.
- Some friends from Estonia came to stay with us, and brought their adorable baby girl. 
- Drew turned 30! We had a great time celebrating with friends and family.
- I babysat for our friends, and Sherlock was very jealous of the sweet, tiny baby.
- We applied for our travel visas.
- We had to do extra medical check-ups to add to our home study. (We braved needles for our Little Man!)

September:
- Our visas arrived in the mail.
- Drew survived the first football game of the season.
- Our home study was finally completed and approved.
- Our church held a special service at a local water park, and we had a great time. We can't wait to bring Little Man along for the next one!
- The adoption law changed in Little Man's country, so we now have to jump through some extra hoops before we can wrap up. (This was a great source of stress for me, while we waited to try to figure out what the new law would mean for our process. Things have settled down now, and we have a plan for how to proceed. I love a good plan.)
- I traveled for work again.
- We have been sorting and purging through our own home in preparation for the garage sale.
- Little Man's room is slowly coming together.
- Our garage sale is set to take place Saturday, September 29. We still need to sort, prep, price and then beg some of our friends to come help us out that morning!

Want to Help?

(1) Pray for us! We are excited for all God has in store for us through this journey, but we know that some times won't be as easy as others. More than anything else we need your prayers and words of encouragement to sustain us through this process.

(2) Our yard sale. We are planning a yard sale for sometime in September. We've already collected a lot of really great stuff, but we still need more. We would be happy to come pick up things from your house for the sale. Also, we could really use some help on the date of the sale. Stay tuned for yard sale updates.

(3) Donate. Simply put, this is expensive. We've begun fundraising, but we still have a long way to go. There are three ways to donate: you can either mail a check (email for address), you can make a gift directly to our personal fundraising account by clicking on the Chip In (using paypal) link, or you can make a tax deductible gift through our family sponsorship grant by clicking the RR button below.   

 

(4) Want an easy way to help us raise money to bring Little Man home?! We have one! Simply scroll down to the bottom of this blog and use our link to make your Amazon purchases (or use the link in this post). Every time you purchase an item on Amazon using the search box on our blog, we are given a portion of the proceeds (which will go directly toward our fundraising). The price for you is the same as if you had gone directly to Amazon.com. You can download movies and TV shows, buy music, clothes, food, books, DVDs, toys, furniture, tools, electronics, and more.

Now is a good time to get a jump on your Christmas shopping!