progress!

Here's a little of what's been going on lately:

* Over the last few weeks, we have received two financial gifts from two very generous, amazing families.
 (Funny story…I wasn't quite prepared for our home study to cost as much as it does. I was, of course, fretting a little over this newfound information. Within just a few days of speaking with our home study agency, we received these two gifts that covered the cost exactly. I'm not exactly sure why I was so stressed about it - we had just seen God work through others in an amazing way not even two weeks before. Someday I'll learn about this thing called faith…)


* Our adoption agency sent out an email saying, "In honor of National Adoption Month, we will waive our "program fee" of $1,000 if you get us your contract by December 31st." Yay! Needless to say, our contract is ready to go out first thing in the morning.

* A friend and I were talking about a month ago and she asked me if we were planning on designing t-shirts to sell for fundraising. I said that we were and that I had a few ideas, but that I hadn't decided on anything for sure. She said, "Well, my husband is a designer and he loves to do this kind of thing. He'll help you out!" One dinner/meeting at Freebirds later, he's designing our t-shirts and working on making our blog more awesome and a bit less "free template-y."

* We found out that there are other families right here in Midland that have adopted/are adopting from Ethiopia! Three of these families are friends of friends, and I can't wait to get together with them, hear about their experiences, and get a few tips and tricks.

Did I mention that my Lord is faithful?

"how many kids do you have?"

Someone asked me this question the other day.

And I actually hesitated.

Then I slowly answered, "Well…we have two here with us right now, but our third one is in Ethiopia. Soon we'll get to find out who he or she is."

It was an amazing feeling. I have no idea who our next child is, but he or she is already taking up residence in my heart. Simply wonderful.

Our story begins...

We've always known that we would adopt.  From the very beginning of our marriage we have known that the Lord has called us to share our home and our hearts with children that were not born into a family.
After our son, Josiah, was born in such a traumatic way in July of 2010, we were advised not to have any more children biologically.  We knew that we wanted more, we had hoped that all of our kids could be fairly close in age, and knowing that adoptions usually take a while, we started the "foster-to-adopt" process in early 2011.  In March, we had an adoption counselor come to our house, meet our family, and conduct our first interview.  We were approved to begin the process and I had ALL of the paperwork filled out within a week.

And it sat there in the dining room for 6 months.

That huge stack of papers took hours to go through and I just tucked it all back into the folder and left it there.  I thought about sending it in every single day, but I just never could bring myself to do it.  I was terrified of the "foster-to-adopt" program because I knew that there was always the risk of bringing the child home, loving him or her as our own for months, and then unexpectedly having them removed from our home.  The process of adopting a foster child takes forever, and I knew that  I would be afraid to get attached to "my" child because of the fear of losing them.
We thought "foster-to-adopt" was our only real option since domestic adoption is crazy expensive and foreign adoption…well, that's like "remortgage-your-house" expensive.

Oh, we of little faith.  We had taken matters into our own hands and, as a result, spent all that time wondering if we were doing the right thing.
Little did we know that God was readying our hearts and preparing us to hear from Him in a massive way.  In a way that would require us to trust Him like never before.