This will be a day to remember for us.  Rick and I had both had not good days at all.  We were venting to each other and the phone rings. 

Backing up a bit…a few weeks-a month or so ago we called Michelle from AWOP to ask about some of the waiting sibling groups and single children on the photo-listing.  Of course, all of the sibling groups had been chosen by families already.  The one little girl on her own who was adorable was also chosen.  There were a few singles still available, but after filling out the application and paperwork for CHI, we realized that we couldn’t afford 2 non-related children (the costs are even more than they are for 2 siblings).  So we decided we’d wait for 2 siblings since Michelle was just about to leave for Ethiopia in a couple weeks.  Before she left, we called her and told her what age children we were looking for and that we were open to either gender and to twins.

Time passes- our paperwork arrived to CHI and we were approved.  Our home study is also in and should be approved this week!  That’s a big step because once it is approved we can accept a referral for children and we can also get immigration moving on our I-600A/I-171H approval, which we need back before we can send in our dossier (big load of tons of paperwork that we’ve been working on) to be authenticated in DC, which will then go to Ethiopia through CHI.  The steps after that will be waiting for a court date.  When you “pass” court, the children are officially yours!  Then you usually travel 2-6 weeks after the court date to go get them and bring them home!  We are anticipating picking them up between mid-December and early-February, but that is a complete guess!

 So back to the phone call…Guess who it is?  It’s Michelle at AWOP!  She was home from Ethiopia since this past Monday and she had news for us!  She told us that many new children were available for adoption, but since returning on Monday, she had been called and notified of several more children that were being brought to the orphanage/care home by the police.  It seems that the food famine is getting worse there and that people cannot afford to feed their children and thus are abandoning them.

She told us the police had brought 2 twin boys that were approximately 6 weeks old to the care facility just a few days ago.  Of course we are thrilled!  This is a word of mouth referral, meaning the boys won’t be offered to another family.  The only thing we will be waiting on is the medical paperwork.  If that comes back clear/good, we can get an official referral that we sign from CHI once that is in and once the home study is approved via mail…we’re hoping this all happens within a week or two at most.  Since the boys were abandoned, they do not have names.  Michelle told us that the nannies at the care home usually name the children if they do not have names, but told us that she would have them called whatever we chose, if we could choose quickly.  That we did.  We are picking Elijah and Jonah.

Another great thing…talk about timing….Diane (my friend from Elkhorn who I met this summer and who is on her 3rd adoption/4th child adopted) was leaving Friday to go get her daughter and bring her home!  She will be going to the care center where the boys are and she is going to hold them and take pictures of them for us!  She also said she’d take a ziplock bag of things for them from us.  So, that same night we got the call, I packed a ziplock bag with 2 light hand-made blankets, 2 soft bears, and pictures of me, Rick, and Evan for the crib(s) and for the nannies to know who the babies will hopefully be going to.

This is an amazing blessing!  This means Evan can still be the oldest child and that soon he could have a couple of brothers to play with…he can’t wait!  He is already saying baby all the time and loves playing with other kids! 

Please pray for the health and safety of these tiny baby boys.  Pray that their medical reports come back good and that we get an official referral for them!  I’ll be posting just as soon as I know about their health and an official referral!

The rummage sale will officially be on Saturday, September 13th and Sunday, September 14th at our home (note change in location) from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

We are getting many donations from family, co-workers, and church families.  Keep them coming!  I hope I am borrowing enough tables from church!

I have heard a few people tell me they’d like to supply some baked goods…we’ll take those too!  We can come get any donations or you can drop them off at our church or our house. 

If you have a clever idea for the ad in the Shopper, let me know.

Thanks for all your support- we couldn’t do this without you all!

Hi all!

So it is looking like Saturday, September 13th and Sunday, September 14th will work best for us for a BIG rummage sale/fundraiser to help bring home two beautiful and hopefully “soon to be known” Ethiopian children into our family…how exciting is that!?! 

So, if you are open to help that weekend, we’d love your help.  If not, we completely understand, but we will need other forms of help, if you are interested.  What can you do?

*DONATE, DONATE, DONATE….we need lots of stuff…we want this to be a BIG rummage sale!  You can drop it off at our house, have us come get it, or bring it to our work place or church…just let us know!

*Help us make signs to hang around the sale so people clearly know that it is for a good cause.

*Help us create a flyer advertising to families at our church, families at our schools, and just to the general public as well.

*Help me think of a creative, but not too long, add that can go in the Shopper.

*Bake some yummy treats that we can sell as well.

This will most likely be at my school, Central-Denison, though we first need to get it approved.  I was thinking outside would be best if it is a nice day to draw more attention.  If it isn’t so nice, it can be in the gym.  School is a great place because we have tables and it’s close to downtown Lake Geneva.  If you know of a better place though where you think we’d draw a larger crowd, please let me know.

 This will be our first of many hopefully successful fundraisers!

Any help you can give would be appreciated, but we need donations more than anything!

Thank you for your love, support, and friendship.  We are blessed.

One more thing….going with this new agency means a much greater expense.  In fact, one we can’t really afford.  We don’t really want to take out any loans or refinance our house, as some people do in order to adopt.  We know God will make it happen.  We have been researching adoption grants and are looking for any great fundraising ideas.  If you have some, please share.  If you’d be willing to help us raise money, please let me know. 

We are thinking of a large rummage sale sometime in September, held on a weekend at my school, maybe with a bake sale too.  We would love ANY donations you have on things you’d like to get rid of, rummage, or give to Good Will.  We will probably make tables- 25 cents, 50 cents, 75 cents, $1, $2, $5, etc. and color-code sticker everything rather than pricing everything.  We will also have a donation jar and sign.  We would also take volunteers to bake some things.  Anything not sold will be taken to Good Will and there will probably be a major sale the last few hours to get rid of stuff the 2nd day.  If you’d like to donate things or donate time (I’ll keep you updated on a date when we pick one), please let me know. 

We’ve also thought of a possible spaghetti dinner (possibly at Rick’s school??), combined with a silent auction, and a quilt raffle.  We’re checking to see if women at our church would help with the quilt.  We could use help creating a document to collect items for a silent auction (I might check to see what another adoptive family used for theirs’) and people to go around passing out the document to businesses/collecting donations.

Other ideas are selling t-shirts- we’d design them and then sell them on our blog or on a website and promote them through adoption groups online, as well as maybe selling them at our events.  We’re also checking on a local band to do a concert to help us raise funds.  We’re up for more ideas….it will take more than one event.  We have a good chunk of money, but in order to bring 2 children home, which we feel is important to us and to the children, we need help from our families, co-workers, friends, church, and of course, God!

Thank you for helping in any way that you can!  We’ll let you know dates when things get established.

we sure didn’t! 

It’s hard to know where to begin on this post.  A lot has happened since I last posted and a LOT has changed!  Some of you may know a little bit about this, some may know most of it, and some of you may know nothing.  So here it is: we will no longer be going with AFAA.  We requested to have our entire adoption file returned.  We had some major questions that we needed answered and it just wasn’t happening.  Communication with them is great when you are interested in their agency, but once you are in, it’s almost non-existent.  We needed answers.  Secondly, we weren’t willing to take that big of a risk/leap of faith.  It could have resulted in a very long process (time was an issue) and we could have lost money or our adoption expenses could have increased dramatically as the foster care fees are monthly once you have a referral for a child/children and there is no cap to them…so you end up paying an arm and a leg if your child is waiting in the orphanage/foster care for months and months.  We are also concerned that no children have come home through AFAA.  Children have been adopted through Uganda, but it was directly through orphanges in which case you have to travel to Uganda more than once and often for weeks at a time, along with getting a lawyer and setting up everything in the country (this is what you pay an agency for).  We may end up doing that someday, but just don’t feel like we know enough to do that now and we are not able to travel to Uganda more than once or for weeks at a time.  So…this means that we will not have Ugandan children..not yet anyways.  I feel very sad about this- it is like a loss for me in a different kind of way.  I think Rick and I both had a strong connection to Uganda through all that we’ve read and seen via dvd/documentary.  We will definitely not give up on Uganda and the Acholi people of Northern Uganda- we are praying for them and will be spreading the word on what is and has been happening there for over 22 years.  I am still making it a goal to speak at church (pray for me to not get emotional and to not get too nervous) and we will show the “Invisible Children” dvd to our church at a later time (evening or late afternoon), as well as open the viewing up for the entire community through the newspaper media.  We hope to someday be able to adopt a child from Uganda maybe when more agencies open up, the program becomes more established through AFAA, or even through one of the orphanges directly as many other families have done.

So on to the new!  We are excited about this, though scared as well, mostly because of the finances needed to adopt through this agency.  Let’s start at the beginning.  Maybe 4-6 weeks ago, a woman from Elkhorn (Diane) put a flyer in our church bulletin that she would be collecting supplies for orphanges in Ethiopia.  The brochure had a picture of children in an Ethiopian orphange (mostly boys mind you).  It caught my eye immediately and I don’t think I thought of anything else for the rest of the service (you’re probably not surprised if you know me well enough).  You also might know me well enough to know how much I love new school supplies and that time of year when they are all put out and there are some great deals.  I buy them for no reason at all sometimes.  Well this year I had a purpose and a darn good one!  I went to ShopKo, Wal-Mart, Target, and Walgreens and caught all the good deals and was donating for 2 or 3 weeks to Diane’s cause.  I do need to mention how good this makes you feel inside- everything about our process so far has made me feel amazing inside.  I always knew adoption was one of my many callings in life.  Along with donating, I read the AWOP (African Widows and Orphans Project) brochure.  Something inside of me was saying I had to see these kids.  So I contacted AWOP with an interest for myself and to also put in a plug at church for adoption to get these beautiful children homes.  I got a username and password (which is changed every 2 weeks) to the photo waiting list of Ethiopian children.  You might also know something else about me- I am an avid note taker.  So I printed this photo waiting list, studied it, and then watched the dvd’s with interviews of all of the children on this list.  I of course took notes on each of the kids, even though she already had a small paragraph typed for each child/sibling group.  The dvd was completed in May.  I felt a connection to many of the kids and wondered how anyone could pick just one or two of them.  The stories of why these children have to be given up is heart breaking. 

AWOP is different in that it is a Christian organization.  You have to write a statement of faith and sign the Apostles Creed in order to adopt a child on the photo list.  They also try and get children sponsored, especially children over 12 so that they can stay with their family and stay in their country.  They do everything in their power before putting these kids on the list.  Don’t ask me why I watched the dvd so many times or took notes.  I think I just thought I’d do everything I could to get these kids a home.  So then I got in contact with Diane via email and we’ve been in contact almost daily since.  Diane and her husband Mike have adopted a son, Owen from China, 2 sons- Adam and Jackson from Ethiopia, and are in the process of adopting a daugher- Ruhama.  They will have 4 kids under the age of 4 (see, I’m not the only crazy one).  They passed court and will be going to pick up Ruhama in Ethiopia in a few weeks, taking MANY totes full of supplies with them and distributing them to a few orphanges.  If you are interested in donating to their cause, let me know, as each tote costs about $200 to take on the plane.  They have gone through 3 different agencies for their adoptions; this last adoption they went through AWOP/CHI.

It was during this time that we started questioning what was going to happen with the Uganda program, wondering why our questions were not being answered by the agency, and also reading posts on a yahoo adoption group that were pretty scary.  This was making us nervous.  We started talking to Diane and learning about her process of adopting Ruhama through AWOP/CHI (Childrens House International).  CHI is the agency that handles the paperwork and actual adoption process. 

Rick, Evan, and I took a bunch of supplies that were at our church over to Diane’s house this last Sunday.  We talked to her a bunch more, got a lot of questions answered(we had emailed back around 2 weeks later asking if they got our questions and were asked to be patient- still not hearing back almost another week later), and helped her sort supplies into ziplock bags- one for each child in the orphanage.  We met Adam, Jackson, and Owen.  Owen was loving Rick and was such a little conversationalist and just so sweet!  Adam and Jackson were quieter, but we loved how interested they were in watching their dvd their mom had put together for them on their adoption over and over again- it was super cute!  Evan was all over the place, as usual.

We pretty much had made up our minds to adopt through AWOP/CHI at this point.  We looked at the photo list again and inquired about multiple sibling groups and a few solo children (thinking of getting 2 unrelated children).  When we contacted AWOP and talked directly to Michelle, who is a wonderful person, all the sibling groups were already chosen by families and most of the other children were as well.  There were only a handful left and all of them were not part of a sibling group.  She did mention that she was heading to Ethiopia this coming Saturday and that she would be adding many more new children to the list.  We decided we would wait until she comes back (August 25th) and look at the new additions, although she knows we are looking for siblings, at least one under 2 years of age, and that we are open to twins or two siblings under 2, though we know that this is rare.  She will be keeping us in mind while on her trip, which is nice!

We emailed AFAA Tuesday and asked for our entire adoption file to be returned.  They were very understanding and said it would go out in the mail the following day and that they were sorry it did not work out.  We were in contact with CHI that day as well and got rolling on their application, along with multiple other documents.

I am pretty much doing most of the paperwork over (some things don’t have to be re-done) but a lot does.  I can’t wait until this part is done, as this has been my life for the last few months it seems.  It will be nice to be ready to accept our referral and then to be waiting for the paperwork to be processed, for the court date, and ultimately for the announcement of us to be able to travel to pick-up our two new Ethiopian children!

We will be sending out the application to CHI tomorrow.  Then it is on to finishing the paperwork and dossier.  Our home study should be completely finalized around August 18th.  When Michelle returns from Ethiopia around August 25th- we are hoping to look at children’s information/pictures and make a decision, and then we’ll be in the waiting game on CHI and Ethiopia’s end.

We are learning what a roller coaster the adoption process is.  You have some amazing highs and some low lows, but it will all be worth it in the end!  That’s what I keep reminding myself of!  Please pray that this new process goes smoothly for us, that we don’t have any trouble with our paperwork, and that there are two children that will fit into our family the way God intends for them to. 

We’ll keep you updated as more happens and as we know more too.  Our goal is to have all this paperwork done and submitted before school starts.