Thoughts and findings of the last week.

Tonight as I sit here with the kids laying on the floor having a sleepover in the living room it is hard for me not to think back to a few months ago when we had 4 kids all lined up sleeping in our living room.  Tonight I am really missing the little boy that is not here physically.  It brings back alot of great memories that we made over the 5 short weeks that he was with us.  We have been working through piles of papers trying to get everything done and everything done correctly with the right color ink with the correct amount of each one signed, notarized on the proper letterhead.  It has been exhausting.  There have been late nights, there have been a lot of trips to the notary with another lengthy trip coming up.  Documents have to be done in triplicate so thats a lot of signing!

This past Wednesday we received an email from our social worker letting us know that we have received endorsement from the State of Illinois.  We can move our paperwork forward and move onto the next step of the process.  Our next step is to send our home study and application to Immigration.

The end of last week we received a call from our adoption agency.  We knew something was going on because most of our communications with the has been through email.  I answered the phone and Cathy (our Agency worker) let me know that the orphan court had asked him if he would like to be adopted.  At this point in the conversation my heart was racing in anticipation as to what she was going to tell me.  She went on to say that he said he would like to be hosted again before he made a decision.  At that point it felt like all the air had been sucked out of my body.  To be  honest with you at that point in time I was sad, confused, hurt and mad.  I do not even remember how I ended the conversation with Cathy.  The call could not have come at a worse time either.  I was in the middle of fixing a customer problem and things were not working for me.  I was trying to get things done and rushing through it and making even more mistakes.  I wanted to get home to talk to Linda about what I had found out.

After thinking about the information that we were given and talking to Linda about it, we got back in contact with Cathy and had a few questions for her about it.  After talking to her our feelings were put at ease when we found out that older children often have that response when asked.

Looking back at the way I reacted and the way I was feeling I see that my feelings were that of selfishness.  The response was not the response that I wanted to hear.  I thought that my way was the best way.  I had forgotten that what I think is the right thing does not mean that he thinks it is the right thing.  I am not the one that would leave the only country he has ever lived in, his friends, the family that he has, his culture, his language, everything that he knows as his life, for the unknown of America.  He would be coming to a new culture  new language, new family, new future, but all of that is unknown and not familiar to him.   when I stepped back and looked at it from that perspective I understood his answer a lot better.

So where does that put us now?  We are continuing with the paperwork so that everything is ready to go and there are no delays in our process after hosting.  We will be hosting again for sure this summer and anything beyond that is in God's hands.  We plan to show him the love of a family and build trust with him letting him know that we will love him unconditionally.

Many of you have asked what you can do to help.  Honestly the first and the most important thing that you can do for our family is to pray.  Pray that we know how to respond to him and how to build the necessary trust in him.  We know that it would have to be a little scary leaving the only thing you have ever known.

There are some tangible ways that you can help as well.

We will need a 28" rolling suitcase to take back with him.  It must have wheels and must be 28".  All children will have the same size suitcase and if he has a smaller suitcase than everyone else it would not be good.  Likewise if it is bigger than 28" it would not be good either.  It must have wheels on it because he has to be able to take his own belongings with him without the help from anyone.

We will have to send him back with some very specific items that have to go back with him so if you felt led you could donate a gift card from Walmart, Target, Kohls or a similar store.

We have to also send him back with a backpack.  Even though he will most likely come with one it is required that he take a new one back with him.

He can have an inexpensive mp3 player(no ipods or name brands).  It can not have a camera on it of any kind and it would be best if it were rechargeable via usb because they do not have much access to batteries.

As I mentioned above in addition to the hosting fees we are responsible for a round trip ticket from New York City to Chicago, or St. Louis (roughly $300)

Thank you everyone who has and is supporting us in any way as we go on this journey.  Your shopping on Amazon.com through our link raised $89.50 last month.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

Summer Mission trip for the entire family

Have you always wanted to take your entire family on a mission trip but have not been able to afford it?  Have you ever thought about turning your home into a mission field?  We did it over Christmas and you can to for 5 weeks this summer.  New Horizons for Children is a hosting program that brings children to the United States for 5 weeks during the summer and 4 weeks during the winter.  The goal of the program is to teach orphans what a loving family is like, to share the love of Jesus to them.  If Linda and I can do it, you can to.  There are over 100 children that are still looking for a family to host them this summer.  If these kids are not hosted they will go to a "summer camp" which is often a worse situation that what they are in at the orphanages.  We are re-hosting this summer from L@tvia and have friends in the area that are hosting from the Ukr@ine so either way you go you will have someone in the area that you can talk to if your questions are country specific.  They have hosted before as well and are actually the people that told us about this amazing opportunity.  All of these children have a story.  Some are host only.  Some children are host only because they are to old to be adopted but have not aged out of the system or their parents have not had their parental right terminated.  These children NEED LOVE.  The love that a host family shows them could be the difference that they need to make it when they are on their own.  The statistics are not good for the kids that age out of the system.   Can you make a difference for just one?  To find out more about these children you can click here.  The deadline for these children is April 15th.  Everyone can do something.  If you can not host a child, maybe you can host a chaperone (which is free other than food and entertainment),  you can become a backup family, pray for host families to come forward, or give financially in the form of a scholarship for some of the waiting children.

Dossier paperwork getting closer!

Our dossier paperwork is getting closer and closer.  We got our medical reports completed and signed in the proper way.  It was a more difficult process than I thought it was going to be but we got it done.  We have everything collected and now have to get them all notarized.  We have to have 3 of every document, and every document has to be original .  That is going to be a lot of signing and notarizing.

Our Pampered Chef party closes Today, Thursday 28th.  If you would like to place an order check out our fundraiser page and follow the link.

Thank you to everyone who took part in our 31 party.

I would also like to thank everyone that has used our amazon link for all of their amazon shopping.  We are currently at earned $70.60 with a few more larger purchase that have not been added into the total yet.  (as a reminder the link will be available to use and benefit our journey throughout the duration of our journey.

Home Study and Fundraiser Updates

This morning we got word from our social worker that our home study was sent to the State of Illinois on Friday.  We pray that there are not many home studies currently on her desk because she is the only person that reads  and approves them.  Hopefully we will hear something back by the end of the week and then we will be able to send it off to immigration so that we can get their approval!



As you may or may not know, tomorrow (Tuesday, March 26th) is the final day to play the 31 orders!  Thursday is the final day to order Pampered Chef.  We also learned tonight that Friday will be the final day to order Mary Kay.

This week will be a big week for us with these three fundraisers coming to an end.  You can click here to get to our fundraiser page or click the link at the top of the page!

Update and News

 Today was the day of our pizza fundraiser.  We had  the ingredients purchased (see previous post), the boxes put together and labeled ready for them to be filled.  Today was the day that all of the planning came together.  We were blessed to have some great women and their children step up to help us assemble the 85 pizzas that were ordered. (some of which were ordered through people that we did not even know!)  I was not present during the pizza assembly but it sounded like everything went very smoothly and we can not thank the families that helped us enough.  We would also like to take a moment to thank everyone that purchased our pizzas.  We hope that you enjoyed them.

Today we got word that our home study is making its way to the State of Illinois to get approved.  In most states once your home study is completed by your agency it is then sent to immigration, however in the state of Illinois you have to be approved by one lady that works for the state that reads all international home studies and approves or denies them.  Today we also got our dossier papers to work on today.  We can work on them while we wait for approval.  I was a bit worried about the amount of work in the last round of paper work, however most of the work is getting everything notarized because every document has to be done in triplicate and they must all be originals, oh yes and you have to sign your entire name and not just your middle initial (like if found out when signing a document incorrectly).  We are hoping to get all documents ready to notarize the first part of next week so that we can get a copy sent to our agency to double check everything before we can have the Secretary of State Apostle them.  Before this process I had no idea what that meant.  It is the process of taking the documents that have been notarized and they verify the notary is a valid notary.  CRAZY!!!  For now we keep working on what we can work on and trying to move the process along.

Amazon Update:  To date we have raised just over $60 from supporters using our amazon link for their purchases

You can also check out our other current fundraisers on our fundraiser page!

Moving along

Friday we got the next thing to work on in the process.  I was able to get that finished so that I can pass it on to have it checked.  With that step done, we are just waiting on the home study to be approved by the state of Illinois.  We are praying that there are not a lot of international adoptions home studies currently finished because they are all read and approved by one lady in Springfield (which ironically there is legislation in committee  to eliminate thus making the process easier to adopt in Illinois).  

This afternoon we had to pick stuff for our latest fundraiser.  We are a part of a home school group and they offered to help us with a "take and bake" pizza fundraiser.  Linda and I were up for it and they offered to help, so we put together an order form.  We thought that there would be about 30 or so pizza's ordered.  It was a good thing that we took orders because we would have only had about half the ingredients needed because  we ended up with 85 pizza orders.  We had people offer to take orders for us that we did not even know.  We were blown away by the support.

We ordered all of our supplies and ingredients and had to pick them up today.  Does anyone know what the ingredients for 85 pizzas looks like?  Here it is:

Home study Done and awaiting approval

As many of you know we had our final home study visit on Monday.  I was quite impressed with our social worker.   She basically had the entire home study first draft completed and just had a few areas that she had to fill in the blanks.  That was done on her visit on Monday through the individual interviews.  We answered all of her questions and showed her around the house for the safety visit.  By Tuesday morning at 10:00 A.M. I had the first draft in my inbox.  I was very impressed with the turn around time.  We read through the 20 page single spaced story of our life and made a few minor changes here and there and got it back to her.  We are now waiting for our international agency to review it and then it will be off to the State of Illinois for approval.

While we are waiting for the home study approval, we get to fill out an application that is sent to immigration along with our approved home study.  We will also be working next week on our Dossier which is the document that will be sent to L@tvia and translated to be presented to the court system.  We are hoping to get that process going next week as the dossier can be being translated while we wait for immigration approval.