I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!!!

Well, the end of THIS tunnel anyways. The tunnel of "Adoption Education." It's been a long one that had an unexpected detour. I am not really sure what happened or who's fault it is but somehow the education requirements were not clearly communicated to our home study worker and the last time I blogged in July I thought we were almost done with the home study. Much to our dismay we were informed of our misinformation and we found ourselves still needing to complete 20+ hours of online education and to read a 250 page book (The Connected Child by Dr. Purvis- GOOD STUFF!) and then backtrack a bit in the home study process in order to do things right. This was disappointing and frustrating. So, after beating ourselves up for a while and wondering what we could have done differently we picked ourselves up and moved forward trusting that God's timing for this adoption is best.

Thus, here I am again, 3 months later updating you all with the same information that we are just weeks away from submitting our home study and moving on the the next step in our adoption process. Hallelujah!

Please continue to keep us in your prayers.

What we've been doing

It seems like the adoption process has a lot of waiting.  .  .  .and then all of the sudden you do a bunch of things all at once! The last week or so we have hit the "do a bunch of things all at once" phase. We had our first face to face meeting with our home study director in Omaha on a Tuesday morning. It went really well! We left immediately after the meeting to drive to Kansas where we visited Nate's family and spent A LOT of time on the phone on hold trying to get insurance and other questions answered for the home study. On Sunday we had the privileged of sharing about adoption with Nate's parents home church in Liberal, KS. I began by sharing our adoption story then Nate preached an awesome sermon about adoption and last, Moses and I sang Children of God by Third Day together. (see video) After the service we all shared a meal together and we were so blessed by the support shown to us!!! We left straight from church to travel back to NE on Sunday and Monday. Monday we were only home for one hour before we got back in the car to head to Omaha for our 2nd meeting. We will have 3 more meetings including the in-home evaluation. We really love our home study director and thank God for providing an affordable Christian agency for us to work with. Our home study will be completed in about 2 weeks and then we will be back to waiting.  .   .  .again.

60 cent Lemonade!

We had a really great garage sale this weekend at some friends house who have a great location! Several families from our church donated items to be sold. It was a lot of work that was honestly overwhelming to me. I was thinking about canceling it because I just didn't see how I was going to pull it off. Thankfully, some great close friends gladly jumped in to help me price, organize and run the sale. It was a great success! We raised $1000.00 for the adoption!!! That was double what I had hoped for. I am so glad I didn't cancel and thankful for EVERYONE who donated and helped!

"May he send you help from the sanctuary and grant you support from Zion." Ps. 20:2

The highlight of the weekend was Moses' lemonade stand. He made this sign and set up shop for 3 hours selling lemonade to raise money for a feeding program by Eyes That See. They feed starving orphans in Ethiopia. It only takes .60 to feed 1 child 1 meal. So, he sold his lemonade for .60 a cup and raised $33.01! That's enough to provide 55 meals! We were so proud of him for serving the lemonade so gladly and for sticking with it for so long.