We heard lots of stories last weekend at our adoption training conference. One of the main ones that really stuck out to me was about Andrew. My friend Rachelle wrote about the story and you can read it by clicking here.

We have a new case worker through AWOP. Our original one had a family emergency and at this time is no longer working there. I talked with our new case worker yesterday and was very blessed.

As with almost all adoptions, finances are one of the biggest challenges. We are trusting in God that He will be faithful. We know that if we are in His will, He will provide a way. There are many grants and different programs you can go through, plus no interest adoption loans. Of course, with many of these you have to have your homestudy complete before applying. There is a fine line between trusting God to provide while waiting for His blessings and maybe His way of providing is by having the programs available to help people.

As our anniversary present to each other we bought maps. My friend Lisa has these and you can see a picture by clicking here. Jesse has been busy making frames and will hopefully have them done today. We will be in town later today and are planning to get the glass to put in the frames and they should be hanging on my walls by tomorrow!

This morning...

We picked up the application for our passports

We had our passport photo's taken

We had most of our dossier notarized

We have an appointment scheduled for our 1st home study visit

We are coming closer to a decision!

This past week

SO! I have been trying to download some pictures for over 2 hours, but it just will not work! aaarrrgh!!
We were gone to our training in Spokane this weekend. What a blessing! There was so much good information! Today we are going to pick up our medical reports and fax them in to our homestudy provider. So all our paperwork will be done for our homestudy! Yeah! We will also go and have lots of papers notarized while we are in town. After having stuff notarized and our medical report, we will be pretty close to having our dossier complete! We really need some prayer as we make an important decision in the next couple weeks. We are desperately seeking wisdom and God's will. Please pray for us!

I'm Still Here!

Wow! It has been a long time since I have posted! Sorry! We have had a crazy few weeks. Jesse's grandpa died last week. He was totally at peace and saw Jesus at the end. This is a blessing, but also very hard for us. We are grateful that he is now in the presence of the Lord and is out of pain. Here is a picture with the immediate family. This was taken at Thanksgiving.







We had to reschedule our Dr. appointments for tomorrow. Then we will be able to have our first meeting with our social worker for our homestudy!


Jesse is now officially off work for spring break-up. It is so nice to have him home! Today he is working on building a cabin for the boys to play in. They are very excited. I will try to post pictures later.

Update

We are all recovering from having had the flu this past weekend. Not very fun, but on the good side of things, we were able to spend a lot of time filling out paperwork. We only have a couple more papers to add and our homestudy will be complete!! We have fingerprinting appointments scheduled for tomorrow and Dr. visits scheduled...we are getting so close! There IS light at the end of the tunnel!

In March we have a 2-day training we will be attending. It should be a lot of fun. We will get to meet other adoptive parents. The training will cover issues such as attatchment and bonding, grief and loss, family dynamics, becoming a conspicuous family and much more.

We are quickly approaching the time when Jesse if off work because it is too wet out in the woods to work. This is not a good time financially, but it has been awesome to see God provide so far. It is great to be able to see things happen--that we didn't think were possible--in God's perfect timing! What an awesome reasurance to know that this desire to adopt is from Him.

AWOP

I wanted to write about our decision to go through AWOP (African Widows and Orphans Project) and Hope Adoption Agency. The fees are the same regardless of whether we go through Hope directly or use AWOP. We decided we want to go through both so we can support the awesome work of AWOP. We have been assigned a case manager through AWOP. All of their case managers have already adopted children from Ethiopia and know the ropes very well. They will walk us through the entire process.

We will send our application and other paperwork directly to AWOP. They will copy our information and send the originals Hope. Their staff will walk us through each detail and we can contact our case manager as often as we wish. They will help us make travel plans, and they have staff in Ethiopia to meet us at the airport and care for us during our trip.

Last week received a huge folder in the mail from AWOP. I will be talking with our case worker for the first time tonight and she will go through it all with me.

Snow!

Oops! Trying to be helpful, I was plowing the driveway so my honey wouldn't have to when he got home from work....I got the 4-wheeler stuck! Sorry Honey! ;)