Miscellaneous

1. We completed both of our homestudy appointments. Now we just have to wait for our social worker to finish the paperwork. Should be within 2 weeks.
2. We are hopefully getting wireless internet in the next month or so (for $50 instead of $500)
3. We are remodeling, so our entire house is covered in sawdust...but....

• I am very excited to have a "new" kitchen!
• We are getting an actual built-in dishwasher (what a novel idea!)
• New sink
• New counter top
• New kitchen floor plan! (we moved a couple cabinets around, plus the placement of appliances.)
• The result is a bigger kitchen, more user-friendly, and more inviting!
• I am also going to paint my cabinets (any ideas on paint colors?)
• Plus, we also get new flooring! Yeah! Away with the 60's green carpet that shows EVERYTHING and in with the hardwood!

A Walk To Beautiful

A powerful story of healing and hope for women in Ethiopia . . .

The award winning feature-length documentary A Walk to Beautiful tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and embark on a journey to reclaim their lost dignity. Rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, these women are left to spend the rest of their lives in loneliness and shame. They make the choice to take the long and arduous journey to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in search of a cure and a new life.

I just checked our local listings and this will air on PBS on May 13 at 8pm in our area.

Busy, Busy!

We have been very busy this week getting ready for our 1st homestudy visit Saturday. I have been cleaning, reorganizing, throwing things out, and cleaning! Our social worker said she does not do a white glove test.....but still! Plus, we are having our family over to our house for Easter dinner, so it needs to be clean anyway. I'm sure I don't have to be quite this extreme in my cleaning, but it sure does feel to have a deadline and good to get it done.

I just heard that we will not receive the new DVD from AWOP till the first part of April. This is very disappointing, but God can teach us patience! We were originally hoping to have it this week. We have been anxiously waiting for the mail to come every day, just to be disappointed when the DVD is not there. They have been busy putting many hours into making it and I know they will send it as soon as they can. I am sure everyone wants to see it right away, so we will try not to bug them. We can use this time to be pray and try to wait patiently.

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.