So call us crazy.

I have been pondering for a week now on what to say in this blog. So, I decided first I would tell you a few adoption words to help you understand the rest of the article. Here we go:

Dossier- a huge stack of paperwork that basically has our entire life history in it that gets translated into the countries language so they understand who we are and where we are from.

Waiting child list- this is a list that has kids on it that are hard to place with families. These could be older kids, special needs kids, or healthy kids with minor problems. Since they are harder to place there is no wait to bring them home J

Concurrent family building- This is a process families can ask to be approved for where they can continue to build their family while they wait for a referral

Referral- When the agency has a child available with our parameters and we are number one on the list. They will call us and say we have a child for you would you like to accept this referral?

The Ethiopia adoption times have continued to increase since we submitted our dossier. When we began the process the wait times were at 18-24 months. We have been on the waiting list since July 2013. The current wait times for a referral from Ethiopia, (with our agency) are at 36-42 months right now. Therefore we still have around 3 more years of waiting before we can bring our child home. Jeremy and I have talked about several different options while we wait for our little Ethiopian bean. We went through lots of classes to do foster care and decided that was not a good fit for our family. We had finally decided that we would just out our time. We both work full time, we are both in school, we are in the process of selling our house and trying to move, we are rasing hunter, Hunter is into every sport he can possibly want to play. But, for some reason God kept pulling on me. One day I logged into our agenicies waiting child list. We can see every countries waiting children. And then there was this child. I immediately went home and told Jeremy. I think they are our child. We have to see what we need to get to bring them home. We had already been approved to do a concurrent family building. We contacted our agency and they told us some of the laws of the new country and tried to explain everything to us in a very detailed email. So, long story short, We have applied to another country to adopt a child from their waiting child list. If everything works out the way we hope it will then we will have this child home in 15 months and still have about 6-8 months before we receive our referral from Ethiopia.

What does that mean? Its time to start fundraising again. Another adoption means another $36,000.00. I’m sure a lot of you are thinking “do you really have enough time to fundraise”, “72,000 for two children?” Let me just say that I will do whatever it takes to get my children home. And I without a doubt I know God will provide.

Now, we have purposely not told you what country we are going to this time. Our first fundraiser is as follows:
We have the countries' flag framed. On Top of this we have sticky papers numbered 1-200. Each number represents an amount that can be donated. If you chose number 25 then you donated $25, choose number 5 and you would donate $5.  After all the numbers have been claimed and donated for then we will reveal the flag. With this one fundraiser we can raise a little over $20,000. &&& YES I DID THE MATH!!  Also as an incentive when all the numbers have been claimed and the donations made then we will have a drawing for an ipad mini and $100.00 itunes giftcard. So would you please consider choosing a number and making a donation either by snail mail or through our paypal donation account? I will keep you update weekly on the number that are still available.