Friday, April 15, 2011

Third Day- Children of God

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6jO7xhU_Pw&feature=youtube_gdata_player


3All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. 4Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. 6So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. 7He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. 8He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.
~Ephesians 1: 3-8

Thursday, April 14, 2011

There will be surprises!

The yard sale was a huge success!  The Holt family and our family each raised $1000 to go toward our adoption expenses.  Thank you so much for donating items to sale and for coming by to see us on Saturday.  It was such a blessing to see your beautiful faces!
We sold so much, but we had so much left over, it took us over two hours to pack up everthing.  We are planning to have another yard sale on April 30th at the same place, in front of Fountain Climate Control Storage.
Greg and I are so excited!  We have received our fingerprint appointment from the USCIS and we are scheduled to go to Birmingham on Monday, April 18th, to do our fingerprints.  Hopefully we will receive the results in about 4 weeks. 
We have just had a couple of unwelcome surprises in our adoption journey, but thankfully we think everything will work out with no lost time.  We just found out that Alabama requires all notarized documents to be county certified before the Secretary of State office will state certify them.  When they "county certify" and "state certify" the documents, they are saying that the notary on the document is commissioned in that county and state to notarize and they are "legal".  So, now we have an extra step in our process we had not planned on.  So, we are going through all the notarized documents we have received to find out in which county each notary is commissioned.  We have documents that have been notarized in Birmingham, Montgomery, Elmore and Portland, Oregan.  We are so thankful we found out this info now, instead of next week.  Fortunately, we plan to be in Birmingham Monday to do our fingerprints, so we can get our homestudy county certified in Jefferson County.
While I was finding all this out, I also found out that our homestudy agency is not a 501c3 non-profit agency and that the home study agency is supposed to be.  What!!  Major PROBLEM!!  I thought this was going to be a major set back and that we would have to do our home study all over again.  On the information that the home study agency submitted to our adoption agency, they had marked that they were a 501c3 agency by mistake.  So, today our adoption agency got on the phone with Chinese and Americans and found out that China actually doesn't require that the home study agency be 501c3, but that they do require it of the adoption agency, the agency they will be working with directly in the adoption.  WHEW!!!  Our social worker with AGCI (our adoption agency) took a very deep sigh of relief with us.  If we had to start over, we would have been set back about three months.
Praise the Lord for His goodness!!  We know there will be set backs and things we will have to do over and over and over again.  We are praying that this doesn't come back to haunt us later!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your prayers!!!  They are much needed!

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Sorry it's been so long...

Sorry its been so long since my last post. I just keep thinking that no one wants to hear about this....

On March 17 we mailed our homestudy with our I800A application to the USCIS (United Stated Citizenship and Immigration Services). I have hesitated to post this because I thought... "how exciting is this to anyone but Greg and I?  Really, what is the big deal about putting a packet in the mail?"  But, it was very exciting to us.  This is one of those bridges we waited eagerly to cross and now have crossed it which propels us to the next step. 
So, now we are waiting for the USCIS to send us an appointment for finger printing. This will be our second time doing fingerprints, which is standard. After the USCIS receives the results from our fingerprints, they will mail us an approval letter,which we will send along with our Dossier to China.  The Dossier is kind of like a biography of our lives from childhood to present, supported with "official" documents from government agencies.

While we are waiting, we are collecting some of these "official" documents that will be mailed with our Dossier.  We have been to the doctor for a second physical and completed a local criminal check. Some additional things we are now working on collecting are family photos, letters from our employer, another financial statement, and an application letter.

Hopefully our next post will be about mailing our Dossier to China.  At that point, most of our paperwork will be done and once China has received our Dossier and logged us into their system, we will be eligible to receive new referrals!!!

Saturday, April 9, will be our first fundraiser. Together with the Holt's, a couple at our church who are adopting from Bulgaria, we will be having a HUGE Yard Sale in front of the Climate Control Storage on Hwy 14, Millbrook, across from O'Reilly Auto Parts to raise money for our adoptions.  We are excited about this opportunity to help with the cost of the adoption!

Thank you so much for your prayers and your support!!  Please keep us in your prayers!