please pray for our friends...

God has blessed us so much with allowing us the opportunity to walk along some friends that are also adopting. our friends The Spencer's are adopting a 4 year old boy with down syndrome from the ukraine. they are wonderful friends of ours and we have the priviledge of serving along side of them in our church body. please check out their story and pray for them. they are in a tight crunch with their adoption and hope to travel to the ukraine in the next several weeks to get their sweet boy. they still have about $19,000 to raise before they can travel but we are believing that God is going to provide. please pray and ask the Lord if he would like you to bless the Spencer family with financial support. we love them so much and are blessed to walk our journeys together.

bought a car seat and stroller

this weekend USAbaby was having a march madness sale and we got a GREAT deal on a travel system for the baby. it is the colours we like and everything we need. don't you like it? after lots of talking with other moms and having our own fun trying to decide we found chicco to be the best. while we were in the store i was making sure i could maneuver the stroller around the aisle, fold it up with one hand, lift it to put in the car, carry the car seat around (that could get very heavy) and anything else you do with a travel system. it was kinda fun. of course because it was a madness sale the ones we picked were out of stock and had to be ordered. well maybe our travel system and furniture will all come at the same time. that would be perfect.

now that we have baby furniture and a travel system we have everything we need to have to bring home a baby. that makes me really excited. after we get approved we will do a baby registry but for now we are just fine.

we heard from our adoption agency over the weekend and they are busy writing our homestudy up for approval. she said it could still be a couple of weeks before she is finished. the waiting is so hard. please pray that brian and i will have continued patience but also pray that our adoption agency would be quick to get our homestudy written and approved. thanks for all your prayers thus far. we love you.

God is in control

this past week I have been looking back over the past almost year at just God's perfect timing. this time last year Brian and I were very much ready to start a family. we started praying that God would open up the doors. He started tugging on our heart strings. We thought we were ready for a family but as I look back I see that God was just preparing us for what was to come. here is a short list of what God has been doing to get us ready for this family that we thought we were ready for a year ago:

- in May of last year we joined an AMAZING small group at church
- in July we joined the Orphan Ministry at our church which is what God used to lead us to begin our family through adoption
- throughout the summer 3 of our friends found out they were pregnant (we now have 5 friends that are expecting and 1 just had their sweet baby girl about two weeks ago)
- in September we started the process of international adoption. met with out adoption agency and switched to Domestic Adoption so we could have a newborn for our first child
- in October because of God's favor we were able to get in the training class (we were supposed to be in the February one)
- Fall last year our jobs proved to be very supportive of our adopting and very flexible with our schedules to go to all our adoption meetings
- ever since October God has proved faithful to bring incredible friends and family along side of us to provide financially for this adoption.
- February we ordered baby furniture that should be in sometime in May
- March of this year waiting for our adoption approval with ONLY $4000 left to go!

God is just so good about his timing. it amazes me that he waited till we were surround by an amazing group of friends to walk with us on this journey. right now i am so emotionally torn about how to prepare for the arrival of our sweet baby boy. i so badly want to prepare for him to come really soon but I emotionally need to prepare for him to come sometime in December. God is certainly in the details. i feel completely confident that it's ok that i might not be completely prepared because i have an incredible group of friends who will be prepared for me. God has blessed us with friends that are also growing their families right now and we can just soak in all that information from them. we have an amazing church body that is filled with people joining in on our journey from a distance. people enjoy hearing our story and we love sharing it. God is even surprising us with how is providing for this adoption financially. i BELIEVE he will provide the last $4000 in the next two months.

we ask that you please pray that this approval process will go quickly and that we will be paired with a birthmom sooner rather than later. most of all please be in prayer for our baby boy as he is waiting in his mommy's womb. pray he stays healthy and that God will send his angels to surround him and him mommy during this time.

home study being written

so we got the news today that all our paperwork is good to go and our home study is being written up for approval. GOD is great!!!!!!!!!! so we begin the shorter of the two waiting periods. please pray that the write up and approval time would be short. we again thank you for all your support, thoughts, prayers and all that you all mean to us. we love you all.

brian

quick update

just a quick update before i start at work. the meeting went great. God is such a great God. now we wait; the ride begins. i do have one urgent prayer request. we need a single piece of documentation from our landlord. please pray that this will not be a hurdle for us, that she will act quickly that we might move forward in the approval process. thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers. you guys are keeping us afloat. we love you all.

brian

the letter and profile

tomorrow morning we have our very last meeting (we hope) with our agency before we are approved. we are so excited and so ready to be on the waiting end of things and bring our little boy home as soon as possible. one thing we have to bring with us tomorrow is a profile book. this profile book contains a letter from each of us to the birthfamily and 8 pages of pictures. this has been a very emotional journey putting this together. how in the world can you convey to someone everything that you are in one letter and a couple of pages of pictures. and how do you make yourself stand out above ALL the other waiting families. i'm trying not to stress myself out about it but i also don't want to take it lightly. for the past 2-3 weeks Brian and i have been putting picture together. we have pictures of family, friends, things we like to do, the house, the baby's room, and even jackson (our dog). and the scrapbooking queen in me wants to make it so creative but we have to make 5 copies of this profile and we have to be able to make a copy at a moments notice. so i can't really be that creative besides what we do on the computer. thankfully brian is super computer savy so he can make it look pretty cool.

the hardest part has been trying to write a letter to the brirth family but specifically to the birthmom. brian and i each have to write seperate letters because the agency told us it would be important to get a letter from the soon-to-be dad, which i completely agree with. but anyways i didn't realize how emotional it would be. i think i've written about 6 different drafts and finally last night i just needed it to be over with. in this letter we are supposed to encourage the mom in her decision and thank her for looking at our profile, share who we are, how brian and i met, what our relationship is like, what our family is like, is everyone excited about a baby coming, what do we like to do, what kind of parents do we want to be, what are our values, and so much more. and did i mention this all has to be in a 1 page letter? yeah, i might be able to fit it in to about 8 pages but not one. and then when i condense it down to one i feel like i am leaving out so much that i want her to know. and we've printed out some letters that other people have written and so many of them our the same. but how many ways can you say "thank you for reading my letter"? there just aren't that many ways. believe me i've thought long and hard about it.

well now i am finally finished with my letter. brian is still working on his but it should be finished tonight. our pictures are pretty much complete we just have to finish up a couple of the last pages. then tomorrow morning we have to wake up very early to run by kinkos to get copies made before we have to beat our appointment at 9:30am.

A few prayer requests:
-please pray that our letters will not be full of our own words but what God wants us to share.
-when a birthmother reads our letters that she is filled with peace and joy.
-brian and i would have peace about what we are presenting.
-our appointment tomorrow would be an amazing experience and we would be able to express exactly what God has laid on our hearts for our baby