Lifted Out Of The Water

FAQ Are you still adopting? Oh yes! Many people have assumed since we had the twins that we are no longer adopting. Infertility was not a factor in our adoption decision. Apparently I am extremely fertile and scored twins! :) I know the Lord leads many families to adopt via infertility, but we are not one of those families. God has been weighing adoption on our hearts since before we wed. Both adopting and conceiving were planned….the whole twin thing was definitely a surprise though! The Lord just knew how much I love a buy one get one free deal :) So, YES we are still very much pursuing our India adoption. Where are you in the adoption process? We have submitted our dossier (all our paperwork) and are currently waiting to update our home study. Anytime there are major changes in your family you need to update your home study. The twins definitely classify as a major change. We are able to update our home study once the twins are between 3 and 6 months. We are ...

I thought I would update all of you who supported our garage sale fundraiser through donating items, visiting and helping out day of, and through prayer. It was a HUGE success! Our financial goal was to make $2,000 to put into our adoption savings. After two very labor-intensive days of setting up, tearing down, fighting the North Bend winds, and haggling with the locals, we raised $2,549.51!  God is so good! We sure learned a lot about garage sales and fundraising through this experience and honestly could not have done it with out the help of our parents who came down to help with the event. We feel so blessed to have so much support as we work to bring our child home. Please continue to pray for India and orphans worldwide.

Our fundraiser is only days away! We are feeling extremely blessed by all the donations we have received and will be able to sell/raffle off this Friday and Saturday (June 6th and 7th). Thank you to all who generously donated! We are also praising the Lord for blessing us with a weather forecast of blue skies! God is good! If you are living in the Coos Bay/North Bend area, we would LOVE to have you come out and support our adoption. If you are one of our loved ones far away, you can still support us through prayer. We need prayer for a good turn out of people, for this beautiful weather to continue through the weekend as forecasted, and for us to give all the details of this event over to the Lord. We cannot express how grateful we are for everyone's love and support as we build a family. Baby A and B will be here possibly next month (CRAZY!) and we cannot wait until the day we are matched with Baby C :) We are blessed! God is SO good! God bless you all! J+M

June 6th and 7th we will be having a garage sale/auction in North Bend to help raise money to fund our adoption. Please contact us if you have any items you wish to donate to the sale. These can be items you are purging from your home or new items too! We appreciate anything you are willing to donate. Thank you for thinking of us as you spring clean! :) Please continue to pray for India and orphans worldwide. God bless!

Please say a prayer that our dossier makes it safely to our agency in Virginia. It feels so good to have all that paperwork done, but very scary to let it all out of our sight. Now we are just focusing on the twins and praying He continues to direct us with our adoption. We are feeling so blessed that God chose to have us build our family through conception and adoption. So amazing to experience them both at the same time. Our hearts are so full! Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." - Matthew 19:14

Hooray! We received our USCIS approval which was the last piece of our dossier. We are going to send that off to be apostilled and then we can mail our whole dossier (every single paper we have collected and worked on since AUGUST) to our agency on the East Coast. Prayers in advance that our dossier safely makes it to its destination please. We have been asked a few times how the twins will affect the adoption timeline. Basically we will not be getting a referral until after the twins are born. We will need to update our home study to show we are stable with the new little additions. This is done when the twins are between 3 and 6 months old. After the home study update is complete, we can be taken off "hold" and open to receive a referral again. The referral process can take months or even years. After we accept a referral it typically takes 9 months to a year until we are cleared to travel and bring our sweet girl home. SO, to put that simply, we are still a few years awa...

Last Thursday was a very long but productive day! We left at 4am and traveled up to Portland for our 9am fingerprinting appointment, then headed back down to Salem to get out dossier apostilled (authenticated). Oh and we stopped at BabiesRus to find carseats for the twins too! What a day, what a day! Now we are just waiting for our USCIS approval and the dossier is COMPLETE! Hooray! Then we will just wait for that wonderful day when we receive our little girl's picture….good thing we have twins to keep us busy while we wait! :) Thank you for your continued prayer.

Good news! We have been submitted into the CARA (Central Adoption Resource Authority) database!  Which means we can now be matched with a child! This process can take a few months or a few years (so don't hold your breath quite yet). We are feeling so blessed and cannot wait to see God's timing unfold. Please continue to pray for CARA and India. As of now, agencies are only able to see an EXTREMELY small percentage of children. This list is rotated every month, but 80% of the children on the list tend to already be adopted or have already been viewed in previous months. These issues have been brought to CARA's attention, but changes still need to be made. Pray for quick and positive changes, proper training, and a more effective referral process. Thank you for your prayers and support!

We have sent off our I-800a Form to the U.S. Customs and Immigrations! This may not make much sense to those outside the adoption community, but basically the approval of this form and our fingerprints deem us suitable to adopt internationally. A big MUST! One of the last pieces to our puzzle! Once we get this form approved (which can take up to 2 months) we can send in our dossier and begin our wait! Please pray that this form is properly received, processed, and approved. Please also continue to pray for India, its adoption procedures, and our future baby. Thank you for your love and support!