Home study Visit and more news!!

Tomorrow is a big day for us:)  Our social worker is coming for our second home study visit.  Hopefully we will finish up the paperwork and sign a bunch of papers and be finished with our home study.  Then we move on to sending the appropriate paperwork and money to Immigration and get an appointment set for fingerprinting.  Once that is approved we will finish up our dossier in the hopes of maybe receiving a referral this summer.  A lot of that may sound like a different language:)  Honestly, sometimes we feel like we are feeling our way through the dark but we are simply trying to take things one step at a time and work on something adoption related each day.

We are so thankful that Mark's best friend, William Turner, ran a marathon two weeks ago to help raise funds for our adoption!!  He survived and raised over $2,000!!  We are so thankful and blessed to have such amazing friends, like William and Melanie, that are willing to invest their time, money and energy to help us bring our little one home!  Thank you William!!  Thank you to everyone that donated!

You probably also noticed the new pictures on this blog.  Lindsay Haselden took them so we could use them for our adoption paperwork and on the blog.  She did a GREAT job and we are so, so thankful!!  She also designed some neat thank you cards for us.  Many of you might receive them:)

Lastly, in the next few days we will announce through the blog another neat way we are going to be raising funds for the adoption.  Think colorful, spring and fun!!  I can't wait to show off a neat idea for gift giving this spring.  It'll be great for teacher gifts, Easter and Mother's Day!!  So be sure to check back in the next few days:)

"Children Of God" - Official Music Video

Sharing...

I follow a stranger at this blog.  Sara Hagerty doesn't know me and probably never will but I am consistently amazed at her words and the way they reveal her heart.  So often she expresses so well what my heart is feeling.  She is sharing a guest post on another neat blog. I hope you will take a look below and hop over to finish reading what Sara has to say.  Good stuff:)

No Longer Motherless Daughters

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Sarahagerty

She lost her tooth on another continent. She learned to write her name there, and how to use the potty. Someone other than me taught her that girls like frilly dresses, but that it doesn’t keep them from playing in the dirt.
Her milestones, to date, are my mysteries.
We’ve named her Hope. She doesn’t know her new name yet – a whole new set of letters to learn – but she’s already becoming, for us, her namesake. One day she, herself, will breathe deep the reality of this name.... (to finish reading, click here or here. And I hope you will.)

Just Love Coffee

I (Erika) only started drinking coffee about a year ago... and I am sorry to say I am addicted:)  Getting up early mornings with the kids for school, especially when it is cold outside, sends me looking for some warm caffeine!  Mark actually has a more refined taste in coffee because he drinks it black.  I have a little coffee with a lot of cream and sugar:)

So we are always looking for ways to order our addiction while feeling like we are doing something with the money we are drinking down...so we like to order fair trade coffee. What is fair trade coffee? It is coffee which is purchased directly from the growers for a higher price than standard coffee.  The purpose of fair trade is to promote healthier working conditions and greater economic incentive for producers.

We recently discovered Just Love Coffee .  They not only sell excellent fair trade coffee but work with families that are adopting.  They help families raise funds to go toward their adoption.  So if you click on the nifty little link to the left:) and purchase some coffee from our "store" we will earn $5 per bag of coffee!!  We bought several different kinds of their coffee so far and have really, really enjoyed it.  They sell whole bean or already ground and ours came within 4 days of ordering it!

So if you want to try some new coffee, help out some fair trade farmers and help us bring our little girl home...then click and shop please!!!  Thank you ahead of time if you decide to grab a cup of java:) They make great gifts too!!

God provides and Seeing Heroes in action

Mark: Genesis 22:14 says, "On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided." Abraham proclaimed this after God provided a ram to be sacrificed in place of his son Isaac. Erika and I have seen time and time again God's provision and this past month as been no different. Erika will go into more detail below.
I have seen Heroes in action. Since this journey began Erika and I have been humbled by the financial generosity of those who want to see us bring our "baby girl" home as quickly as possible. Once again Erika goes into more detail below, but because of the efforts and gifts from many of you we are able to go further, faster. We are ahead of the curve with our process and paperwork because money has not slowed us down. Thank you for being our Hero!!

Erika: We've had LOTS going on in the last week or so!! We sent in our homestudy application and a majority of the required paperwork.  We received an email about a week later that said they received it and would contact us soon to set up an appointment for a social worker to come and interview us.  That was huge!!

We also went on Monday to apply for our passports.  I knew the cost for the application and for the pictures but didn't realize we also had to pay other processing fees.  It went very smoothly and quickly but I was a little surprised at how much that whole process cost!  The amazing thing though is that each step as we face new needs and as we find out how each piece of paperwork seems to come with a new cost...God is ahead of us already providing. One family sent a check to Nightlight with our homestudy paperwork.  God provided!

Another family has donated money each month for the last 3 months.  Each time that donation arrived it was JUST as we were having to pay for 16 birth certificates from 3 different states...or finding out Mark needed to go back to Columbia again to order 6 more marriage certificates...or right as we received an email from Nightlight announcing that Ugandan lawyer fees went up in price another $1500.  So this journey is definitely already a bit of a roller coaster ride, but God is saying hang on!!  He is definitely in charge:)

We have some dear friends, Chris and Cookie Cawthon, that have been such an encouragement to us in this adoption process.  Their two girls, Carson and Campbell, had a cookie and lemonade stand a few months ago and raised over $32.00 toward our adoption!  Chris decided he was going to run the Myrtle Beach Half-Marathon to help us raise funds toward our adoption.  Well, Chris is highly motivated and I've never met a person that doesn't think he is great!!  We knew he would be successful at whatever he put his hand (or foot) to...but we have been blown away at his success.

We spent the night at the beach and Mark spent the morning of the race following Chris from point to point as much as possible.  Chris did a great job running and finished the 13.1 mile race in 2 hrs 12 minutes.  Even more impressive is that Chris' friendship and influence and efforts raised over $2500 toward our adoption!!!  Isn't that so cool??!!  We are so grateful for people like the Cawthons and other friends and family that are helping us reach our goal!!  Our God provides!!

So next steps are:
1. Working on our dossier which is essentially all the paperwork that goes through the US Government's hands and then into the Ugandan officials' hands.  Lots and lots of notarized stuff!
2. Waiting to meet with and be interviewed by a social worker from Nightlight as part of our homestudy.
3. Taking an online class and doing lots of reading and research to fulfill our education requirements for our homestudy.

I will also try to blog soon about the neat ways God has been preparing our boys' hearts for their little sister.  We have prayed that the Lord would already begin bonding their hearts with this new sibling and God is answering that prayer!

The Back Story

I had a neat conversation with a good friend the other day and had the opportunity to share the story about how/when Mark and I finally got on the same page about adoption.  Or rather how God put us on the same page.  After sharing with her I realized that I still have not shared that on this blog.

So here goes:)  Back in March/April 2010 I had felt the Lord pressing on my heart that we were called to adopt for a couple of years but conversations with Mark did not appear to be moving us any closer.  I still felt it would be a LONG way off.  So I asked two of my close friends to pray with me that I would be quiet and allow God to move Mark in whatever way He wanted.  I knew that if/when we would adopt it needed to be led and spearheaded by Mark.  The Lord needed to place that passion within Mark and move him to action.  As the spiritual leader of our home, the right time would be when Mark placed it on Mark's heart.

Mark had been to Catalyst conference in Atlanta, GA a couple of times and for a year felt with certainty that he was supposed to go to the 2010 Catalyst conference.  It is an amazing conference for Christian leaders and the Lord has used it in our lives in tremendous ways.  In 2009 Mark attended and the conference had a major emphasis on the need for adoption and the massive number of 143 million orphans in the world.

So although it is by no means a cheap conference we made it a priority that he go.  He went with his good friend, William Turner.  The first day there were labs that they could choose which ones they wanted to attend.  Mark really felt he was supposed to go to one that emphasized adoption but he made the deliberate choice to go to a different one.  In his words "it was miserable".  He was supposed to be at a different lab:)

One of the neat things about this conference is that on one main night they live stream the main session online.  It was around 7pm and I was in the middle of feeding the boys, giving baths, we had just returned from soccer practice, things were chaotic.  However I had the session streaming on the computer and after the praise and worship they had a ten minute segment that despite all the chaos...it grabbed my attention.  I sat down on the floor and the boys listened/played around me while I watched a segment about adoption.  At the 2009 conference a man attended and the Lord used the conference to lead him to the lifechanging decision to adopt.  He and his wife had three children but despite financial obstacles they adopted in 2010 a little girl from South Korea.

It was a very moving story.  Two things the man said resonated with me.  He shared that if you are called to adopt then there is a child somewhere in the world that is not receiving the care and love that your family has for him/her because of your disobedience.  He also said that people don't pursue adoption because of the cost...but if your biological child had cancer and you had to come up with $150,000 for your child to receive treatment...you would find the money, somehow.  Those two statements stuck with me.

They also struck a chord with Mark too.  As a matter of fact on the way home from the conference as he was debriefing with William he told him that he wasn't going to tell me about what he heard.  He did admit to William that the Lord was pressing in on him with the calling to adopt but he wasn't ready.  He said if I (Erika) said the same things to him that the man at Catalyst said, then Mark would know that we were supposed to adopt.  Famous last words:)

When Mark arrived home we were planning the very next weekend to get away to Asheville, just the two of us.  So we really didn't talk much about the conference.  We jumped back into the busyness of life with 3 boys.  We figured we would talk the next weekend.  We did have home group that Sunday night.  As a group we were studying Richard Stearns book "The Hole in our Gospel".  The session we were on dealt with orphans.  So I shared with the group that night what I heard the man say from the Catalyst conference.  Mark was sitting beside me and started to cry...which was weird because he is not a crier.  A little awkward but he didn't really say anything.

That night after the boys went to bed Mark casually asked about my comments and if I had seen the whole clip.  I told him yes and that it was very impactful.  He began to cry again and finally shared with me what the Lord had been doing in him.  He affirmed that we were called to adopt and that we needed to move ahead with it immediately.  We had no idea how we were going to do it or what that would look like but it was amazing that God brought Mark to the point where he was initiating the decision and we were definitely on the same page.  We serve a big God:)  And how cool that the very next weekend we had time alone as a couple to pray and talk and listen for direction about beginning the journey toward adoption!

Accepted!!!

 

Step One: Done! (Look at those precious smiles!! Clean kiddos in pjs are the best!)

On December 31st we mailed in our initial application to Nightlight Christian Adoptions along with our $500.  There are the boys with the envelope the night before we mailed it out.  They began accepting applications on January 1st which was actually on the weekend so they wouldn't actually be open until January 3rd so just to be safe I mailed it out on Dec. 31st...we were a little excited!!

We received an email back from Nightlight on January 5th that we were accepted!!  That really just means that we can now enter the next phase for adopting from their Uganda program.  We actually received three emails from Nightlight that day with 22 attachments.  We have quite a bit of work ahead of us:)

Lots of reading and paperwork to fill out, lots of paper trails and questions to be answered.  Lots of research to do and stuff to learn!!  Along with all the applications, financial forms and paperwork we are required to do 10 hours of adoption related education.  They say that this will actually take about 20 hours.  For me that means the joy of buying some cool new books.  For Mark that means we are looking for lots of online resources and audio books we can download.  Yes, we have very different learning styles:)

We have also started some work around the house.  Mom helped me paint the upstairs hallway.  We still need to finish the trimwork and then work on painting the upstairs bedroom.  So we have lots going on.  Of course we had a big Christmas with lots of family coming to Florence which was great.  And then Eli's birthday was right before Christmas and Haig's is right after Christmas....and then of course we were out of school for 3 days because of the Great Snowpocalypse of 2011...so we've been busy!!

Our next goal is to have our homestudy application and the check for $1400 in the mail to Nightlight by the end of January.  We are almost ready with that portion of paperwork.   We are also working on getting current birth certificates for all of us, a current marriage license as well as lots of medical paperwork and financial paperwork.  Apparently they need long form birth certificates and most of these certificates must be issued within 6 months of the adoption dossier being submitted.  Whew!  This is definitely testing my ability at multi-tasking and staying organized:)  

Thank you for your prayers for us as we forge ahead and for our little girl somewhere in Uganda:)  We will try to keep you updated.  We are soooooo thankful for all of your prayer support and thank you to so many of you that already have surrounded us with financial and emotional support.  Daily Christ reminds us that this is indeed the way we are supposed to walk:)  Thanks for walking with us!