This may seem like a small praise, but every little bit counts! I had nursery tonight at church and was talking with my friend, who has nursery with me. She is still in the process of adopting her foster daughter (for those that want to know, they were unable to have children the “old-fashioned way”). I was updating her on our adoption/home study and commented that most of the paperwork that needs to be completed is stuff we’ll need notarized and I also commented about how much stuff that is. She said, “I’m a notary. I can do it for you. For FREE!” Yippee! In comparison to all the costs for the adoption, this is minor, but it’s still an added cost that we are going to be able to avoid. Am I thrilled??? You better believe it! I love how God works out those little things! Now we’ve got to pray for provision through the big things.

And another praise, our adoption agency will be opening up an office on the East Coast in North Carolina (up the road a bit from us but closer than the mid west).

Keep on praying and join us in thanking God for all his big and little provisions thus far!

We had our first home study visit yesterday. A travel 3 hours away to have this meeting, with the kids. It went okay but we went long and the kids got wild. Mark was wondering what the social worker was thinking as Ace and Liam chased each other with action figures around the conference room and neither of us batted an eye.

I think it went good. Mark was pumped. He asked me why I wasn’t excited, mainly because I can’t see my daughter’s face right now, so I know we still have a way to go. It’s good to be started though.

Just pressing on and on to the next thing…getting ready to go camping! Loads of fun.

I’ve had several people ask me what the process is and what we have to do, etc. I’ll work on getting a post together about all that over the next week or so and put it up so you can be praying about us and it for each step.

Please pray for our country that we will be adopting from. Right now they are in legislation and have some policies concerning adoption that will be up for approval, etc. A new proposal from the agency we want to use and others will be coming up this week. What we know about the proposal is that it is “pro-adoption and designed to facilitate the international adoption process.” Please pray that this proposal will be passed!

On another note, I’ll be mailing off our homestudy application this week. We really have no reason that we have been waiting, other than just time, etc. We’ve still got two visits from the homestudy agency plus one visit to them, plus about fifty more pages of paperwork that will need to be turned in. Of course, I’ve got most of the paperwork done but we’ll have our lovely background checks from everyone and his brother to do and that will take some time.

We’ve been talking a lot at church about how everything we do is for God’s glory. So, I thought I would start off our adoption adventures discussing this as well. I’m actually writing this, probably pretty well in advance before I post it. The reason being, that we want to make sure we are really on the road to adoption and in God’s will. We want our sweet blessing from another country to really be for His glory.

That being said, I will share how we started this journey. There is a couple from our church who have adopted two (maybe three, I can’t remember) children and are in the process of adopting three more. I spoke with her back in January about adoption and asked if I could contact her when we were ready to start our adoption process. She wholeheartedly agreed, so I’ve been waiting for God and His timing. He’s also used the time from January until now (May) to prepare our hearts and lead us to a country. I’ll get to more about what country God has lead us to later.

I’ve been waiting, sometimes patiently, sometimes not so patiently. Until this week, I’ve really felt God telling me it’s time. Not only that, He put Jennifer, the mom I wrote of earlier, in my path on Wednesday, and I felt God all but yelling at me to talk to her. I really just have two main questions to ask, but I know that these two questions are what will get us really started on this road to adoption. Anyways, I chickened out. I disobeyed God because I was finally getting started and I was scared! Most of you know that when God is speaking to your heart, He will be pretty persistent. I felt Him telling me again, on Thursday, to call her. This time, my excuse was that I hadn’t spoken to Mark. However, the thought, stayed in my head all day on Thursday. And God told me to talk to Mark last night. I did and he agreed that if I felt that strongly that we were being led to call, then I needed to call.

So, I called her over a week ago. She was a wealth of information and pointed me to what I pray will be a great homestudy agency out of Marietta.

We’ve got the paperwork for our homestudy and have already started working on it and our dossier. Basically, anything and everything about us has to be put on paper and notarized…I just hope we don’t have to count how many times we go to the bathroom!

I probably won’t post much on this until we get accepted in to the adoption agency we would like to use. For now, pray, and if we ask you to do a reference, be nice :)…or at least honest.

Here’s what to pray for:
1. Patience on our part as we gather all our paperwork to complete the homestudy, dossier, and all the other things associated with bringing our sweet child home.
2. Our child/children who may be waiting on us now…for their health and wisdom for us to know when God shows us our child or children.
3. Finances! This is going to be expensive. Especially if God leads us to adopt more than one child at a time. We’ll be trying to do it without having to go into debt. To do this, we’ll need help and I’m sure I’ll post more on that as we go.
4. Go ahead and start praying that Zoe, Ace, Liam, and Josiah will be able to adjust to an instant little sister (or brother and sister or sisters). This will be an ongoing prayer of ours.