The Next Step!

First, let me share that we have decided that we want to adopt 2 siblings. Our hope is to get a sister and brother between the ages of 6 to 11. Individual children are sometimes available in Ukraine, but most often the children have siblings.

We finally have found the agency that is going to complete our homestudy. I am so excited. They are local to us in Murfreesboro, and we met with them today. Our first home visit is scheduled for February 11th. Apparently this first visit will last 3 hours!!! They will meet with each of us seperately for a personal interview as well as check our house for certain safety issues such as fire alarms and carbon monoxide detectors. The quicker we complete all our paperwork ,parent training and lots of fingerprinting the sooner the home study is completed.

After speaking with our placing agency, Lifeline, we found out that we could and probably will have our children home by or before Christmas of this year!! This is much sooner than I anticipated, but we are very excited about it. What does this mean? The fundraising has to be our main priority. Some of the fees we ,kind of, pay as we go at certain parts of the process, but by the time we get our appointment to go to Ukraine, we have to have the full amount of monies raised.

The most urgent need right now is the money we need for the homestudy. We need $1950 by our February 11th home visit. We have a little over half of that right now. We are trusting God that the rest of this money will come in before that time.

We have multiple fundraisers on the schedule. We signed up with Global Re-Source Funding. If we collect empty ink cartridges, cell phones, gps, digital cameras and laptops and send them in to be recycled, they will give us money to go toward our adoption. We are planning a donation only bbq dinner in February or March, we will invite people to come to a free dinner with the hopes of collecting donations. Jeff is scheduling at least one cooking class in February or March. All of the catering jobs we get between now and the adoption will go toward the adoption fund. In early April, we will have a yard sale and will be accepting donations of items that people would normally send to Goodwill. We are also posting items on Amazon to sell. We will also be sending letters to our family and others to let them know what we are doing and how they can help if they feel led by God to do so. Once our homestudy is completed, we will apply for grants. As a last option, we can apply for no or low interest loans. Our total need is 36,000 dollars.

If you have a desire to help us, you can do this by collecting ink cartridges and cell phones from people you know. If you have sellable items for our yard sale that you would like to donate, we would appreciate those items as well. We can arrange to pick up any items you want to donate or arrange for shipping of recyclable items. Of course, monetary donations are welcome. We have an account set up under Chip-In...look at one of our previous posts to find the link.
Thank you for reading! We will keep you posted!