Road Trip!!!

I finally got everything together for the dossier so my little sister Destinee and I decided to drive four hours away and hand deliver the dossier to be apostilled. Everything for our dossier had to be notarized then apostilled which just means the state of Texas made it an official document and put a gold sticker on it. Well I was hoping it was going to be a gold sticker turns out it is just an orange star on the paper (lame). Anyway Destinee and I had  a great time hanging out on the 3 or 4 hour drive there. I'm not exactly sure how long it took???

Once we got there we parked kinda far away from where we needed to go so we used me handy dandy GPS to help us find the building. The only problem is I didn't put it on the "walking GPS" so it took us a super long was cause it thought we were in a car and there were a lot of one way streets. Once we got there and realized we parked a block away not 5 we couldn't help but laugh.  

We made it! 

Destinee took this picture and I thought she did a great job :)

While we were waiting for the apostilles to get done we asked where the Capitol was and it turned out to be across the street from where we were. We were super excited to go check it out. Oh and everything went well with the apostilles I need to redo a few notaries and send them back in but I should be finished with those things tomorrow! 

Here I am in front of the Capitol! 

We gave ourselves a little tour of the building. This was a super cool door hinge. 

This heart reminded me of Melody and Madison.

This is the first time I have been inside of the Capitol Building and it was beautiful! 

This little stair case at the top was so neat and so randomly placed.

I have no clue what is done in this room because we didn't want to wait for the tour guide but whatever it is I'm sure it is important. 

We had a great time and I was so excited to get most of our apostilles done. We did this on Friday the 15th then I mailed then to our agency on Saturday the 16th and guess what we got in the mail on Saturday??? OUR FBI BACKGROUND CHECKS!!!! I was so excited it was the moment we had been waiting for! Those have to be federally apostilled so a friend is getting those done for me this week!

What does it all mean? Hopefully by next week our agency will have our WHOLE dossier. I can't wait to say this part is over. It has been hard but Baby A is so so worth it!

I will keep you all updated! 

Praise God the dossier prep fees are now paid for!

I am soooooooo excited to tell you all we have more than we needed for the dossier prep fees!!!

Here is how it all went down:
I couldn't wait to start getting everything ready for the garage sale so when my friend Taylore brought over a van full of donations 2 weeks before the sale I was so excited! We packed it all into our garage and I loved looking in the garage knowing it would be used to raise money to bring our boy home.

Fast forward to Friday the day before the garage sale we had several friends help us for HOURS going to pick up items that people were donating then taking them to our church. We had a TON of stuff and there was still more coming. After church we had a lot of help so we went ahead and set up all the stuff for the garage sale in the church parking lot.

 We are a fairly new church so we don't have a building yet and we meet at Grace Church when they are not having service. Their church has been such a blessing to us and we were so excited they were going to let us do the garage sale there. They even donated items for our garage sale.

Jason and two of our friends volunteered to stay all night and guard the stuff. We started moving stuff out at about 9:30pm and didn't get done until about 12:30am. During that time we made $300 from people pulling up and wanting to buy stuff while we were setting up. It was crazy but exciting. I think I finally went home around 2am and fell asleep at 3am. My alarm went off at 5:45am and at that moment of my life I was not at all excited about the sale ha. Once I woke up though I was super excited. I got donuts and headed to the church. I got there around 6am and from about 6 till 11:30am we had steady traffic. It was really neat the way the Lord worked it out because just when we were getting tired a new volunteer would show up to help us. I can not believe how many people helped us I can not thank them enough.

We put up tons of signs.




The sky was so beautiful!




We had a ton of stuff this picture doesn't do it justice. Thank you to everyone who donated items to our garage sale. On Friday night a family came to donate stuff they had read Patrice's blog for a long time and found us through her. It was so great to meet her and her husband!

We set up a donation box with Baby A's picture on it and we had a lot of people donate that way.

This is my dear friend Shannon and her kiddos Eli and Jadyn. It was so neat to have so many of our friends come out and support the adoption. We also handed out fliers with Baby A's story and and link to our blog so people knew what they were donating to and could follow our story. 

Everything went really really well once we were finished with the sale we started packing everything up and it started to rain. It was kinda refreshing because it got kinda hot toward the end of the sale but then it got so humid. We were rushing trying to get the TV's out of the rain.

I met Angela when I was staying with Patrice her family was going to be moving to Texas very soon and very close to us. We were so excited to get to spend time with them once they got here. Well they have only been here for a week and they came at the end of our garage sale to help us pack everything up and to clean the church. I was so blessed they were able to help. 

The garage sale went amazingly well. We were so tired and we are all still so so sore but I am so thankful we were able to do it.

 I can not thank everyone enough for all of their help! It was so neat to see the Lord use tons of different people to help get us one step closer to bringing our boy home. 

Thank you so much to everyone who donated stuff, picked up donated items, set up until 1:30am Friday, stayed at the church to guard everything ALL NIGHT LONG, helped run the garage sale, bought stuff, and helped clean up. It went really really well! It was so neat to see the body of Christ working together to bring sweet Baby A home. I also want to thank everyone who donated through our chip in and who gave us money to go toward the dossier fees we have exactly what we needed! 

To God be the glory!

GARAGE SALE IS ON!!!

WE GOT LOTS AND LOTS OF STUFF!

This wedding dress is in great condition.... no stains:

We got baby stuff (cloths, toys, jumpers, strollers, and much much more)

TVs:

Lots of clothes:

Baby/toddler bed, co-sleeper

Stove in great condition (very clean, looks new)

Bikes, fold out bed couch, etc...

Lots of shoes of alot of different styles:

It is a beautiful morning out right now so come visit us and help with our adoption fees :)

We are at:

WE HAVE THE GOLDEN TICKET..... now what??? and THEY ARE FINISHED WITH OUR BACK GROUNDCHECKS.

First and foremost I want to tell you all I called the FBI today and found out our FBI back groundchecks are finished!!!! They should be mailed out to us no later than the 12th of July. I called back to see if there was anyway we could rush the delivery since that is all we are waiting for to complete our dossier but they can't so we wait :) 

There is no telling what our mail man thinks about us we are always getting mail from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI haha

I was so excited about getting our USCIS approval I didn't really take time to explain what happens next so here goes...

The date of our USCIS approval has to be on the documents that our adoption agency has to create. That is why we couldn't really go any further in the process until we got this approval. So now that we have it I will take our dossier (without our FBI back groundchecks) to get appostilled then I will mail that off to our agency so that she can start working on the documents she has to create. It will take her a few weeks to finish everything she has to do and she also goes on vacation at the end of this month so that is why we are trying to hurry up and get our paperwork to our agency. We still need to raise 2000 dollars for our dossier prep fees. We will be having a garage sale on Saturday and we hope to raise a lot of money there but if you would like to donate please use the chipin on the side of our blog. All the money raised using the chipin will go directly to Baby A's adoption fund. Thank you so much to everyone who has already given!

Once we send her our FBI background checks and she finishes up with the documents she has to create then she will mail our dossier off to Eastern Europe.

Once it gets to the agency's office in Eastern Europe then they will translate it into English submit it then we wait for our travel date.

We will travel for the first time hopefully in September and commit to Baby A's adoption in Eastern Europe. We will get to meet him and spend some time with him that trip and I can't wait!

Then we come home for anywhere from 4 to 16 weeks and  wait for a court date. Once we get a court date we will fly back to Eastern Europe and officially adopt Baby A. There is a 10 day waiting period after the court hearing and we wont get to take Baby A until after those 10 days are over. After we get him then we get his birth certificate, visa and medical evaluations after that we will be headed home.

I know I have said most of that before but it took me forever before I realized exactly how this process was going to go so I like to keep putting it on here just in cause you all forget what's next.

This next picture is not for the faint at heart...

Kenya had asked me to show her the adoption papers and I said "okay give me just a minute." Well I totally forgot she had asked me that so later on that day I came to get something out of the adoption papers and I screamed and the sight of a BIG HUGE spider. Jason and Kenya DIED laughing because they had placed Kenya's spider ring in the paperwork to scare me. They were laughing so hard I couldn't help but laugh. I have tried several times to get them back but it still hasn't worked... Soon I will get them :)

On a side note I didn't realize our other chipin was expiring so it did and now I can't change the date on it. We raised 500 dollars using that chipin!!! I added that amount to the total raised on the side of the blog. Thank you so much to everyone who has given!!!

I hope you all have a great week!