And off it goes.. UPDATED

UPDATE: OUR DOSSIER ARRIVED IN BABY A'S COUNTRY ON AUGUST 31st!!!!


This is me getting ready to mail off the last little bit of our dossier to our agency in America on July 23rd.
They had to create a list of documents and prepare our dossier to be sent to Eastern Europe all of this took about a month.


I am overjoyed to let you all know that our agency mailed off our dossier today and it is on it's way to Baby A's country!!! It will take about a month to get there and get translated then it will be submitted to the government in Eastern Europe and we will wait for a travel date. I am hoping we will get to travel for the first time at the end of October to meet our sweet boy! That is just a guess though we wont know for sure until they give us a date :). Please be praying that our dossier gets there quickly and we are submitted as fast as humanly possible. We are so so thankful for God's faithfulness to our family we can't wait to go meet our baby boy!

More exciting news!!!

We just heard from our agency and our dossier is PERFECT!!!! We don't have to redo anything. I am so so so excited about this!!! All of our hard work has paid off and for now we can just sit back and wait for a travel date. We are still several weeks away from that point but it is so nice not have to do anything right now!!!!

I am just rejoicing and praising the Lord!!!

Exciting news while we wait...

Our completed dossier is still at our agency in America and as far as I know our agency hasn't gotten a chance to look at it yet. I am a little bummed out about this but I know they have to work in the order in which they receive the paperwork. I know a lot of families are using our agency and some of their children and living in horrible conditions waiting until their families can go save them. I want to be able to meet Baby A LIKE NOW and bring him home soon but I can rest knowing he is being taken care of by people who love him and want what's best for him. His nanny is the only Mommy he has ever know and she takes such good care of him. It is so nice to be able to move forward with the adoption and not have to worry about our boy.

 And now for the exciting news... We received a check in the mail for $4,000!!! That means we only need to raise $9,000 more and we will be fully funded. We are just rejoicing and praising God for His faithfulness! Although $9,000 may sound like a lot I am just excited to be under the $10,000 mark. We are getting close!!!

Thank you again to everyone who has donated money, done fundraisers and prayed for us. We are so so blessed!!!

And it's off

I just wanted to let everyone know we mailed our dossier to our agency last week!!!! It takes a few weeks for our agency to create their documents then they will mail it off to Eastern Europe. Once it is in Eastern Europe our agency there has to translate our dossier and create some more documents which can take a few weeks to get done. The lady at our agency in Eastern Europe is going to be on vacation for a few weeks this month so that might slow us down a little bit.

My guess and this is just a guess is that we might be traveling for the first time in September to meet Baby A and officially commit to his adoption in Eastern Europe. Then we have to come home and wait for two to three months for a court date. After that we will go back to adopt him and bring him home! So maybe in November or December depending on how long it takes to get a court date.

We are excited to be getting so much closer!!! We know that God's timing is perfect and we are just trusting Him to work out all the details.

I may not have any updates for awhile because now we just wait but if anything new happens I will update you all.

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!

WE HAVE A USCIS OFFICER!!!!!

This is going to be short because I am too excited to stand here and type I must keep running around my house and yelling every 5 seconds because I am so excited! We have a USCIS officer!!!! This is HUGE she said we should have approval in 7 to 10 business days!!!!! Ahhhhh this means we should have our USCIS approval by July 8th (please be praying we also get our FBI background check soon) after we get it we will take our dossier to get aposilled then mail it off to our agency our agency has to do something that takes about a month then they mail it to Eastern Europe and it will take about a month to get translated then we should get our invitation to travel not long after that. AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!! We could be traveling for the first time in September I can't believe it! I can't wait to hold Baby A in my arms for the first time!!!! 

Please keep spreading the word about Baby A's adoption we still need at least $2000 in our chip in to be able to pay for the dossier prep. fees. This money has to be in our chip in and not our Reece's Rainbow account so that we can send our agency a check as soon as we mail off our dossier (hopefully by July 13th!!!!!). 

Thank you all for your prayers and financial support. We are so blessed! 

Please keep praying for the process to move along quickly and for God's will to be done! To God be the glory alone!

wait, wait, wait

I am beyond excited to tell you guys that our dossier is ready to be notarized. I felt like this day would never come and I can tell you it is such a relief to know all we now have to do it wait, wait, wait. Well I say it's a relief it's a relief not felling like there is always something to do. Since February I have been going non stop working as hard and as fast as I could to get everything ready and now we wait. I called USCIS today and they are just now working one April's applications, we sent ours in the middle of May so now we wait. I also called the FBI and our application was entered into their system on May 25 and she said it would take 6 weeks to get our background checks back from that date booo. I am really hoping and praying things mover a little faster but I can rest knowing God is sovereign over all things including the timing of all the paperwork After we get our golden ticket (USCIS clearance) and our FBI background checks back we will take our dossier to get appostilled then off it goes to our agency. I fell like we are so close but so far away at the same time.

We are planning a super huge garage sale to raise money for the dossier prep fees and I'm sure we will do a few other fundraisers too. We will get the money from Reece's Rainbow after we travel for the first time and officially commit to his adoption in Eastern Europe. We will have to pay our agency $3,500 once we send them our dossier so the money raised for this needs to go in our chip in not our Reece's Rainbow account (in case anyone wanted to donate). Even though raising $3,500 in just a few short weeks seems impossible I am just trusting God and trying not to stress.

I will let y'all know as soon as we have more updates.

Back on track.

We are still not finished getting everything ready for the dossier but we are getting much closer. We only have a few things left to do. Then we wait and wait and wait for USCIS approval.

 Trying to get the last few papers filled out for the dossier.

I started out with one folder for our paperwork but quickly realized I needed something MUCH bigger. There are well over 200 papers in this file holder all for the adoption :)

My sweet hubby filling out paperwork. I made him use my girly pen :)

Even though our day did not go as planned last week it has not made me want to stop but move faster. It is so strange to me that I can miss someone that I have never met but I miss Baby A so much and I often dream of going to visit him. Even though the adoption process is hard at times it is so worth it. The best way I can describe it is like this... If someone took your child across the world and told you you had to do X,Y and Z to get your child back you would do everything they said and more to get to bring your child back home. It wouldn't seem like a burden to fill out paperwork but a joy knowing you would soon get to see your child. It is my joy to do above and beyond what is required to get to bring Baby A home.

I hope you will all continue to lift us up in prayer, we still have a long way to go but he is so so worth it.