We are being featured on the Give1Save1 website this week!!
Beth is an adoptive mama who has a heart for helping others. She wants to help other adopting families raise money for their adoption journeys. She is blessing so many people. We really appreciate everything she is doing for our family and all the other featured families too! She features a different family each week. Check out her site and please consider signing up to donate $1 per week-this week is goes to us and everyother week it goes to another adoptive family. Every $1 really does help and its really appreciated.
Here's our story:
We are on the journey of following God's plans for our life by building our family through adoption. We are so excited to see how God continues to work in and through our lives!! We were married in 2006 and excited we became parents in 2011.
Adoption has been something that we both always dreamed about, but we were scared to take the first step to get started. The financial aspect of adoption is scary. It is expensive. But one day while eating lunch with some friends in Nov. 2009, our friends said her sister and brother-in-law have adopted 3 times. Brad and I at the same time said "How have they afforded it?" Our friend simply said "God has provided." That was the little push we needed to step out in faith and start the adoption process. We have been truly blessed along this journey, because we started the adoption process with just enough money for the homestudy and we were blessed with just what we needed when we needed it!! We are so thankful for all the people that have allowed God to use them to bless us!! Every penny of our first adoption was paid without a loan- Praise God!
On January 27, 2011 we received our referral for a 2 month old boy!! We were in love from the moment we saw his picture!! We were able to spend two months in Ethiopia between our court date and being cleared by the Embassy. We brought Jacob Jafar home on May 20, 2011. Adoption #2 has been in the process since April 2011. During our two months in Ethiopia we met so many older children that literally begged to be a part of our family, or really any family. We loved every minute with Jacob but we couldn’t stop spending time and loving on the older children. They tugged at our hearts every day. Before we even left Ethiopia we had already contacted our Family Coordinator at America World to see about starting the process again soon. We were told that we would need to wait until we are home with Jacob for six months to apply to AWAA again. But the week we were leaving Ethiopia to come home, the rules at AWAA changed-now we are able to fill out a concurrent family building plan which eliminated the six month wait. We felt the nudge from God to start the adoption process to adopt an older sibling group. Everything about this adoption is the opposite from last time. Our journey to Jacob was perfectly orchestrated by our Heavenly Father and we are so thankful that we have the opportunity to raise Jacob as our son. But this time we are leaving our request wide open. We are open to an older sibling group of 2 or 3 kids, healthy or special needs- including HIV+. So basically everything that scared us in our first adoption is in our request this time. God has a funny way of changing your hearts for awesome things to happen in life!
We are expecting this adoption to be over $50,000 and we have no idea how long the process will take. Sometimes families are matched with older children very quickly, but sometimes it still takes several months. We are so excited to be on this journey again. God taught us many things and changed our lives during our last journey, and we know this journey will be amazing and life changing too! Thank you to each one of you that is helping us become one step closer to bringing our children home!!!!
These beautiful necklaces just arrived from Ethiopia!! A friend went to pick up her kids and was kind enough to go shopping for us! These paper bead necklaces are BEAUTIFUL!!!! Women in Africa make them from recycled magazines. The necklaces are available in solid colors (red, blue, purple, green) or some multi-colored. I LOVE mine- I have 8! I have collected them from different peoples fundraising, gotten them as gifts, and I got a few while I was in Ethiopia too. And they are all different. We are selling them for $15 each, plus $1.50- if needed.
