more Kisses from Katie-the book

My last post I talked about how I just finished the book Kisses from Katie by Katie Davis. I talked about some of my favorite and challenging parts of the book. Katie has 13 daughters in Uganda, so naturally part of the book was about her adopting these girls. She writes:
"Adoption is wonderful and beautiful and the greatest blessing I have ever experienced. Adoption is also difficult and painful. Adoption is a beautiful picture of redemption. It is the Gospel in my living room. And sometimes, it's just hard. ...Adoption is a redemptive response to tragedy that happens in this broken world. And every single day, it is worth it, because adoption is God's heart."
"My family, adopting these children, it is not optional. It is not my good deed for the day; it is not what I am doing to 'help out these poor kid.' I adopt because God commands me to care for the orphans and the widows in their distress. I adopt because Jesus says that to whom much has been given, much will be demanded (Luke 12:48) and because whoever finds his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for His sake will find it (Matthew 10:39)."

People often tell us our kids are lucky or we are so great for adopting. I often find myself without anything to say. Sometimes its just awkward. Sometimes I say "we are the lucky ones" because its true. We are so thankful and lucky to have Jacob in our lives and we can't wait to have Kaleb and Isaiah home and a part of our family too. We don't think we are doing this great thing. We are following God's plan for our lives. We are so lucky that God choose us to walk this path with Him and so thankful that we said yes to building our family through adoption.

Kisses from Katie-the book

I just finished reading Katie Davis' book, Kisses from Katie. It's so good! And so challenging. I am amazed by how she lives her love for Christ EVERYDAY. I highly encourage you to go read it!! Here are a few of my favorite parts of the book:
" 'Remember, God will never give you more than you can handle'. People repeat this frequently; I heard it when I was growing up and I hear it now. It is meant to be a source of encouragement, and it would be if I believed it were true.
But I don't.
I believe that God totally, absolutely, intentionally gives us more than we can handle. Because this is when we surrender to Him and He takes over, proving Himself by doing the impossible in our lives."
She goes on "...I have learned to accept it, even ask for it, this 'more than I can handle.' Because in these times, God shows Himself victorious. He reminds me that all of this life requires more of Him and less of me. God does give us more than we can handle. Not maliciously, but intentionally, in love, that His glory may be displayed, that we may have no doubt of who is in control, that people may see His grace and faithfulness shining through our lives."

WOW! How many times have I thought or said "God won't give us more than we can handle"? Many. I love the way Katie explains the reason for tough things to happen in our life. She has tough situations that arise daily in her life in Uganda. During the tough times is the only time we have to constantly rely on our Heavenly Father to pick up where we think we can't make it anymore. It takes such faith and courage to ask for the tough times so you can remain close to God and rely fully on Him. Wow. I think my prayers for my life need to change.

Here's another part of the book: "Here is the thing: I want big things from God. We want big things from God and then think its strange when He asks us to build an ark, or feed five thousand or march around a building for seven days with seven priests blowing trumpets made from rams' horns. I am asking for big things from God. Big things like a van I can take my whole family to church in and a house with ten showers. Bigger things like 147 million orphaned children in the world to each have a mommy who knows what they like for dinner. So really, I am not surprised at the craziness of my life. Every morning , as I wake up with some impossible task in front of me, I know that God will meet it with impossible strength and love. I serve a God who uses Moses, a murdered, to part the Red Sea; a God who let Peter, who would deny Him, walk on water. A God who looks at me, in my fallen weakness and says, 'You can do the impossible.' "
What a great reminder that when we ask for big things from God we need to remember that He asks us to do big things. I want to approach the big things in life like they are gifts from God.
Thank you Katie Davis for challenging my life!

Amazed, Humbled, in Awe...

This is how I am feeling about this adoption. I am amazed at how God is building our family and at how many people God is using to help support us through this adoption. We have received so many calls, emails, and FB messages from friends-some long-time friends and tons of new friends through adoption. People are so full of encouragement and excitement for us!! We are so thankful for each person that is sharing this journey with us!!! We are so humbled by financial support that has been given to us. Some people have repaid gifts that were given to them when they adopted, some friends got together and decided not to give each other gifts and instead give that money to our adoption, some people have just given us money before we even knew we needed it. Receiving financial gifts is so humbling and often hard to receive, but we KNOW that we will be paying it forward to others in the adoption process in the future. These are all gifts from God that we are being blessed with now and plan to bless others in the future!!

We are also IN AWE of God's perfect timing in bringing our family together. Not only was God's timing perfect to get our papers ready the same week our newest sons papers were ready, but we sold our house at the perfect time. We we started the adoption process we knew we needed to do something drastic to come up with the money needed. Because we all know that adoption is expensive, but it is also SOOOO worth it!! So we ended up selling our house, cutting our house payments in almost half and get this-had an extra $10,000 in equity that we could use to pay the referral fees. We sold our house the day after we got the referral. We told our Family Coordinator we would have the money to accept the referral the next week, but we weren't sure how. We were going to beg for a quick loan or something. We knew these were our boys and we were going to fight for them! We knew we would have about $5,000 in equity, but the loan officer calculated wrong and we actually had $10,000. I'm positive that God knew this miscalculation was going to happen at the perfect time! So we were able to accept the referral right away!!! Praise God!

Then we were told that we could submit our Dossier in the next couple of weeks (we orginally thought we would be submitting it around Christmas time). This also means that we need another $7,700 to pay international fees, etc. Yikes! That's almost $18,000 in a matter of 3 weeks. BUT our God is bigger!! We have received numerous gifts through people donating to Lifesong and sending gifts in the mail and we have been selling some t-shirts and African bead necklaces.

To all of you walking this journey with us- Thank You just isn't enough!

T-shirt order

Here's our little cutie in our shirts!!

We will be placing another t-shirt order on Monday, October 24th. We have toddler, youth, and adult sizes. All short sleeve shirts are $15 and long sleeve shirts are $18.

All of the info is on the side or under the fundraising tab.




Thank you for helping us bring our boys HOME!!!!!!

Isaiah knows he has a family!!!

Today we got an email saying that Isaiah was told that he has a family and then they showed him a picture of us. He remembers us and is very happy to be a part of our family!!! We were so happy to hear this!! We were pretty sure that he would remember us, but there are a lot of families in and out of the TH, so we wondered if he maybe forgot us. It does our hearts good to hear that he is happy about being in our family too!! Praise God for bringing our family together!!!!

Blogging

There have been almost 400 people that read the post about our growing family announcing our newest two sons! I had no idea that many people read our blog. CRAZY! Sometimes I think that I am blogging just to document our life and adoption process for ourselves. I have recently started filling out Jacob's baby book and I am thankful that I have blogged about all the important things, because its amazing how you can forget some things.

I'm thankful for so many blogs that I get to read and follow other families journeys. And its nice to know that people are following our journey too! Several people have asked if they can share our story with others or share our blog. Yes! It's God's story that He is writing through our lives!! May God be glorified!

11 months old

I'm running a little behind this month! Jacob was 11 months old on October 8th. He is at such a fun age!! I might have said this about every stage he has been in, but it's true- he keeps getting to be more and more fun. He is constantly on the move, crawling and pulling up on everything. This month he started to walk around furniture while holding on. He still says "ball", "dadada", "baba" (bottle), and his animal grunts. He added the pig noise this month too. Every once in awhile he will cry "moooooooom" but he doesn't say mama yet. He loves to give kisses, play peek-a-boo, and patty cake. He started to peek through his fingers while playing peek-a-boo and laughs so hard. I have been giving him the soft part of popcorn since the first day he has been with us and two nights ago he decided he was done with that. He grabbed a handful and chewed it up just fine. I guess thats one way to tell his mama that he can handle it!

We moved this past weekend and I was concerned how he would handle the new environment. He has been fabulous. No waking up crying and he loves to play with all his toys in the new house too!
Here are some pictures from the last month. We went to the pumpkin patch/apple orchard for cousin Kylie's birthday and J went for this 1st horse ride. He didn't last very long, but it was fun while it lasted!

Our Family is Growing- It's a Boy AND a Boy!!!!

Yep, Jacob's going to be a LITTLE BROTHER!!! He got so excited when we showed him the picture of his brothers!!!!

Today we got the official call for the referral of our 2 newest sons!!!! They are 10.5 years old and 1.5 years old and we LOVE THEM!!!! Our adoption journey is a constant reminder of God's Perfect Timing!! If we haven't learned that now, I don't know if we ever will. We were reminded constantly during our journey to Jacob, but God's perfect timing and plan for our lives is even more evident now.
We had decided to stay in country between court and the Embassy clearing Jacob to come home. We knew that our time in Ethiopia would be precious bonding time with Jacob and also an amazing time of getting to know his birth country. What we didn't know was that we also had met our soon-to-be newest children. The older boy, who we are naming Isaiah, spent a lot of time with Brad. Brad would often go play soccer or some games with the older kids, and Isaiah was always by his side. After a couple weeks of getting to know Isaiah, we asked the in-country staff about him. We found out he had a baby brother, who we are naming Kaleb. But we found out that they weren't adoptable at the time. We were sad to find this out because Isaiah kept asking us why his friends were leaving with families and he was still there with no family. We hate that some older children had to stay there and watch other children go home with families while they just continued to wait and wait and wait. This was the first day that we considered adopting older children. Up to this point we were open to children up to age 4. We met so many wonderful children and we knew God was stirring our hearts and opening them up to new possiblities. So exciting and scary!
At this time AWAA had a policy that you had to be home with your child for 6 months before you could adopt again. The week we came home with Jacob, AWAA changed their policy and now you have to have 6 months between placements, not applying. The whole time we were in Ethiopia we knew we would be starting the adoption process again and building our family this way next, we just didn't know how soon it would be happening. So we came home and started updating our homestudy and got it all done pretty quickly. Then we sent it out to be approved by our state. We wanted it done right away, of course. But God's timing was better! While we were waiting to have our homestudy approved we saw a couple different sibling groups on our agencies waiting child list. We were trying to be open in this adoption and accept anyone that God put on our path. If our homestudy had been approved, we would have reviewed their files. But God's timing is perfect and our homestudy wasn't ready yet, because our sons weren't ready yet. Our homestudy FINALLY got approved last Monday. We were so excited! On Thursday several AWAA families started posting and emailing about new cute brothers on the waiting child list. I, of course, had to check them out. I about fell over to see THE BOYS that we knew and loved on the computer. We were told that they might not ever be adoptable and HERE THEY WERE. I sent Brad a text message about checking the WCL and I quickly got a phone call back from Brad. He was sobbing saying "They are our sons. They are really on the WCL." God's perfect timing- they were paper ready THE SAME WEEK we were approved!!!! God is AMAZING!!!! Brad imediately called our family coordinator to ask about them and if we could review their file. We were told we would hear something next week. (What a whole week of waiting????) Thankfully it wasn't that long. That part coming soon...
As soon as I saw the boys on the WCL, I started praying "Lord make it clear that I am their mom, fill my heart with mama love for them". We have spent a lot of time with them in ET and I didn't know I was there mom then, so I didn't love them like a mom. I loved the boys as I love many children, but it was different to me at that time. So all day I was praying for the Lord to make it clear and fill my heart with mama love. I got several phone calls and emails from friends we met in ET and they all said "your boys are on the WCL". Then a friend called me in the evening and said that another family posted online that they were interested in them. It made me sick to my stomach, but I immediately changed my prayers to "Lord put them in the right family, whether its ours or not. These boys NEED and WANT a family and I want them to be with the right family." The sick feeling was what I needed to know that I was totally in this and I did love these boys as a mom. I emailed several adoptive friends about them and asked that they pray for these boys to go to the right family.
So Friday all kinds of emails are going back and forth between our family coordinator, the program director, and several friends that were praying. That afternoon we got the call that we could review their file. We didn't really care what it said, we knew they were our boys. On Monday we emailed our family coordinator and said that we wanted to accept the referral, but we wouldn't have the money until next week. You see, we need almost $10,000 to accept the referral for two kids. We JUST finished paying for everything from the first adoption, we don't have any savings. So lots of praying again on this issue. We called places and begged for a loan or anything. Lifesong (we had a tax deductible account through them last time) said we would hear something in 3-8 weeks. Hmmm, thats not going to help with the referral fees. But they called back the next day and approved us for a fundraising tax deductible account. God has been working in all the details!!!! We have had a few people ask about giving gifts through a tax deductible account and now we have one! Praise God!!!
Here is our Lifesong information:

Lifesong for Orphans
Mowen Adoption #2363
PO Box 40 / 202 N. Ford St
Gridley, IL 61744

So after telling our family coordinator that we wanted to accept the referral , we found out they need us to answer some more questions. So after all those emails, today we got the official call that THESE ARE OUR SONS!!!!! PRAISE GOD!!!!

As if this isn't enough excitement for one week, we are also moving. We are moving to a house that already has four bedrooms! We decided this summer to try to move to buy a less expensive house to save money for this adoption and for when our children are home. After talking to a realtor, we decided we would lose too much with realtor fees, closing costs, etc. Then without our house being on the market, we got an offer that will cover what we paid for the house and the fees. What a God thing!!! We were able to find a house (actually a friend was flipping a house) that will cut our house payments in half and already has four bedrooms. God's perfect timing again!!
We are so excited about this next stage of our life and I'm so happy to be the mama of THREE BOYS!!!! I see lots of matching outfits in their future!! HAHA!
We have no idea what sort of timeline this adoption will have, but we many memories with the boys that we can cherish until we are with them again! Isaiah knows some English and he read some books to Jacob and Kaleb while we were in ET. Such precious memories were made and we didn't even know how cherished they would be in the future. We are so blessed to be back in this journey and we can't wait to be back in Ethiopia again! We are looking forward to holding our boys as their parents and telling them we LOVE THEM and we are a FAMILY!!!!