Just Love Coffee

Did you know that Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee? We have started another fundraisier to help us pay for our adoption expenses. If you like coffee, check out: http://www.justlovecoffee.com/mowen
I have heard that these are some of the most popular flavors: Ethiopian Harrar, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, and Goodnight Moon.
From this wesbsite you can purchase coffee and we will recieve a portion of each purchase.
A family started Just Love Coffee to help other famlies with their adoption expenses, help Ethiopian coffee farmers, and help Ethiopian orphanages.
Thank you to everyone that has helped us along the way! We apprecaite it more than you know!

Illinois Approval

After a 9+ week wait, Illinois and DCFS approved our homestudy. That means today our approved homestudy will be sent to USCIS (US Immigration) to join the other paperwork that was sent to them on Feb 1st. They are estimating a 30 day wait from USCIS to send our I71H to us, but since we have already been fingerprinted we are hoping its shorter. As soon as we get that we will send our Dossier to Ethiopia and get on the waiting list. We are so excited!! After 2 months of almost nothing happening, we finally feel like its moving forward a little bit more!!

Lucky Illinois and fundraising

From what I have heard, IL is one of the only states that requires your homestudy to be approved by DCFS before submitting it your agency. We have been waiting for over 2 months now for the approval. We were told it would take 6 weeks at the most. It is frustrating not being able to do anything to help along the process. But again we give it to God and know that its in HIS hands!

So we continue to wait.

In the meantime we have been able to get some more fundraising done. We had our 2nd yard sale at the church last weekend. Between the sale at our house and the one at the church we made a grand total of $2,926.37. This has been AMAZING. We are so blessed with wonderful people in our lives!! Thank you to everyone who has had a part in helping us!! We are sooooo thankful! We have also sold almost $3,000 in cards. We are getting close to having all $8,000 that we need to send in our Dossier.

It's amazing that we aren't going to have to take out a loan for this portion. Going into this we thought there was no way that we could save/raise all the money up to this point. God has been doing awesome things in our lives and putting amazing people who support us along this journey. We are definitely reminded not to put limits on our God!!

Yard Sale Pictures

We had our yard sale fundraiser on Saturday. Boy were were tired when it was done!! It was a lot of work to get ready for it, and luckily we had lots of help! Both of our moms and lots of our friends were around several days last week and even for the sale. We couldn't have done it without you guys-thanks SO much!! We were able to raise over $2,300! Praise God! This was such a blessing to us!!
Several people that came by said this was one of the largest yard sales they had ever seen. Thank you again to all the generous people who donated items to help us!! Here are some pictures....

Here are pictures right before we started taking things down, and actually we sold all the furniture you still see here, some people were coming back with a truck later.

After we put all the stuff that didn't sell, this is all we had left. Remember the last pictures had boxes all over the basement and also a full garage. Now we can park in the garage, we just can't use the couch downstairs yet. We will be having part 2 of our yard sale on May 1st at our church.

Yard Sale Fundraiser

We have been collecting items for a couple of weeks now for our yard sale this weekend. All proceeds from the yard sale will help support our adoption. Family and friends have been so supportive in donating items. Some friends have been over spending HOURS with us organizing and pricing the items too! Thanks Marie, Stu, Lindsey, Larcy, and Dan-we really appreciate all the hours you have put in this week so far and will put in later this week too!!

I thought I'd share a few pictures of what our house looks like now too....

this is the two parts of our basement

and here's the garage

Thank you again to all those who have donated and helped! We really appreciate all the support!!

God's perfect timing

I know its been awhile since I've posted anything and several people have asked me why...it's simply because nothing has happened in the last several weeks. We are still waiting. Someone else from IL said it took them several months to receive their I71H back. We've been waiting for about 5 weeks now. So hopefully we should get it soon.

The other day I was reading something about adoption and adoption advice. It said we are not waiting on man's timing, we are waiting on God's timing. There is such peace in that. God already has our child picked out. If we turned our Dossier in at the wrong time, we wouldn't have our child that God has planned for us. I am glad we serve a perfect God who always has a perfect plan for us! We can rest assured everything will happen in God's perfect timing!!!

Hand Stamped Cards-Fundraiser

One of the fundraisers we have been doing is selling Hand Stamped Cards. I am a Stampin' Up! demonstrator and when we started thinking of ways to fundraise I first thought of making and selling cards. We have started out my putting them in our teachers lounges and a few friends and family have taken them to their work too. At this point we have sold over $1,500 worth of cards. Thank you to everyone that has either helped sell the cards or that has bought them!

I am going to try to put a link on the side too, not sure how to do this yet. We are selling a 10 pack of cards for $15, plus $2 shipping-if needed. If you are interested or have any questions please email me at tara_mowen@yahoo.com. You can pick All Ocassion (usually 4 birthdays, 3 thank yous, 1 wedding, 1 sympathy, and 1 thinking of you or baby), Birthday, Thank You, Sympathy, Baby, Anniversary, Praying for You, etc. Here is a picture of some of the cards I have been including in the packs.



If you live close by, just email or call me. If not I'll ship them to you! There is a paypal button on the side now. Just click on it and in the comments leave me your address to ship and your email if I have any questions! Thanks!!

Ethiopia Law Change

Unfortunatley the Ethiopia Adoption Program had some changes today. One of the several of reasons that we chose to adopt from Ethiopia was because you only had to travel once to get your child. Today those rules changed, now you must travel 2 times. Once for court and once to pick up your child. This makes the travel expense double, which means another $6000-7000 we weren't planning for. We have to try to look at the positive side and trust that God has His hand in all of this. We will get to meet our child within 1-2 months of accepting the referral. The heratbreaking part will be leaving them in Ethiopia while we come back here and wait 2-3 months to be able to go back and pick him/her up.

USCIS Fingerprints

After driving around Naperville for awhile, we found the place to be fingerprinted. It was the back of a building, which we had been warned about, but still hard to find. The GPS told us we arrived at our destination at an empty field. So we kept driving and driving another 2000 blocks and we found it. We got there a little early but they took our fingerprints anyways and we were out of there within 10 mins. So we drove about 3 hours to get there and only 10 mins to be fingerprinted. Oh well, at least it is done! Now still waiting for DCFS to approve the Homestudy and our I71IH to be sent to us!!

Grant Applications

This week we have been busy filling out grant applications to see if we quailify for any financial assistance or interest-free loans. The paperwork really never does end!!
We will be going up to the Chicago area on Monday for our FBI fingerprints. We are excited the end is really near. After our fingerprints, we will need to get our I71H in the mail (maybe as soon as 3 weeks) and we can submit our Dossier and get on the waitlist. It seems like this has been something that was so far away for awhile, but now I think we can see the end of the paperchasing!!

DCFS Cleared

Today we were finally cleared from DCFS. We had been waiting on this background check for about 5 weeks. It took that long to say that we are absolutely fine and clear to proceed...geez. Oh well, I guess its better to be thorough. Our homestudy will be approved from AWAA by March 2nd. Then it needs to be approved by DCFS, which could take another month. And we are still waiting on our Homestudy to be sent in to USCIS, then our I-600A to come back to us as an approved I71H.
Several people have suggested to subscribe to a Ethiopia Adoption yahoo group. So a couple of days ago I joined one and there over 50 emails a day. After reading through all of these, I learned 2 new things, 1 encouraging and 1 discouraging. I found out that we can send a cover sheet and power of attorney (so someone can stand in our place at court in Ethiopia before we travel) to be state certified before we have all the documents. We thought we would have to drive this to Springfield once we had all the papers for our Dossier together. So this will save us one trip to Springfield, one day off of work, and maybe a week or so of time!!! So that was exciting. I also found out that about 1/2 of the court dates in Ethiopia don't go through. Usually some piece of paper is missing or the birth family doesn't show up. Some families were waiting for their 3rd court date. This court date happens after you have accepted your referral of a child and you are waiting to travel to meet him/her. That would be so hard. We have to continually rely on God's timing!
Also we are able to start applying for some grants now that our Homestudy is done. One friend told me that applying for grants was like getting another masters degree. There are a lot of forms to fill out and a lot of papers to write about our faith and testimony. Thank you to our friends who are continually filling out reference forms and letters too!!!

Still waiting, but a few more things done

We have had several people asking us whats going on with our adoption process. The answer is- not much. We are just waiting.... although today we completed our 8 hour Hague Adoption Training. It's nice to have that out of the way. We don't have the Internet at home so we had to leave our comfy couch for the day and get it done.

We also received a letter this week telling us that our FBI fingerprints are finally scheduled. We will be going to Chicago area to the FBI headquarters in a couple weeks. Then we will be waiting on getting those back.

We have also had several friends email us and ask if we decided on adopting one or two children yet. We have been going back and forth on this issue for some time now. We keep praying and talking to each other and other family, friends, other adoptive parents, and our social worker. For now we have decided to request a sibling pair under 4, or just one infant under 12 months. We don't care about gender. Ultimately we know that God has the perfect child or children picked out for our family. He trust in Him to work out all the details!!!