December 13th, 2004 Update
God is so good to us! It has been incredible to us to have such wonderful friends and family stand behind us as we move through this adoption process. Just a little over a month ago, Sarah’s mom, came up with the idea of putting together a boutique to help us raise some of the money that we would need for this adoption. We decided that we would have one in Ben Lomond and then the following weekend, we would host one at our house in Sacramento. It started out as just a small boutique that would have some scarves, hats, baked goods, and tiles in it. To our amazement and surprise, once we started letting people know about what we were doing, the support started flowing in. We ended up with homemade goods and some new and used gifts from 19 different people! It was so incredible. We were blessed by the outpouring of support from everyone.
As we wrapped up the first weekend and looked around the room, we were amazed that we still had a majority of the items left and that we had not had a ton of people show up, but as we counted up the money, we were even more amazed. During that first weekend, people had purchased $1606.00 worth of items! Where we had been worried that we hadn’t sold as much as we were originally hoping to, we were blown away by how much money we had raised.
Sarah’s mom packed up everything that hadn’t sold that first weekend, loaded it into her car and made the trek to Sacramento this last weekend. We set everything up, passed out fliers and started our second boutique. By the end of the weekend, we had sold a vast majority of the items and our grand total for the weekend was $1580.00! That meant that in two weekends, friends, family and people we didn’t even know had blessed us with $3186.00 towards our adoption fund. What had started off as just a small boutique with a few items had turned in to an extremely exciting event that raised over 10% of what we are needing to complete our adoption. What is even more amazing to us is that through the boutique and other gifts, God has blessed us with about 2/3’s of the money we need to complete this adoption and we are not even half way through the process yet. God is so good!
We also wanted to update everyone on the status of our adoption process. This Thursday, December 16th, we will have the last of our Home Study interviews with our social worker, Lori, and she should have our Home Study report ready for us by Friday. This document will mark the last of the documents that we need to collect, so our goal is to get all of our documents apostilled by New Year’s. This is a governmental process that checks each document over and checks the authenticity of the notary’s license, and gives it another piece of paper that says it is all legal. We hope to have our whole dossier (all the paperwork for our adoption) to our agency by the first of the year. At that point, we will be placed on a waiting list which is said to take about 4-6 months.
One prayer request that we have at this point is that on Friday night we received an email from our agency that basically said that Russia has closed its adoption process temporarily. This means that there are going to be no children leaving Russia until this political mess gets cleared up. Our agency has hopes that the Russian accreditation board will be back in business by the middle of January. If this is the case, it would possibly only delay our trip by a month or two but if it takes longer, it would mean more of a delay. We are praying that the accreditation board that reassembles will be a fair and just board and that they will have a heart to help these children have a better life. You could also pray for all the families that have already gotten their referral of a child. For these families, they know their little child and are waiting to bring them home but they will not be able to until this is resolved.
Thank you for keeping us in your prayers. We hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas that is filled with the love of Christ.