Welcome to our blog! We've had lots of people asking us to keep them posted on all the adoption happenings, so I decided to make a blog. Enjoy!

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Another reminder

Just another reminder, we're the featured Africa family this week on Give1Save1.com If you have an extra dollar (or more), we sure would appreciate it! We're currently working on raising funds to submit our dossier. The check we have to write for that is $2,000, but that doesn't include the fees to schedule our fingerprinting appointment, translate documents, see our doctor, and a few other expenses that arise while putting the dossier together.

So far we've raised just over $400, which is awesome, but I'd love to get that number even higher before our week ends. If you're local and would prefer to donate cash/check please let me know and I'll give you our address. That amount will count toward our "Give1Save1" total :)

Next week we're going to start promoting our next fundraiser which is a benefit concert on June 30th. I'm excited about it, should be lots of fun!

Monday, May 28, 2012

Our week is here!

Today starts our week on Give1Save1. Please, please, please go check out our video and share it on facebook, twitter, email.... any other social or personal networking arena you can. The more people that see the video, the greater chance we have of blowing the donations out of the water.

The premise of the website is that everyone can afford to give $1. You are welcome to give more, but even if everyone only gives $1 it can add up quickly! Thanks in advance and we'll keep you posted on how it's going throughout the week.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Give1Save1

Just a quick reminder that our next fundraiser is coming up next week! We'll be the featured family on Give1Save1. If you have a few extra dollars, you can go check out the current family of the week, and throw a couple dollars their way! They're a family whose blog I already follow and will be traveling to bring their little Noah home next month and still have some last minute funds to raise.

Next week, on Memorial Day, our week starts. What I need from you is to BLOW UP Facebook, Twitter, Email, Pinterest... and any other anything you can think of to get the word out. Show your friends our video. Ask everyone for $1. THANK YOU sooooo soooo SOOOO much in advance! :)

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Thank you!

A great big thank you to everyone who participated in some way in our adoption auction! We raised over $600. The final total for what the items were sold at is $607, but as I'm receiving checks, cash, paypal payments, etc. many of you are being generous and rounding up or adding an extra $5-10, so the total has gone up a little from that.
After most of the auction money comes in, we should be able to send off our I600 in the mail, which is a petition for "advance processing of orphan". You ship it, birth certificates, marriage license, the home study and  $890 of to the USCIS (United States Citizen & Immigration Services) and they'll set up an appointment for us to get fingerprinted (again.), and then once that is approved (and we get other paperwork together... and more money...), we'll be able to send our dossier to the Congolese government. The latest fundraisers have been enough for us to get that check in the mail (Thank you God!). The next big chunk of money is the dossier fee, which is $2,000 and the translation fee (for the dossier) of $300.

All this adoption stuff is so new to me, I'm learning as we go. I only sort of/kind of know what we're doing next. I went to our agency's website that keeps track of where we are in the process, just to confirm that I'm telling y'all the right information!

Tonight I updated our little thermometer over there ------> to be accurate to the cash/checks we have (or have had) in hand. It doesn't include auction money that we haven't received, so I'll keep updating as the cash/checks/paypal keep coming :)



So... what's next? I'm still knee deep in auction stuff. The auction ended 5 days ago, but I'm still delivering items, collecting money, shipping out packages, etc. Honestly, I'm only able to juggle a certain number of balls. Children, house, husband, church, friends, adoption paperwork, adoption fundraising.... so I don't want too many "adoption balls" in the air at the same time. So, we won't be doing any other fundraisers until all of the auction items are out of my house and delivered :) BUT, we do have one on the calendar for the end of May... so everything should be delivered by then! ;)

On May 28th (which happens to be Memorial Day) we'll start our week on Give1Save1 as the featured family! The website is a fabulous website, run by a woman who is in the middle of the adoption process herself (and still raising money for their adoption), but felt like God was calling her to help others. This website has grown a ton just in the past 6 months since I discovered it. They now have 3 featured families every week- 1 family adopting from Africa, 1 from Asia and 1 from Haiti. The whole idea of "give 1, save 1" is the thought that not everyone has a lot of money to give, but pretty much everyone of us can afford to give $1. Just one dollar. So every week she asks people to donate 1 dollar to the family of the week. If 20,000 people donated $1 to our adoption fund... we'd be covered! If 10,000 donated $2... we'd be covered! If 5,000... you get the idea! So, that week I'll be asking you to support us financially (every dollar counts!), and I'll also be asking you to help spread the word! The more people that hear our story, see our video and click on that link to donate $1, the closer we are to getting our baby girl home!


So, that's our fundraiser for May :) At the end of June we'll be hosting a benefit concert, and you'll be hearing more about that at the end of May (remember... one ball at a time!)