This Week in Adoption World...

So, this week has been a bit crazy.  A lot of little things have happened, but no red-letter days.  I did want to check in real quick though and keep everyone updated on the happenings since last post.  Even though it has been relatively quiet announcement-wise, we have been quite busy working on behind the scene adoption work.  So, here is the week in a nutshell…

Saturday (10/2) - Jolene and I set up our virtual bake sale after the Saturday evening service at church.  Only raised $17, but that was seventeen more than we had before.

Sunday (10/3) - We again set up our virtual bake sale after services at church.  This time we were able to raise $391, definitely a big boost to our total sales.

Monday (10/4) – Spent the evening, and on into the wee hours of the morning, finalizing paperwork due to our homestudy agency on Tuesday.  We finished up autobiographies, filled out financial statements, budget information, listed everywhere we have lived since age 18, and much, much more.

Tuesday (10/5) – Dan and I attended our orientation meeting at the America World Adoption offices in northern Virginia.  This provided us a chance to turn in a lot of the homestudy paperwork we had already completed as well as pick up some new things to complete.  It also serves as our first homestudy “visit” which marks one other thing-to-do off our list.  This was also the day I put out my Buy-Me-Lunch-Or-Donate-$5 campaign on facebook.  A huge thank you to all who answered my plea – I was able to add over $100 of donations toward paying that debt.  That, on top of calculating that our bake sale brought in a total of $3089 in sales and donations, made Tuesday a very GREAT day!

Wednesday (10/6) – I was able to drop off 155 items at a local consignment sale – thanks to some very generous donors.  I was able to list for sale all of my own maternity clothes, but that would never have been enough to make any “real” money.  I am still waiting on a total for my sales, as the sale ended today at noon, but as of last night my commission looked to be about $139.  I was honestly hoping for more, but as we are still putting together the final $800 we owe on our homestudy fees, I will gladly thank the Lord for whatever profit He provides.  I’ll have to let you know what that turns out to be.  Wednesday was also the day we were able to mail in our CCAI agreement paperwork, putting ourselves officially into the waiting family system.  Thanks to our great bake sale success we were able to pay the needed $2050 fee in full as well as submit an additional $500 towards our next fee.  (For those curious, all of this money was submitted via bake sale checks made out directly to CCAI so we were not able to apply the overage to our homestudy fees which go through America World Adoption.)

Thursday (10/7) –  I spent four hours volunteering at the consignment sale in order to earn a higher return on my sales.  I have to admit, I got really excited whenever I saw someone with one of my items heading for the cash register.

Friday (10/8) – We spent the afternoon working on homestudy paperwork.  I was able to schedule our home fire inspection and spent a good amount of time trying to track down the right people to do a sanitation inspection.  We also worked on filling in blanks for background checks, fingerprint cards, child abuse registry checks, etc.  Never a dull moment.

Saturday (10/9) – This morning we put together our DONATE button, located on this here blog thing.  Why, you ask?  Because we are standing on the threshold of being official Show Hope T-shirt sellers.  Yep, we just have to get the order form organized to reflect our own family’s information and we will hit the streets – or churches, blogs and facebook as the case may be.  If you are interested in Showing Hope with a shirt, be sure to watch for my next blog – sales coming very soon!  This afternoon, I worked my final four hours of volunteer time at the consignment sale.  Like I said, I still don’t know how my final profits look, but it was good for me to work today.  Most of what I consigned was donated to me so I had marked almost everything to be donated at the end of the sale.  As I spent four hours sorting “donate” from “non-donate” items, it served as a good gut check for me.  Several times I would catch myself moving some item that I had consigned to the bottom donate rack thinking “maybe I should try to sell this somewhere else” only to remind myself that God is faithful.  I didn’t need to un-donate things because of worrisome thoughts about having enough money.  No matter how many dollars I earned from the sale, it is that much more than we had before.  That many more forms we can pay to submit, that many more copies we can afford to make, that much more postage we can afford to pay for getting paperwork to the right offices around the country.  Un-donate.?  Nope.  Trust and obey?  Absolutely!

So, there you have it.  Our week in review.  Like I said, not much to shout from the rooftops (though that bake sale total is pretty AWESOME!), but definitely a week of moving right along.  I hope to blog a more personal report in the very near future, but for now I will sign off here.  Thank you again for supporting us in this journey – we couldn’t do it without you!