Dossier Run Through Call

I can't believe how fast time is going by right now! I love this Christmas season, but it's moving too fast.   It's already been almost a week since we got our adoption planner in the mail! It came literally 5 minutes before we walked out the door to our small group Christmas party.  Needless to say, the excitement of getting home and looking over everything was in the back of my mind all night.  I still can't believe we're already to this point, God is so good! We had our DRC(Dossier Run Through call) Thursday afternoon. It was the perfect day, it was snowing and Aaron and I were both off work(a rare thing these days) so we both got to be there for the call as they explained the mountain of paperwork to us.  In my head, I knew it was going to be a lot of paperwork, but now seeing it all in front of us is a little overwhelming! I love our agency though, they have already been so helpful. The end result will be so worth it! We cannot wait to have this baby home! Our Christmas break will be filled with a visit home to family and trying to knock out a huge chunk of the paperwork and education while Aaron is out of school.  Praying we are super productive and get lots done in the next few weeks! We also don't want to get so bogged down in all the paperwork and logistics of what we're doing that we forget the reason for this beautiful season and why we're doing what we're doing.  Glory in the highest!

A Little Update

Today was a great day at the Coalson house because these...

Are in the MAIL!!!       

God has been SO good, gracious, and faithful to us over the past few weeks! We put these contracts in the mail today, along with the biggest check we've ever written.  It felt so good to get those in the mail and no longer worry about that 90 day deadline.  We needed to raise about $4000 in order to pay for our contracts and home study right up front, and me...showing my lack of faith, expected it to take us the full 90 days and until the end of January to come up with that money.  But God has really shown us just how big and faithful He is through this process and we now have enough money to pay for both of these steps and some left over to get us started moving towards our dossier, just 4 weeks later! Wow! We are so thankful for a God who cares about the details and is able to do abundantly more than we can ask or imagine. 

So, now we wait for AGCI to receive our contracts and make sure everything looks good, and then we will get our adoption planner/dossier notebook! We also have a big pile of paperwork waiting for us to get started on the home study! I feel like we can finally start "doing" things to move this process along.  Let the paper chase begin!

Yard Sale Update........and the WINNER of the Mountain Getaway!!

Well, the yard sale has come and gone, and I can maybe get a little of my sanity back!  We were up bright and early yesterday morning at 4:30am(for those of you that know me, that's a miracle in itself! Especially when the temperature was a crisp 26 degrees :) ). We had the help of some awesome friends who were also up at the crack of dawn to help us get everything set out.  Somehow I managed to not take any pictures of the actual set up of the sale. We had what we thought was a great turnout considering the weather and the fact that our yard looked like this not one hour after we got everything back inside! 

Yep, that's snow! And it kept snowing all night, it was beautiful! After everything was said and done, the Lord truly blessed us and allowed us to make almost $600 with our yard sale and we are SO thankful!  We are that much closer to sending in our contracts and being on our way to bringing our baby home! A huge thanks to everyone that donated, prayed, shopped, and stood out in the freezing cold to help us out yesterday, we are truly blessed!!


And now, for the moment you've all been waiting for!!!  Tonight concludes the getaway giveaway part of our $20 Difference fundraiser.  We are going to continue to have this as part of our fundraising but the deadline to be entered in the giveaway ends now.  We have raised over $1600 in three weeks through this fundraiser and each day we are just completely floored by how the Lord continues to provide for this baby through the generosity of others.
The winner is: Pam and Mark W.  Congratulations!!

Thank you all so much for your generosity and prayers throughout our journey!  We've got more updates on where we are in the process coming soon!!