48 Pieces!

This is the number of puzzle pieces we have sold so far! Thanks to those of you who have purchased pieces and prayed for us. We are thanking God that we have seen such progress already!  We are encouraged as each and every piece is bought, knowing that it is filling in one more piece of the puzzle in our family's journey.  We are excited to get started putting the puzzle together.  I debated on whether we should put it together as the pieces are bought or just put it together all at once and fill the names in as they come in.  I think we'll go with the latter, otherwise I would have a huge puzzle sitting on our table for months!! Even though we're off to a great start we still have 452 pieces left to sell!! If you don't know what we're doing, check out the original post here, help us spread the word and be a part in bringing our baby home!

Blessed

God is SO good!  I am already beginning to see how much of an emotional roller coaster this process is going to be.  I love how God works though.  Just when I was beginning to get a little discouraged that our latest fundraiser wasn't going as well as I'd hoped, God reminds us who he is and blesses our socks off.  I went to the mail box today expecting one thing, and got something totally different.  We received a generous donation from someone we didn't expect. Over the past couple days we have received a few donations that were above and beyond what we expected.  Just when I needed a little reminder to keep going, God reminded me that he is faithful and this baby is coming home on his terms, in his time, and in HIS power!  So many people(some we have never even met) have already played a huge part in our family's story, and we are so thankful!  We have some great fundraisers in the works, one being an acoustic artist that we've been listening to for a while agreeing to do a free concert for us to raise money, we were chosen as a partner family to sell some adoption t-shirts in a few months, and I heard yesterday that a woman that goes to church with my mother in law in Georiga would like to host a catalog party for us and give us all the proceeds from the night.  We are so BLESSED!! How can I doubt that God is going to fund this adoption? Just tonight I received an email from someone I've never met but has been following our blog and praying for us and wanted to donate to our fundraiser. 
         It brings tears to my eyes thinking about all of this and how God is going to make this adoption come about.  We are just incredibly blessed and I can't say thank you to our Father enough.  I admit that I have started getting baby fever over the past couple weeks(a little early, I know!), and this process seems much more real now that we're getting closer to the waitlist.  It seems like the end(even though it's a good ways away) is in sight now.  I am imagining that at this point there is a good possibility that our child has been conceived, and we just can't get there fast enough.  But for right now I am resting in God's faithfulness, praising him for his goodness, and thanking him for the more than enough reminders to keep going.

The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in Him. Nahum 1:7

Education Done!!

      Woohoo!! Our education is done, and with a few days to spare! Our goal was to have it finished by the time Aaron went back to school this semester, we finished it Monday night and he went back to school today! It is such a relief to have that done, now we can focus on the dossier paperwork and not have that nagging feeling that we should be working on homework.  So excited that that daunting workbook is now complete, and it definitely was a labor of love!
       As of right now we're waiting to be assigned a social worker to start our homestudy visits and working on the dossier paperwork, we're slowly checking things off the list!!!!! Definitely feels real now! We've sold about 12 pieces of the puzzle so far, so keep spreading the word!! We need to get this thing complete! The puzzle just arrived in the mail today, so I'm excited to start working on it! I got to have dinner with a new blog friend last night.  I love that we have this community of other families who all have a passion for the same thing, it was great to get to meet one of those special ladies!  Thanks for praying with us and following our journey!

*sidenote-has anyone had trouble commenting on here since I changed the look? I got a note from someone that did, but I tried it and didn't have any problems. Wasn't sure if it was an isolated thing or not. Email me at scoalson104(at)gmail(dot)com if you are having problems and I'll try to figure it out!

Puzzle Fundraiser!!!

Ok folks, here is our latest fundraiser.  We are currently in the process of working on our homestudy and dossier, praise the Lord!! These are the last things we need to complete in order to get on the waiting list for our baby! We are getting closer every day and we are so thankful to be this far along already.  God has faithfully provided all we have needed up to this point and we are confident that He will continue to do so.  We saw great success with our last fundraiser and we pray that this one will go just as well! With this next chunk of paperwork we need $5,000 to send in with it.  These fees will cover the translation and authentication of our dossier as well as take care of some international fees.

 So, we have purchased this puzzle to hang in our baby's room (we're thinking of going with a Pooh theme since it's pretty gender neutral, and I happen to be a big fan :)  )

We're asking that you purchase a piece of the puzzle for $10(or more if you'd like).  You can donate through paypal here on the blog, or you can contact us at: scoalson104(at)gmail(dot)com to get our address and send a check.  We will then write your name on the back of a piece of the puzzle and once the puzzle is completed we will hang the puzzle in a double-sided frame in our baby's room as a reminder of everyone who helped bring our baby home.  We think this will be a great way for friends and family to be a part of this process.  Our goal is to sell 500 pieces of the puzzle, which will cover all of our fees! There are actually 1000 pieces, so it would be great to sell more, but 500 is our goal. Please help us spread the word and tell everyone you know!  Thanks for being a piece of the puzzle in our family's journey!

Heavy Heart

Over the past few days my heart has grown heavy, not only for our child, but for the people of Ethiopia.  I have been reading There is No Me Without You, and even though I've only read a few chapters, it has already provided me with greater insight into the conditions of Ethiopia.  I knew the normal statistics you hear in the adoption world, but the statistics in the book break my heart.  

• Nearly 2/3 of school aged children in Ethiopia are not in school, and only 41% of adults can read.
• 81% of Ethiopia's people live on less than $2 a day, and 26% live on less than $1...the marker of absolute poverty in the world
• In 2002 the Ethiopian government was spending only $2 per person, per day on healthcare...this broke my heart "Thus victims of polio and malaria and HIV/AIDS and cancer, and the blind and the lepers, and the mentally ill and the malnourished, and the orphans and the dying, roam the streets of the capital city, or lie on its sidewalks, defeated."
• Africa is known as the continent of orphans
• Because of aids, more than 13 million children had been orphaned, 12 million of those in Sub-Saharan Africa. 25% lived in Nigeria and Ethiopia.
• In Ethiopia 11% of all children were orphans
• by 2010, between 25-50 million African children from newborn to age 15 would be orphans

These statistics not only blew my mind, but broke my heart.  Those numbers are just unfathomable, that there are that many children who have no family, who are living on the streets or in the dump, in one country/continent.  My heart is broken for these people.  There are so many luxuries that we take for granted, even the ability to read, one of my favorite activities since I was a child. And to think that if our child were left in that country, what are the chances he/she would end up in the small 41% that are able to read?

Reading all of this makes us want to push through all of this paperwork even faster, to get our little one home.  We have been praying for this process to draw us closer to each other and to our Father, and so far it has done just that.  It has given us a tiny glimpse of how His heart breaks for His precious children.  We want to live our lives radically and generously, and we have been praying for opportunities to do that.  Adoption is just one of them, how can we rescue just one when we have heard what we have? We cannot turn our backs on the beautiful country that will give us a child.
Our prayer is this:
 "But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.  Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. That I may know Him and the power of his resurrection...Phil. 3 :7-10

Praying that we can live this out and make a difference, whatever the cost.

Home Study Packet/Fingerprints DONE!!

Yesterday was a day that has been way overdue.  We finally got all of our home study paperwork in the mail!! We've had that stack of papers for over a month, and I never anticipated it taking that long but we got to send it off yesterday!! Hopefully this means we will get a social woker soon! And get this home study show on the road!  We also got our fingerprints done Thursday for our FBI background checks, so those are going in the mail Monday.  It's exciting to see things moving along like this.  We felt some huge relief to get all that home study stuff in the mail so we can really focus on the dossier now.  It almost seems like we already did a mini-dossier!  So right now we're trucking along on our education, a little at a time each day, we're gonna get there! Each day we get something done we're one day closer to our precious little one! SO cannot wait for that day!

Happy New Year!!

Well, the holidays have come and gone again.  Seems like we just put the tree up and yet today I've already got it taken down and another holiday's decorations are back in the box.  Amidst getting started on our paperwork and education I've really been thinking about what 2011 has in store.  Could this be the year that our baby comes home? I pray that it is!  I've never been one for New Year Resolutions but I read this post this morning and it really spoke to my heart. I've been trying to come up with something to write to start off the new year but this says it pretty well, check it out:

http://itsalmostnaptime.blogspot.com/2011/01/crazy-in-2011.html

Happy New Year everyone! Praying for lots of babies to come home this year!