Couple Days Left!

Hey everyone, just a reminder that there's a few days left in March for you to head over to Dulcitas and find you something cute and support our adoption!! I also got an email from Nicole, and starting tomorrow (3/29) at 7am(Central Time)  she's giving everyone a coupon code to get 26% off your purchase!! You just apply it at checkout, the code is BIRTHDAY26.  This is only good for 24 hours so make sure you head on over before 7am on the 30th!  Here's a little taste of what you mind find in the shop...

Lots of cute stuff!! Happy Shopping!

Back in Town

My hubby and I just got back from quick trip to the mountains!  It has been an incredibly busy/stressful month and we needed to get away!! Every now and then it is good to get away and just recharge for a while.  We needed some time to just be alone with each other, and with God, to reconnect a little bit. Some time to escape all the paperwork and fundraisers.  We are so incredibly thankful for this journey we are on, and we wouldn't trade it for the world!  But I am also thankful for a husband who knows when it's time for us to have some quality time and will move around his schedule to make it happen!  We spent 3 days relaxing, reading the Word, watching movies, and just resting, it was oh so good!!  So it was back to reality today, and all my little pre-schoolers were going full steam!  Nothing like ten 1-2 year olds to bring you back to reality :)

Nothing really to report on the paperwork front right now, we are waiting on a copy of our homestudy, it's written, but being edited now.  Hoping to get our hands on that soon so we can send it to AGCI and then off to USCIS!  So ready to be on the waitlist and that much closer to our baby!  Speaking of baby.....one of my friends and I went to a huge community yard sale last weekend and I found the best deal!!  Since we have no idea of anything really(age, gender, etc), when it comes to baby, we have decided to do our nursery in Winnie the Pooh!  It's pretty gender neutral, and I was a huge fan when I was little :) so imagine my excitement when at one of the yard sale stops I spy this:

It was a whole entire Pooh bedding crib set!  So this is the comforter! I got this, 5 sheets, the crib bumpers, a lamp, a night light, a rug, and a mobile!  It all matches and the best part was I got all of that for $30!!!  It would have been well over $150 if I bought it all new, and it hardly looks used!  Needless to say I was super excited and it was totally worth getting up early!  I LOVE it!  I know it's early to be buying this stuff, but I could NOT pass this deal up, it was too perfect!! 

Hopefully we'll have homestudy news soon! Have a great weekend! I'm off to get my coupons ready for Harris Teeter Super Doubles!

Our God can move mountains!!!

We are so happy, relieved, excited, about the encouraging email we have received from our agency today!  After 2 weeks of uncertainty, it was so great to hear some good news today!! Happy tears came to my eyes the more I read this email.  We are on this journey, and we are IN it.  Part of our hearts are in Ethiopia, and we are thankful for such a BIG God, who can do all things!  Here's the email that we got, they explain things better than I could!  It's a little long, but so worth it!  Also, don't forget to head over to Dulcitas this month and find you something cute, we're getting 25% of their profit this month to bring our baby home! Please keep praying, we appreciate your prayers so far.

As you know, over the past week AGCI has been working in collaboration with Joint Council, other licensed Adoption Service Providers in Ethiopia and the US Department of State to get clarity on the proposed changes instigated by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs that would have drastically reduced the number of adoptions processed by their office.
We have spent the entirety of this week and last connecting with our own Foreign Staff, participating in caucus calls led by Joint Council and the US Department of State, and independently collaborating with other Adoption Service Providers to get clear and accurate information concerning this matter. Your grace and patience has been so appreciated during this time! What we know as facts are:

• MOWA posted a notice indicating as of March 10th they would be reducing the number of adoptions processed through their office to 5 cases a day.
• Within days of this announcement, the director of MOWA and several other staff members from the ministry have been terminated.

Today we want to update you on the feedback we received yesterday from our foreign staff in Ethiopia, which was confirmed in a discussion with our adoption colleagues in a Joint Council caucus call later in the day.
At this time, all Foreign Staff on the ground in Ethiopia are reporting that MOWA has completed their staffing changes and are now currently working at full capacity to complete those adoption cases currently re-scheduled or assigned a court appointment through the courts of Addis Ababa. Our staff believe this to be around 800 cases they are working at full force to complete with no restrictions on the number of cases processed each day. This is great news! We are thrilled to hear these drastic changes do not seem to be going into full effect.
We are also pleased to report that for new cases moving forward; it appears the original changes proposed by MOWA will not be implemented to the degree of 5 cases a day. At this time it is unknown whether or not MOWA will issue a formal statement regarding how they will process cases in the future, but from all discussions it will not be a drastic decrease from before. Through the continued work, meetings, and advocacy of many Foreign Staff members in Ethiopia, it appears any future changes within the case processing for MOWA will avoid sweeping and disproportionate alterations to the number of cases processed each day. Rather, the hope is that MOWA, Joint Council, Adoption Service Providers, the US Department of State and other NGO organizations can come together to support the government of Ethiopia in strengthening the process for ethical adoptions to continue while also improving the general social structures to assist with family preservation in Ethiopia. This plan was acknowledged in the recent posting by the US State Department this morning at http://adoption.state.gov/news/ethiopia.html. We understand the US Department of State cannot issue a formal statement without MOWA issuing a retraction. Based on the information we are receiving, MOWA is concentrating on processing the current adoptions and the new staff is not focused on numbers, but doing their jobs.
AGCI and our trusted colleagues look forward to collaborating to ensure adoptions move forward with the highest level of transparency possible. It is our commitment to carefully, ethically, and mindfully complete the adoption process on every level for orphaned children. Our hope is that as we do this in collaboration with other licensed agencies, we can also help to eliminate future concerns by MOWA and continue to build trust between their office and the adoption community at large.
Despite all this talk and discussion about proposed changes, we want to share with you some highlights from just the past two weeks in our program. Even in the midst of all these proposed changes we have seen things move in positive directions:

• 7 children were referred to their forever families (wait time for a referral for our most recently placed families was approximately 10 months for an infant boy and for an infant girl)
• 9 families and children were issued their first official court date
• 3 families and children were approved at a rescheduled court appointment
• 1 family and child was approved on their first scheduled court appointment
• 9 families and 10 children were cleared by the US Embassy and invited to travel to Ethiopia to complete their final immigration visa appointment and bring their children.
• 2 children have returned home with their forever families.

As you can see from above, our attention over the past week and this week has been not only on gathering information on this issue but also on processing adoptions for many of the children at Hannah’s Hope. We will be calling each of you to check in for your monthly updates, paperwork calls, and to connect with those of you who are already referred and in the court process. For those of you in the paperwork process, Julie Salwasser will also be continuing to step in to provide support and answer questions. Thank you for your ongoing patience!
We want to encourage you all and to share that Ethiopia is still an active adoption program! We are so blessed to be looking back at all these wonderful moments and see God’s hand at work in the stories and lives of these children He loves. Thank you for your continued passion and dedication. We look forward to all the wonderful moments yet to come as we continue to serve in Ethiopia!

Breathe...

Breathe, that's what I feel I'm somewhat able to do now.  These past 2 weeks have been quite the roller coaster of emotions.  We've had so much going on with planning 2 big fundraisers, we really haven't had a chance to even process all the news about the cutbacks in Ethiopia.  We finally had one good conversation about it last night as we were going to bed, but we still have lots of questions.  We don't know what this means for our family and our process, but our hearts ache at the thought of our baby still being years away from us.  Our hearts also ache for what this announcement means for all of the children waiting in orphanages across Ethiopia.  There is a petition going around right now to send to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, and it needs 250,000 signatures by Monday.  Please consider signing it, if you haven't already, it only takes about a minute.  Here's the link:  http://www.orphanpetition.org/ Thank You!


On the fundraising front, our concert was Friday night and it was so much fun!  The evening went smoothly and everyone seemed to enjoy the music!  We didn't have as many people show up as we were anticipating, but God proved his faithfulness once again and we were able to raise $1200!!!  We were surrounded by friends from church, our awesome small group, and even some strangers we didn't know!  It was just a great night of God's blessings amidst all the chaos and uncertainty of the week.  We are so thankful for our generous friends here in Wake Forest, who gave up their Friday night to come and help support us, truly being the hands and feet of Christ.  We have been blown away by the success of these 2 fundraisers, and on top of this we've been given a few other generous donations, meaning we've raised over $3,000 in 1 week!  God is so good!  Here are a couple pictures from the night, if you haven't heard these guys, check them out, good stuff!

Jonathan Edwards

Jon Troast

Jonathan, Caleb(the MC), me and Aaron, Jon

(Pictures courtesy of BrianFlemingPhotography.com)

So even though things are looking a little grim right now, we rejoice in the fact that God is sovereign, and his hand is on us and this process.  We are resting in this "He who calls you is faithful, he will surely do it." 1 Thessalonians 5:24.  This morning during worship we sang,
"Our God is greater, our God is stronger, God you are higher than any other,
Our God is healer, awesome in power, our God." 
I was reminded of the power of our God and how through him, anything is possible.  We covet your prayers during this time as we wait to see the effects of this proposal.  There is another meeting with the Ethiopian government tomorrow, hopefully we'll have some answers soon.

Yard Sale Success!!

We are home from a whirlwind weekend!  We left NC bright and early at 4:45 Friday morning to head down to GA for the yard sale.  We arrived at my parents house to find it overflowing with items for the yard sale!! They had been working tirelessly all week to get things organized and priced(thanks mom and dad)!  We got to work right away to finish getting things priced and ready for the morning.  Things were not looking good, weather wise.  As we went to bed Friday night there was a 90% chance of rain for Saturday morning.  If you remember, at our last yard sale it was freezing and ended up snowing 2 inches right after we broke everything down!  So we have had no luck with weather at our yard sales.  But God completely blew us away Saturday morning.  We woke up to rain, and had to scramble to get things situated in the garage and on the front porch.  Couple that rain with it being a little cold, and someone the day before had taken down some of our signs around town, I admit I wasn't very optimistic about this sale.  To my(and pretty much everyone there's) surprise, the crowd was pretty steady all morning!  People just kept coming, and buying the most random things!  At both of our yard sales there is no way that we should have made the money we did, because we didn't have anything big to sell.  I firmly believe God multiplied the money and people continually all day.  God has continually throughout this process, used so many complete strangers to show his power and glory.  When all was said and done, at the end of the day we made $1,073!!!  Yes, that's almost $1100, with nothing big to sell and the weather completely against us!  And we have enough left over to have another sale that my parents are going to do for us in a couple weeks, hopefully on a prettier day!  Somehow in the craziness of the day, I forgot to take pictures :(  but I do have a few of the left overs so you can see what we were dealing with.  We are just overwhelmed by how good God has been to us through this process and are excited to see how he's going to continue to work.  Thank you to everyone who had any part in the yard sale, you are helping us get one step closer to our baby!!

Check it out!

I still cannot get over all the ways God is providing for our family! Just last week I received an email from someone I've never met but who has been reading our blog and wants to help us out.  So, this month we are excited to be the family of the month for Nicole over at her super cute Etsy shop Dulcitas!  Nicole has generously offered to give our family 25% of her profit for the month of March! How awesome is that!!  God is just continuing to place awesome generous people in our lives with a heart like his.  So so great!! So head on over to her blog Home for Hire, check out the story and then check out Dulcitas, she's got some awesome stuff for your home on there!  And it'll be helping bring our sweet little one home!!


On another note, we're having our next yard sale THIS weekend!! We've had so many family and friends donate items over the last couple weeks and both of our parents have been hard at work getting it all organized for us.  We are SO thankful for that, it's hard to have a yard sale in another state! We'll be leaving SUPER early Friday morning to get there and finish getting everything ready, then Saturday is it! We're praying for good weather and lots of shoppers!! It's so awesome to see everyone coming together to help get this baby home!  We are so close!