3 Years!

This post is a little late to the party, but I wanted to get it on here anyway.  Tuesday my awesome hubby and I celebrated 3 wonderful years of marriage!!  I can hardly believe it's been 3 years since this moment:

So much has happened over the past 3 years.  It's amazing to look back and see all the blessings that God has given us.  We have been in ministry, shared the Gospel on the other side of the world, moved our lives 8 hours away from our family to follow a calling to seminary, become part of an awesome church and involved in more ministry, bought our first house, made some amazing friends who push us deeper into the Gospel, started the adoption process to grow our family, seen God provide in ways that only he can, and those are just the big moments!  There are countless other small things that are a part of our story, and I love the evidence of God's hand all over our lives.

When I said "I do" 3 years ago, I had no idea that this is what our life would look like 3 years later.  Now, I can't imagine it any other way!  We have learned so much about ourselves, about the Gospel, about the beauty of marriage.  I never thought we would be this close to adding a little one 3 years into this(but i hoped!) and here we are, right in the middle of this process, trusting God with hearts changed.  I can't wait to see my husband become a father, it's going to be so good!  We are praying that we don't celebrate another year without our little one home, and that this post next year will include pictures of that precious face!  I'll leave you with some of the fun we've had over the past 3 years!

Our rehearsal!

First Fall!

Greece Mission Trip 2009

Our first addition :)

Our house!

 First "big" snow at our house!

Cruise, Spring of 2010

Starting this crazy adoption process!!

Latest Baby Find!

I love books, I love to read, and I love kids who love to read books :)  My hubby is the same way, we can be a little nerdy sometimes!  Every trip we take, before we go, hubs is always googling some book stores we can hit up while we're there and we spend lots of time just browsing.  We would love to have a library room one day(and we're already well on our way with all the full shelves we have)!  So books are the one thing I know I can't go wrong in buying right now for our little one, we can't wait to pass on our love for reading!  On our trip to Rhode Island a few weeks ago we found a cute little bookstore in the middle of Providence and snagged this little find:

(sorry, for some reason I couldn't get this to rotate!)

This is such a cute story, and hubs is a sucker for anything involving bears!  We can't wait to read this to our sweet baby.  I have been missing our baby something awful this week.  It's amazing to me that I can miss someone so much that I have never even met before, someone who may not even be born yet.  I feel like a piece of my heart is missing, but I know that the Lord is connecting our stories every day and it will make that sweet day when he/she is forever in our arms so much better! Until then, we'll just keep preparing our hearts, and wait on the Lord's perfect timing.

September Numbers!

We finally got them!! Here are our September numbers! We had quite a bit of movement this month and we are so thankful. Every day we are getting closer to seeing that sweet face, and we cannot wait!

For a Girl:

For a Boy:

That means we moved 6 spots on the girl list and 3 on the boy list this month, love it!! Thanks for the continued prayers for our family and this journey.  Please keep Ethiopia in your prayers right now, there are some things going on with some families with our agency who have children coming from the Southern region of Ethiopia that greatly need prayers right now.  So thankful that the Father is holding us all in his hands.

Created for Care!

Well, I am SUPER excited about this event this year.  Last year, when registration opened, we had not yet started the adoption process.  However, a few months later, we were in the thick of paperwork and I remembered this retreat, only to find out that it had filled up within 48 hours, so it just wasn't going to happen, and I was kicking myself the whole time for not signing up.  This year, I am ready for it! Registration opens at 12:01 am tonight!! We are leaving out early in the morning for a trip to pray about church planting, so I can't decided if I should stay up and register at midnight or wait and do it right before we leave bright and early.  Either way, I could not be more excited!! For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this is an event for adoption mama's(although you don't have to be, you can just be interested in adoption, or want to support a friend who is adopting).  It's a weekend long retreat at an awesome lodge in GA, spent meeting hundreds of other women who are right where we are, have already been where we are, or want to learn more.  A weekend spent learning more about the Father, from the Father, learning from each other, and just sharing our hearts with other women who have the same passion.  To see the orphan become orphan no more.  Seriously, it's going to be an amazing weekend and I can't wait!!  I'm also excited to get to meet lots of my bloggy "friends" in person!!  So, if you want more info, check out the website here, and there's a list of the awesome breakouts over on Andrea's blog.  You really don't want to miss this!! Who's in??

August Numbers!

Well, Friday afternoon we got our official August numbers!  We were excited to see more movement this month.  With the courts closed it helps to at least keep seeing a little progress during these slow months.  Withour further ado we are, for a girl:

And for a boy:

We moved 4 spots on both lists this month! Pretty exciting!  My hubby is convinced that he's going to get a son, it's pretty cute :)  We'll see if he's right or not, but it's looking pretty promising!

What are we waiting for?

Now that I am not in the habit of blogging regularly I randomly have thoughts float through my head that I think would make a good blog post, but I rarely take the time to sit down and actually write it.  I've been thinking about this post for about a week now.  I've been listening to this awesome CD:

This is the new CD of one of the awesome worship leaders at our church.  Everyone needs to get this CD!! There is so much truth and so much Gospel in this one album, it's amazing!  Definitely a nice change from some of the fluff that's on Christian radio right now.  The premise of the CD is that the Gospel changes everything and asks the questions, are we living as though Jesus is alive? and what are we waiting for?  Jesus has called us all to go, he has called us all to care for orphans in some way.  That along with this video(pause the music at the bottom of the page first):



have just really gotten me thinking lately.What are we waiting for? As Matt's song says, "a message in the sky? a sign from up above? is not His Word enough?"  God's word clearly tells us to care for the poor, the orphan, the widow, as Katie says in her video "it's not an option."  Us adopting should not be viewed as us doing something noble, or "super christian", we are just obeying God's word. Not to say that everyone should adopt, but we are all called to care for the orphan in some capacity.   
We are also all called to make disciples and take His Word to the nations. And yet so many times we don't, myself included.  My prayer lately has been,taken from  another line in the song, that I would not become to comfortable with amazing grace, and to familiar with the empty grave. We cannot wait to have this baby home so that we can share the love of our amazing Father with him/her.We have so much to celebrate, and so much to tell the world about.  So what are we waiting for? 

It's that time

Well, it's that time.  The dreaded time involved in Ethiopia adoption.  Friday, the Ethiopian courts closed for the rainy season and will not reopen until mid-October.  I have not been looking forward to this since we started the process.  Things will slow down a good deal over the next two months.  Referrals can still happen, and the Embassy will keep scheduling dates, but with the courts closed, things will be pretty slow.  On the other hand, this will be a blessing because the people are in desperate need of rain right now, so we are praying the God sends lots of it!  Focusing on that blessing will hopefully make this time a little easier. I start back to work at the preschool tomorrow so that should help move things along too!  We are praying for all of the families caught in the middle of this closure.  I can only imagine how hard it would be to have seen our baby's face and then get stuck in this closure, waiting extra months to be able to hold them. 

There have also been several orphanage closures in the southern region of Ethiopia recently.  No one is quite sure of the reason for this yet, but this is also causing several families with our agency to be in a limbo of sorts, not knowing what will happen next or when they will get their babies home even though they have already been approved by the courts.  Our hearts are hurting for them and we are constantly lifting them up before the Father.  We ask that you would pray with us, and that these little ones would get home to their families as quickly as possible!  It's still amazing to me how quickly things can change in this world of International Adoption, but I am thankful that we have a Father who holds us all in the palm of His hand, and has ordained all of this from the beginning of time, so amazing!