New Look!

Well, it's a new year and I decided to give the blog a new look.  I've been debating on whether or not I should switch to Wordpress, but decided to hold off for a while and just change up the look here :) I think I'll be happy with it for now.  I can't believe January is already almost half over and this is the first time I've blogged in the New Year! Where is the time going?  I've got some posts I've been mulling over for a few days so they'll be coming soon.  Today you just get to see the pretty new design :)  unless I get a wild hair and decide to blog some more today while I'm home recovering from this nasty cold, courtesy of my preschool kiddos :)  Happy Friday y'all!

Dear 2011,

You were a good year, a great year really.  You were a hard year at times.  We have struggled, we have grown, we have had our faith tested like never before.  There were many ups and downs, but thankfully there were way more ups!  We have learned to lean on God as our source of strength and for everything that we need.  We have many great memories from this year, we've made great new friends that we are so thankful to walk through this life with.  This journey we are on has been stretching, it has been long and hard.  Our hearts have ached to hold the child that God has for us.  This time last year we optimistically thought we'd have seen a picture of our babe by now, but that was not God's plan.  We needed more time, more time to learn and grow, more time to prepare our hearts to be parents, more time to establish our firm foundation, more time to draw closer to God, more time to learn to trust Him in everything.  Some of these things are still a work in progress.  There are still things we have to learn to trust Him for, but by His grace, we are not the same people we were at the beginning of this year.  Yes, our hearts are still longing for that child, and we are praying this is the last end of a year we will see without at least knowing who that child is, but we are also grateful for the year we have had and all that we have learned along the way in this journey to our precious baby.  2011, we are thankful for what you have given us, but we are more than ready to embrace 2012, to continue on this journey, and see what the Lord has in store for this next year.

We are so richly blessed! Happy New Year everyone!!

December Numbers!!

Well, we finally have December numbers!! And we are finally beginning to see some movement after almost 3 months of none at all.  So I am actually excited about posting these this month.  We are so thankful for this journey, even when the hard months come, we know it is all worth it.  Even when our hearts ache this Christmas, we know that the time will come, in His perfect timing, where there will be the cutest little smile looking up at us from under the tree and it will all be worth it.  All the pain will seem like a distant memory, and although there will be new hard and painful things, we will do it as a family, and we will have learned so much.  So yes, this wait is worth it. And we would gladly do it all over again.  Here are our numbers this month:

For a Girl:

For a Boy:

We moved 3 spots on both lists this month, and the day before we got these there was more movement that isn't included in these numbers, so we are actually unofficially a little lower :)  We are rejoicing in the one whose birth we will be celebrating this weekend, He is faithful!!

It's Christmas time!

Things have been looking very festive around our house over the past few weeks!  We got our tree up the day after Thanksgiving and have been enjoying it ever since!  This Christmas season has seemed a little more special than normal and I've had a hard time putting my finger on it.  Sure, we've done all our traditional Christmas festivities, in fact, tonight making fudge and watching Rudolph are on the agenda :)  we had a small group Christmas party at our house Wednesday night that was a lot of fun, we've been reading our Story a Day til' Christmas (love this tradition!), there's even an extra stocking hung this year for our precious little one (thanks Lauren!) and Christmas music constantly playing. The kids at the preschool are in full Christmas mode and we're having our party Tuesday morning on our last day, these are just a few examples of the festivities we've been partaking in.  But this year, Christmas is a little more sentimental for me.  I've posted before that over the past year since we've started this adoption process, the Gospel has become so much more real.  So it makes sense that the Christmas story would mean that much more this year.  We watched a movie of the First Noel with the kids at preschool yesterday, and I literally got all teary eyed watching it.  Not only is it such a beautiful story of love, but sitting there, watching it with so many little ones, some of who were probably hearing it for the first time, I just got overwhelmed.  It's such a simple story, the birth of a baby, doesn't seem like anything special.  But that story is the epitome of love, and that baby is the King of Kings, our Savior!! That baby grew into the man who is weaving our story with another little baby on the other side of the world, and that gets me teary (ask my hubby, that's not hard to do these days!).  So while I can't wait to experience Christmas with a little one, and my heart aches for a baby that we've never met, this Christmas, I'm rejoicing in another birth, the birth of our Lord!  I'm rejoicing in a redeemer and a Father who cares enough to send a total stranger that I've never met before(and they didn't even know about the fundraiser, they were there for the band), along with her precious Ethiopian princess, to our Chick-Fil-A fundraiser last night who had just the right words of encouragement that we needed to keep going when this road looks never-ending.  Thank you Father for these precious gifts!

Eat Mor Chikin!!

That's right, our next fundraiser is going to be a Chick-Fil-A spirit night!  Who doesn't love Chick-Fil-A?  We're going to ask all of our friends and family here in RDU, and all of their friends and family, to join us on Thursday, December 15th at the Falls Village Chick-Fil-A.  We will get a portion of all the sales from 5:00-8:00pm that use one our our fliers at the register.  I'm going to try to get a picture of it up on here to make it easy to print out, but if not, email me and I can send you a copy!  You will need to have one of these that night to make sure that we get the credit.  We are so thankful for this opportunity!  There will also be live music that night from a local Raleigh artist, Daniel Renstrom, so hopefully that will draw a big crowd as well. If you don't have any plans for dinner that night, please come out and eat with us! We would love to see all of you there! And help us spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, email, word of mouth, etc.  We love seeing how God provides to bring this baby home!!

Happy Thanksgiving & November #'s

I hope everyone had a very happy Thanksgiving yesterday!  We enjoyed the day with several friends here in NC and missed our families back home in GA.  We ate way more food than we should have, laughed, thanked God for all of our blessings, and just had a great time with each other.  I love the holidays!!  We were sad that we couldn't spend this one with our families in GA but we will be home for Christmas, and we are enjoying our new tradition of having Thanksgiving here in our home for friends and students who aren't able to go home for the holiday.  We love opening our home for that reason!

It's been a while since I posted on here, just proof of how busy we've been!  But right before Thanksgiving we got our November numbers and I wanted to post them.  We were a little bummed this month as we had no movement on the girl list and moved back a spot on the boy list(a family that lost their referral joined the list again so that's how we got moved back).  Although we are a little bummed about this, this is the first month that this has happened since we've joined the list, and for that we are thankful.  We are thankful that we've experienced movement every other month and we are thankful that we know there is movement coming because several kiddos are being picked up in the next few weeks to join their forever families and we hear that several new babies have come in to HH!! So, I'm not doing the regular numbers post that I normally do, but just wanted to put it on here to have a record of this month and our numbers.  For November we are still 75 for a girl and 60 for a boy.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of this holiday weekend.  I'm super excited because we are going to get a Christmas tree this afternoon when my hubby gets off work and we found a local farm where we can choose and cut it ourselves!!! I have always wanted to do this and make it a tradition in our family, so here we go!!

Ordinary Hero Grant Contest!!

Hey everyone!! I am excited to announce this new fundraiser we are doing!!  I have signed us up to become an affiliate family working with Ordinary Hero!  We are very excited about this and hope that many of you will partner with us in this fundraiser.  Basically, this is an organization that has ties to Ethiopia, the owner has adopted from Ethiopia herself, and she has started Ordinary Hero as a chid advocacy program.  It's so awesome! You can read more about that here.  Their store sells lots of awesome stuff: t-shirts & sweatshirts, jewelry, accessories, and now they even have items that you can donate to Ethiopia! Here's where YOU come in!  If you go to the store and do some shopping, whenever you purchase an item, make sure you choose my name (Stephanie Coalson) from the affiliate drop-down list to make sure that we get the credit for that item.  We will get 40% of any purchase that you make and the total will go straight to our account at our agency so you can be sure that the money will go to our adoption!  Now...starting TODAY, until next Sunday, November 13 at midnight we are going to try to win a $500 grant from OH.  That means that we get 40% of all the sales that we make, plus the $500 grant if we are one of the top 3 sellers!! How awesome is that?? We would be so grateful if each of you reading would just take a look at the store and see if anything catches your eye.  Even if you don't see anything you want for yourself, how about taking some Christmas money and donating an Amharic(Ethiopian language) children's Bible to a child in Ethiopia?  I have to tell you though, I have ordered two of their shirts and they are super soft and comfy, I love them!!  We especially want our family and friends to take advantage of this. Please, please don't spend anything on us for Christmas, but consider donating some blankets or maybe even a sheep to feed about 40 children.  Check out the store here, there is really something for everyone!  Thanks for thinking of us and I apologize in advance that I am going to be blowing up your Facebook feeds and emails for the next 10 days :)