God is Good

Thanks to all of you who have sent donations to us or to our church's adoption fund! Though we don't have all of it in hand yet, we expect that between the garage sale and your donations we have jumped quite suddenly to over $13,000 raised. This is more than we could ever have hoped for in one week. Thank you all, and praise be to the Lord, for His lovingkindness endures forever.

Garage Sales Rock

Our mega garage sale went much better than I ever dreamed possible! At the end of a long week, we had made over $5,000! Praise God!!

Our garage sale was more of a warehouse sale, with over 40 tables of stuff (pictures coming soon) and a number of items that went for over $100. Thank you to our church family at Church of the Good Shepherd for their generous donations of time, money and belongings. A few awards to the following:

Lawrence and Janet Howell take the cake for contributing the most items. It took a box truck to bring their goods to the church!

Julia Tucker definitely gets the team spirit award. Even though she was in Chicago on the actual days of the sale, she and Jenna Killingsworth gave out hand-made invitations (from their work's recycle bin) to all their co-workers. She not only convinced her co-workers to come to the sale, but to donate some pretty amazing stuff too. Then she did all the math of how much money we could earn by selling pop, hot dogs, and water and brought them all to the sale.

Kyla Curell gets the MVP award for sheer man-hours put in. After helping make signs, pricing for days, and sorting through 5 tables and 3 rods full of clothes, she was also dreaming about garage sales. She was even there before me on the first day! True to being Mike Boles' daughter, she was also a stickler on bargaining. Apparently Kyla and Mike had a show-down on the price of an impact wrench, which I would have loved to see. But either way - Kudos to Kyla!! You rock!!

Isaac Curell earns the best baby prize for contentedly letting his mother work.

Eleanor Rice gets the award for best saleswoman (stories coming soon).

My mother claims the "I travelled the farthest for the sale" award. North of Martinsville doesn't hold a candle to central Wisconsin!

All of the Bayly clan get the "Hey! That's mine! You can't sell that!"or the "This is being un-donated" award.

Jon Crum receives a medal for bravery in the face of great danger, risking life and limb and the favor of his boss while delivering the left-over items to an auction house in Salsbury, Indiana.

Glen Pierson gets the sign-picker-upper award. Between putting up the large road signs and bringing them back to the church both days, together with going out and picking them up every 10 minutes when they blew over, it's no wonder that when he brought them back for the final time he said "I hope I never see those signs again!"

Each of you were a tremendous help and we couldn't have done it without you. Thanks for a great, great garage sale weekend!

Quilt Raffle

As part of our massive garage sale weekend, we are raffling off this quilt. My mother made it and quilted herself. She does an awesome job and if it weren't counter productive, I would buy this one myself. The quilt is 86" x 74" and would also make an amazing gift! Raffle tickets are $5 a piece and we'll be drawing the name next week.

How you can have a chance for this quilt for $5:

Bloomington locals - bring your $5 to the church office, garage sale, or Sunday service, writing your name and phone number on a 3x5 card to be entered into the drawing.

Out of towners - post a comment, saying you'd like to be entered in and mail a check payable to "Heidi Bayly" and a 3x5 card with your full name and phone number on it to: Heidi Bayly 949 S. Persimmon Tree Cr. Bloomington, IN 47403

Huge Garage Sale

As we mentioned in the last post, as part of our fund-raising efforts we're going to be having a monstrous sale on April 11 & 12, 8am - 3pm. Really, we know it's going to be huge, because we've already got approximately three and a half tons of stuff you didn't want your precious belongings that you have donated to the cause.

If you are in Bloomington, there are a couple of things you can do to help us with this.

1. Donate anything you think we can sell - really, anything. Furniture, appliances, clothes, baked goods, canned goods, books, music, lightbulbs - whatever. Then bring it all to the church's Senior High Room on Wednesday the 9th (9 a.m. - 8 p.m.) or to the church's gymnasium on Thursday (9 a.m. - 9 p.m.). If you want to price your own items, go for it. Otherwise, we'll slap a price on it on Thursday night, which brings me to the next way to help.
   
   
2. Volunteer. We need help advertising. We've split up Bloomington and need people to volunteer to post 3-5 signs in their area. We're also going to print posters to post in restaurants, shops, and the library downtown. Then we'll need help pricing everything on Thursday. Any amount of time you can come between the hours of 10 a.m. - 10 p.m. would be great. Next we'll need about 5 volunteers to help run the sale (take money, make sure people don't steal, help load stuff). Shifts are 7:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. - 3 p.m. Friday and Saturday. When it's all said and done on Saturday at 3, we'll need a truck and some manly men to load up the leftovers (hopefully not much) and take to Backstreet Mission. That about covers it.
   
   
3. Bring everyone you know to the sale! This isn't exactly a high-traffic location, and 314 tables of items for sale without anyone buying would be rather... sad. There will definitely be great deals, and we'll be raffling off a beautiful quilt made by Heidi's mom. If anyone has a clue about how raffles work - ummm, we don't. Hint, hint. We're thinking about selling each raffle ticket for $5?
   

Fundraising (ie. Money, Money, Money)

As you can see from the thermometer on the right, we currently have a goal of raising $20,000 for the adoption process. This is a minimum estimate of the cost according to our agency, AWAA. You can find a detailed breakdown of this estimate here. There are a number of things that could cause our goal to rise in the coming months, including being forced to spend more than the estimated minimum amounts as we continue through the process--something that is a definite possibility. However, the single biggest change will be if we receive referrals for two children instead of one. We have requested two referrals, but we probably will not know if this is possible until we receive them. At that time, our goal could increase significantly. So the question becomes, how are we planning on raising this money?

We are going to start a pyramid scheme! Ok, maybe not. We're actually pursuing a number of different ideas at once. Some of them may not pan out, but right now, this is the plan.

1. Garage Sale

This is going to be a huge sale, primarily made up of items donated by you: our friends and family. It will take place at Church of the Good Shepherd. For details, please see the next post.

2. Grants and Scholarships

The paperwork's a drag, but you can't turn down free money, right? We'll be applying for a number of different scholarships over the next few months. (You've heard that there are millions of unclaimed dollars in scholarships and grants each year, right? Here's to hoping that a few of them slide our way.)

3. Donations

Of course, we will also be accepting donations from family, friends, strangers, and enemies. The catch here is that if we receive any matching grants, some of the donations will have to be appropriately tracked by that organization. So if you offer us money, and we tell you to make the check out to something not even remotely like "Joseph & Heidi Bayly," you'll know why.

4. Write a Book

OK, so this is where we get a little crazy. Actually, the book has already been written by my sister, Hannah. The idea right now is to make some modifications, and then print it, market it and sell it. We aren't sure where this will go, but rest assured, you'll be able to find out more about it right here on our blog.

5. Let You do our Fundraising!

Yes, we are more than open to others putting on fundraisers of their own devising. In fact, it would be downright encouraging if you would be creative and help us out with this in your own unique way. We've heard tell of one plan that includes a real-life medieval feast. The reality is that we have way more fundraising ideas than Heidi and I can pull off on our own. Many of them are ideas that you all came up with and told us about. If you can just go ahead and do it too, that would rock! Then you can brag about how much money you raised for our adoption. Yeah, like I said, a pyramid scheme. (But we're serious.)

Strangest Donation Award!

Well, we haven't really done much fundraising yet, but we're already awarding our strangest donation award to the person who gave us old gold teeth and an old wedding ring! Hey whatever it takes, right? If anyone wants to try to top that donation for weirdest, wackiest, go for it. We'll at least award a runner-up. In the meantime, does anyone know where I can get cash for gold?