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!

Donations (Good news and a correction)

We have been approved to receive assistance with our adoption through our church’s Adoption Fund. If you would like to make a tax-deductible financial contribution to our adoption expenses, mail your donation to Church of the Good Shepherd, 2501 S. Endwright Rd. Bloomington, Indiana 47403. Checks should be made out to ‘Church of the Good Shepherd’ and in the memo line ‘Adoption Fund’.

This is in distinction to the newsletter we sent out which also had our last name in the memo field. If you do put our last name in the memo line, the gift will not be tax deductible. (The IRS tax code hard at work.) I'm sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

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.)

Introduction

There are any number of things I could say in this first post, but I want to let you know briefly what is going on. Heidi and I are adopting from Ethiopia. We began the process in September of 2007. We are currently in the "paper chase." We are gathering a whole bunch of official documents and once we have them all, our dossier will be complete. Then we wait. And wait. And wait for a referral—a picture and complete medical records and all known information of a baby (or babies). Once we accept the referral, we wait for the adoption process to finalize in Ethiopia, and then travel to pick them up. We're hoping that we can travel before 2009.

What can you do?
-Pray for us as we continue the process, that we would have patience.
-Help us with our fundraising efforts (the estimated cost to adopt 1 baby is about $20,000)

What to look for here
-More detailed information about each stage in the adoption process
-Up-to-date status of where we are in the process
-Details of fundraising plans and how much we need to reach our goal