April 2008

Dossier passed first review

Our family coordinator emailed us today to say that our dossier looks fine - WHEW!! I can't even explain how relieving that is. If they are able to get it to the U.S. Embassy to be sealed (which they plan to) it will be mailed out to Ethiopia on Friday. Here's to hoping!

Dossier on its way!!!

We received a wonderful surprise yesterday and got our I-171H in the mail. So, this morning I drove up to Indy and got all our dossier documents certified. It was quite painless really and I was only in the office about 15 minutes. I enjoyed the beautiful early morning mist, treated myself to some Starbucks, and listened to the Wailin' Jennys. Then I came back and did all the copying and checking of documents. An inch (over 2 pounds) of paperwork is on its way to our agency and should be there tomorrow morning!!

Authentication part 1

We've both got life insurance!! We signed the policies today. This means we have everything EXCEPT the I-171H, which we're filing a nice complaint about with all the powers that be, trying to make Indiana do a bit better job.

Garage (Warehouse) Sale Pictures

When we say 'garage sale', even 'huge garage sale', we're doubtful you're thinking huge enough unless you actually saw the gymnasium, so we're giving you some proof of just HOW huge this thing was!


Raffling off my mother's quilt has already made hundreds of dollars. Next week we'll find out who the lucky winner is! You can still buy tickets!!

Life Insurance Part 1

Joseph's life insurance policy came today, so we're one paper closer to being done. We are hoping mine will come tomorrow. Once we have both in hand we can get them approved by our agency and get everything certified.

Then, we still wait for our final I-171H to come in, which our representative is looking into. Please pray that this comes this week. It would be a HUGE deal to get done with paper work and officially start 'waiting.'

Newsletter

Many of you have received our newsletter in the mail, but we also wanted to make it available here for you to download. Please feel free to pass it on to others also.

Here is the link to download the pdf.

Adoption_Newsletter.pdf

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:

Quilt Raffle


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’.