Onward and Upward

Forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. 

Shortly before eating this most awesome cake, (shout out to Trefzger's) we submitted our application to CCAI on 7/10/15! And, just so everyone is aware, we had help eating it. It wasn't just us, I promise! I will admit to having a piece for breakfast though.

Pretty much everything the past seven or so months hinged on submitting this application. Now that that's done, it's like we've hit the ground running. Funny how you go from doing nothing to doing everything! This is going to be a not too fun post and mostly informative for those of you who are curious about where we go from here.

Our second meeting with our social worker for our home study was last night, which went really well. Note to self, never assume they will tell you when they'll check the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Hey, at least one of them was working and installed! We have a few more things to do for the home study and then that will be done! Hooray! We are stretching that out a little so that we won't have to update our files in case we don't have our placement yet at this time next year. Any way to save a little money sounds all right with me!

We received our approval for our application for adoption from CCAI today too--and now we're really rolling! They gave a fancy-shmancy flow chart of our things to do to prepare our dossier and when to do them, which is probably my favorite thing ever! I do love a good check list. Here's a breakdown of how long each step should take (more or less):
     1) 5 days: Application approval--done!
     2) 1-2 weeks: Begin home study, begin to get forms and paperwork ready (this will be a theme...).
     3) 2-5 weeks: Create your Adoption Petition and Financial Statement, doctors' visits, police clearance reports, gather photographs, and a few other things.
     4) 5-10 weeks: Complete home study process, go through the checklist for your documents, get dossier information from USCIS.
     5) 10-20 weeks: Begin notarization, certification, and authentication (Did you know authentification is not a word? Just learned that!) for dossier documents. (Ah, paperwork.)
     6) Submit allllll of the above to CCAI for them to submit to the CCCWA.
     7) Celebrate!

There it is folks, dossier submission in just seven--that's right, seven--easy steps. You're welcome. (Yes, I can hear some of you laughing. There's definitely a reason it will take six months to complete!) If you are unfamiliar with any terminology from here on out, I did pick a few major terms and stuck their definitions here under our Resources page.

If you have any questions for us, we'd be happy to answer them! We may not know the (right) answer, but we will do our best. Thank you everyone for your prayers this past week; we all appreciated and felt every one of them!

Lots of points to the first person to get the quote. And not google it.

As always, stay tuned!

Just a Short One

Many of you have asked in the past week, so I thought I would post here that the fundraiser/benefit that was to be held August 15 is no longer taking place due to unforeseen circumstances. We are currently trying to decide what our plan B will be, or if there will be a plan B. Would you pray with us that God will reveal the direction we should take? We would surely appreciate it! 

In the meantime, a few of you have expressed some interest in still hosting small events. That's awesome! If this is something you feel led to do, please let me know and we'll go from there! 

Thanks everyone! We appreciate all of you! 

Life Goes On

Let me start by apologizing to anyone who ever came to our house. Apparently, it is not safe.

Before I explain that, let me just fill you in on what's been going on around here in the past few months. Bear with me, I think this is going to be the record breaker of long posts. Since we've been in a state of waiting for months now, we've just continued on with business as usual. 

First of all, Derek graduated and we spent the weekend in Madison. (I know, that's not really "new" news...but for the sake of documenting I'm still posting about it!)

Our littlest souvenir! 

We're all really proud of Derek and all his hard work, and appreciated my family and his coming with us to celebrate! It was a fun weekend; Madison is a cool place! 

In other news, it has been raining (more accurately, storming) here almost daily for pretty much the past three weeks. Of course, the first storm was the one that finally ended our tree. For those of you that know us, we've had a love/hate relationship with that tree since the first month we lived in this house. Every year we've lost a sizable portion of it, but since it never damaged the house we decided to leave it up since the quotes to remove it were not in our price range! However, that particular storm was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. And so...

You see, not only did the storm make our tree peel like a banana, it also pulled the electrical service from the house. (Basically, a repair that would require more than just the power company coming to turn us back on.) I will fully admit that, after assessing the damage, I turned to Derek and said that this wasn't fair. After all, of all the years and times for this to happen, spending thousands of dollars on tree removal was not what we wanted to do right now--we're supposed to be saving money, not spending it! Plus, we knew that with no real damage to the house insurance wouldn't be covering it. After the initial shock and panic I won't say that we were okay with it, but ultimately we concluded that things happen.

But. 

Less than an hour later, my friend Jenni called to say her dad (a retired electrician) was willing to hook our electric back up the next morning so we didn't have to call an electrician. Then, since a tree removal service was already in the neighborhood working on a lot of other trees, they gave us an awesome, awesome price. We actually got the tree removed and the electric working again for less than our homeowner's insurance deductible! Amazing, and an answer to prayer. Instead of thousands, it was less than one thousand.  

A few people commented to us on how God worked everything out to our favor. True. I would like to counter or add to that to say God was in control the whole time. He had it all planned out, and we just needed to trust him for whatever the outcome was. Thankfully, yes, it did work out the way we wanted, but ultimately it was more an exercise in faith for us to lean on the Lord no matter the outcome. After all, as little Lindy's picture on our fridge says "God keeps his promises." He is always faithful. 

In the meantime, Derek's family bought a camper, so we were invited to go camping with them. It was...an interesting experience. Before we left we discovered our tent was actually growing gross things, so we threw that away. Thankfully, we didn't need to buy a new one because my parents gave us their old one that can probably sleep an army. However, there was rain in the forecast. It didn't stop us though. 

Our "we're totally ready for this camping thing and it's going to be so fun" faces.

Fun 'til it wasn't. 

It didn't stop us until the next morning, because after approximately sixteen hours of rain our tent was surrounded by a moat. I'm all for sticking it out...but when everything is wet, it's time to call it. Would I call our first camping experience a success? Yes. We are still married. 

Seriously though, it was nice to camp with the family, even if it wasn't exactly what we had all hoped it would be. 

And..... now that you're caught up, this is what we did tonight. 

We realized that it's time to actually get our butt in gear, since July is fast approaching. We can now officially say our home study will begin (or continue) on July 15. Since we've lived by the "life goes on" motto, we suddenly realized that we have a lot more to do around the house, classes to take, etc. After going to Menards tonight (super fun date night), we stood in front of the "child-proofing" section and came to the conclusion that we have no idea what we are doing. So, we bought the basics--fire and carbon monoxide alarms (because ours have been broken for...?) and outlet covers. If anyone knows what else we will definitely, 100% need, please, help us out. Tell us, so we don't look like the fools we felt like standing in that aisle. 

Now that I've successfully talked your ear off, and most likely lost your interest 1000 words ago, we just wanted to thank you all for your prayers and support thus far. We will be really getting things moving in the next couple of weeks, so we would appreciate the continued prayer. We will continue to keep you updated on the goings on in our lives!