Wow! So, it's been a while since we have blogged. In all honesty, it's been a rough season of life. Evan was wrapping up his senior year, picking a college, graduating high school and making the sometimes painful transition into adulthood. Grace got her driver's license, was given a car by some dear friends and three short weeks later, while picking Cate up from school, she was rear-ended. Her car was totaled and the girls dealt with concussion symptoms for a week or so. Jack had a minor surgery in preparation for a big surgery that he will have 2 days from now. Little Claire went through some more testing and was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. We have been busy figuring out new therapists and therapy schedules for little Claire. Not to mention the emotional struggle of your 5 year old daughter behaving like a 1 year old (she has come a long way, but still has a long way to go). We have had issues with the house that forced us to spend some money on re-modeling. Then throw in the stress of trying to figure out how to squeeze a couple of more bedrooms into our rapidly shrinking house, while walking that line of trying to not make Evan feel like he is being force out or replaced. In all honesty, these things just scratch the surface. This all seams to be par for the course for us when we are in an adoption process, it's a full on spiritual war.There have been times that we have asked each other "What are we doing? Can we handle another one?" That is where our faith has to kick in. We made sure, before we ever pursued Sam that this is what God asked us to do and that we weren't just acting on our own. God has pulled us through and in spite of all the above (plus some), we can honestly say..."it's going to be worth it!"
We have also been busy doing fund raisers to get the needed money to bring Sam home. In May we hosted a chili supper/gift basket auction at the church office and had an amazing turn out. Leslie had some good friends who wanted to hold some other smaller fundraisers through their personal businesses. We just can't thank everyone enough for all of the support. In the mean time, we tried to keep the paperwork rolling which isn't always easy. Sometimes you are just at the mercy of waiting on the system. We finally got all of the paperwork back (17 documents in all), I had them all notarized, took them downtown to be State Certified (took 4 trips), and finally had a package ready to send to the courier in Chicago for authentication at the Chinese consulate. We paid to have them over-nighted, and then I got the dreaded phone call. The courier didn't think the consulate would accept half of the documents. Really?? Three of them are the exact same documents that we used on the first two adoptions! And a new regulation from China...nothing can be older than six months. So, our physicals were too old by a week. By this point, we were pushing our deadline to get the dossier to China. So, I made a call to the agency to give them a heads up. Made a quick call to the Dr. who kindly worked us in that afternoon so that we could get labs going and back before she headed on her 2 week vacation. I re-worked the other documents and had corrected documents notarized, certified and back to the courier within a week. Whoa...what a mad scramble! Anyway, we got all 17 authenticated documents back from the courier in a week or so and turned around and over-nighted them to our agency. As of today, drum roll please, we have a log-in date!!! Our agency said that they would expect us to be home with Sam by Thanksgiving! That was great news as we had been speculating that we would travel in late December or early next year. It will be so amazing to have Sam home for the holidays! So now the pressure is on once more. In addition to the fundraising, we have received several grants to help pay for the very expensive dossier documents and our agency fees. We still need to come up with another large sum of money for the China orphanage fees and all of our travel expenses. We are waiting to hear about another grant which was a very generous one when we adopted Claire. Praying for the same this time. I have a few more grant applications to fill out and turn in.
So, that's where we are for now. Sorry that it's been such a long time since we blogged. I'm guessing that the blogging should start to happen a little more often now.
Thank you for reading,
Chris
...man up! Defend the weak and the fatherless!
