Thank you!!!

Today has been a WONDERFUL day!!! Full of "happy birthday's" from friends near and far, and a great day spent with my dear friend Melissa Miller, as we prepared for another orphan to finally be in his forever home! So cool! I want to take this time to say a heartfelt, deep, sincere THANK YOU- To every single person that has prayed for our family. Everyone that has donated to our fundraisers or helped organize fundraisers for our kids. Everyone that helped ready our house for Sam or has given clothes and toys. Every meal prepared for us, every grocery brought over, every person that helped get kids to and from while we were away. To my mom for coming here on two separate occasions to stay with the kids while we traveled overseas. THANK YOU FOR EVERY single thing that has been done to help us get our kids home from China. It has been overwhelming at times to see the generosity that has come to our family. There are no words to express how much it not only has meant to us, but just how much of a role you have ALL had in getting them home. It truly does take a village! We thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. May God bless each of you many times over for your thoughtfulness, generosity, faithfulness, obedience, and friendship. Adoption is a wonderful thing, but there are some very hard days. And we have been given the most faithful group of friends imaginable. And they span all over the US!! It seems like some of our closest friendships have been made through the adoption processes. And boy, does it feel nice to finally be done with the whole process!!! NO MORE paperwork, fundraising, homestudy visits, etc. WHEW!!! Again, we send our love and appreciation to each and every one of you.


Thank you!!!

Leslie

Hong Kong Hotel

Things are moving right along. International flights are booked. Passports have been sent off for Visas. Our agency is working on our itinerary for all of our in country travels. The only thing that they don't book is our one night hotel stay in Hong Kong. So, I also have that room booked now.


We have sent a care package to Sam that includes a toy, a camera for them to take some pictures with, goodies for his foster family, and a photo album of us so that he can start to get familiar with the faces of his new forever family. I can't imagine the fear and anxiety our little guy is going to deal with initially. He is almost 8 years old. We have been praying for him for over a year now! Looking forward to gaining his trust!


Two weeks from today, Grace and I will be in the air!

Plane tickets

Well...I wish I could say that I stayed 100% faithful, but I did have some anxiety. We have some friends that wanted to use their points to buy part of our round trip international flights. They went beyond that and paid the difference to get all of our tickets paid for and they are now booked! What a huge blessing. We also had some anonymous donations come in to help get us pretty much all of the travel money that we needed. God is good! This has been all Him from the beginning. Our fundraiser will remain open until we get home as we still have some post placement expenses to cover.



Amid all the discussions and weighing of options after we got travel approval, we decided that it would be best for Jack to stay home. So, just Grace and I will be traveling over to get Sam. For those who are not up to speed, Leslie needs to stay home for Claire. Claire gets a little grouchy without her momma and is really hard for anyone else to take care of. It is just not feasible to try and take Claire with us or for both of us to go and leave her behind. It's been a struggle for Leslie, because she knows what she will be missing out on. Those initial interactions with Sam, getting to know each other and starting the bonding process. Not only that, but we have made life long friends with other adoptive families each time we have traveled to China. We will do our best to Skype, and document our trip via video and pictures.


Thank you for all of your support and prayers!

Travel dates

Ok. We have our travel dates! Consulate date is December 2nd. Looks like we will be flying out on November 21st and we will have Sam on November 24th. Got some things cooking as far as travel money...it's been an anxious couple of days, but we are getting closer!

Travel Approval

We received travel approval from China today! Should hear consulate dates and travel dates by Monday. Very exciting news yet its a little nerve wracking since we do not yet have all of our travel money accounted for. Trying to stay faithful!

Last Saturday, October 18, we did a Both Hands fundraiser which serves both a widow and an orphan. It was a beautiful day and we got so much accomplished. Our team was amazing and we couldn't have done it without them. Click on the link below to see our project video.
Both Hands Project video

Log-in date

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!