Posted on

Referral!!!!!

Yes, we received our referral call on Friday!!  What a surprise!  We didn’t think it would come that soon!  AWAA called to offer us siblings: a boy-4 years old and baby girl-3 months old! God had put almost those exact ages on our hearts when we applied!  They are beautiful—“button cute” as Michael says!  We can’t post pictures or any more information yet till we pass court and they officially belong to US!  🙂

Because of Ethiopian court closures in August and September during the rainy season, we probably won’t get a court date till about mid-October.  But my good friend, Deanne Mott, is already over there with her girls for a month, so she can love on them for us while we wait!  And I have been to the Transition Home and have seen how well the nannies care for and love on the children, so I am confident of our babies’ care until we can bring them home.  After we pass court (which is not always on the first try), then it will take another 1-3 months while they gather paperwork for the Embassy and we go back and bring them home.  We are hopeful to have them home before Christmas!  (What a cold winter welcome they will receive!! 🙂 )

We have a lot to do between now and then, including me (Suzanne) trying to finish a 75-page MA thesis on God’s Heart for the Fatherless in Scripture.  Please pray for 3 things:  diligence and supernatural quickness on the research and writing, health and emotional comfort for our kids while they wait, and funds to continue to come in for the rest of the adoption.  We are amazed at God’s grace and intimate hand on our lives through this whole process, and we pray He is glorified through it all!

Here is a picture of us showing our other 3 kids the photos of our new additions:

Posted on

Puzzle update, family trip, & 4th of July

We met our match! Lifesong for Orphans had offered us a matching grant up to $2000 and we have received more than that in donations, so Lifesong will be granting us an extra $2000! Thanks so much to all who are supporting and praying and to Lifesong’s generosity! Here is our updated puzzle….do you see it starting to take shape??

7-2-10

We won’t be updating the puzzle for another 2 weeks because we will be going on a family trip to OK. The first part of our trip will be 4 days at New Life Ranch‘s Family Camp. We are excited to spend some time at the camp I worked at one summer almost 20 years ago! (Hard to believe I’m that old, I know!) There are ropes courses, zip lines into the river, archery, horseback riding, hiking, as well as family worship times and a late night outdoor movie. We are looking forward to some family bonding time away from Wi-Fi and cell service! 🙂 Soon, when our other kids come home from Ethiopia, Erin, Liam, and Maura know that there will be a bit more attention on our new kids as we bond and learn to communicate with them. So we thought it would be a good idea to spend some quality time with them now as extra reassurance of our love for them and each other. After family camp, we will go on to visit my family in OK for a few days and then head back home to Lincoln.

We hope you all had a blessed 4th of July! The kids had a great time decorating their bikes and riding in our local parade, ending with the fire truck hose down, of course! These are great memories to savor! (Please excuse the iphone photo! And, shhh, don’t tell photographer Michael–he would be appalled! Be sure to notice the hero cape on our youngest–she FLEW that day!)

Posted on

Shhh! It’s Liam’s Birthday

We have had a history of having themes for each of the kids’ birthdays.  For Liam’s birthday this year, we did a “secret agent birthday bandit” theme.  It was rumored that the Birthday Bandit had been lurking in the neighborhood, stealing presents from birthday parties.  Sure enough, while we were outside playing with Liam and his guests, the Birthday Bandit found our house and stole the presents.  Fortunately we found enough clues hidden around the house to recover the gifts and unmask the thief.   Here are a few photos from the preparations and day of the party.

Posted on

Father’s Day and Puzzle Update

We had a great Father’s Day today!  Among other things, we celebrated with Frosty’s at Wendy’s because they were donating $0.50 to the Dave Thomas Foundation for every Frosty purchased this Father’s Day weekend!  Dave Thomas started Wendy’s and has a great organization that helps find permanent loving homes for children in foster care.

Here’s Michael’s new adoption/Africa t-shirt purchased through Ryan and Ashlie Fulmer‘s adoption fundraiser. (Pic taken with iphone :))  Ashlie is in Ethiopia right now with her baby boy Easton!

And here is our weekly puzzle update!  Every piece of the puzzle represents $10 that has been donated toward our adoption since we sent letters out in May.  Getting closer to Africa…..!!  (Click on the puzzle button at top right of the blog to see past updates.)

6-20-10

Posted on

Fundraising–the first pieces to our puzzle!

We are in the fundraising portion of our adoption.  There are several ways to help us out–something for everyone!  We are selling coffee, naming puzzle pieces, and working with Lifesong for Orphans to meet their match offer of $2000!  Click here to read more details on our fundraising options.  If you did not receive a letter from us in the mail, you may view our letter here as well as the official Lifesong letter that goes with it.

I wanted to highlight here our first puzzle pieces that you can see on the right of our site.  For every $10 donated towards our adoption, we will write your name on the back of a puzzle piece.  Our kids were eager to get started on the puzzle and eager to help with our adoption, so they each donated half of their birthday money to help bring their siblings home.

Our “bio kids,” as they are called in adoption world, are ages 6, 8, and 10.  They have been so excited all along the way about our adoption!  Liam talks about when “my boy” will be here.  Maura, the youngest, often suggests that she has “outgrown” a certain toy or clothing item, but that we should save it for “our baby” coming.  And of course our firstborn, Erin, has offered multiple times to “help take care of the kids”!  There has never been a moment where we sensed that they were hesitant or concerned about our changing family structure.  Now, granted, they are young and don’t truly realize what all will change–none of us do, for that matter!  And we have tried to be honest and explain that when the kids come, there will need to be extra attention paid to our new children to assimilate them into our family and our culture and even our language.  But we have promised to make an effort to spend some special times with each of our children individually.  In fact, we are going to an adventure camp this summer called New Life Ranch down in OK for some extra family bonding time before our family as we know it changes forever!

We are so proud of our kids!  It is obvious that God has put adoption on their hearts as much as on ours!  God is weaving our family into a beautiful multi-colored tapestry and we can’t wait to experience “even more than we can ask or imagine”!

Posted on

Erin’s Tenth Birthday Party

Another weekend in April means another birthday.  This year Erin hit double digits: she’s now a decade old.  To celebrate, she invited her girlfriends (and their American Girls dolls) over for a tea party.  Suz prepared some delicious treats for the day: cream puffs with chocolate syrup, heart-shaped brownies with powdered sugar, and fruit kabobs.  The girls played American Girl trivia, did some weaving, and went home with a tea cup filled with nice little goodies.

Posted on

Maura: Birthday and Bike

Maura celebrated two significant events this weekend: her sixth birthday and her success at riding a “two-wheeler.”  She had several friends over on Saturday for a “Princess and the Frog” themed event.  Suzanne, as usual, made an excellent cake for the party.

The girls colored pictures, ate cake, blew bubbles, played with sidewalk chalk, had an Easter egg hunt (not often that you get to do that at a birthday party–Maura’s idea), and played on the swingset.  Quite a time.

After church on Sunday, Suz took Maura and her bike out to one of the local baseball fields.  We’ve found that a baseball field has been good training ground for learning to ride a two-wheeler: the infield is firm enough to ride on but much more forgiving than the street when the kids fall.  Not much later they came back home and Maura was eager to show off her new skills.

Six years old and all grown up.  (BTW, Maura picked out her own clothes today….. )

Posted on

DTE today!! (“Dossier to Ethiopia”)

The long awaited important DTE date has come: 4-9-10!  Usually our agency, AWAA, sends the dossiers over to Ethiopia via FedEx, but in the email we received this morning they informed us that our paperwork will be hand delivered by some of their staff who are traveling there this weekend.  I love the idea that it will be handed over to the orphanage staff by loving, praying hands!

We are so blessed!!  I even got to do the DTE Dance with our friend and mom-in-the-adoptive-process, Deanne Mott, since she happened to be here when I got the email!  Woo Hoo!  Now to work on fundraising…… 🙂

Posted on

Milestones and Anniversaries

As with most families, it’s been a big week for us. Besides the usual Easter activities and traveling to visit family, we have had a few other milestones. Since we have been so busy, I am cramming it all into this blog entry. ☺

Last Monday, Mar. 29, was our 14th wedding anniversary. We celebrated by going out for dinner at Jack & Jo’s in Mason City. We cannot recommend it enough! It is well worth the short 20-minute drive from Lincoln. John Means, the owner and Donald Trump of Mason City, showed us around his newest project—a building space across from the restaurant in which a chiropractor’s office and art studio will be located.

We also celebrated the long anticipated day of mailing off our “dossier” (9 months worth of paperwork, background checks, notarizations, autobiographies, medical forms, and a chunk of money!) to America World Adoption Association. They will double check it all, bring it to the US Embassy in DC to be certified, and then mail it off to Ethiopia! After it gets there, we will be put on a waiting list for a sibling group (boy 3-6 years and girl 0-18 months) and will wait on God’s timing to bring us together with them. We are officially in the 2nd trimester our paper pregnancy! We will be doing some fund raising and a lot of reading during this stage, but it will be a little more relaxing than the other 2 trimesters.

The Sunday before we mailed the dossier, we brought those important papers to church. Our elders prayed for us and for our paperwork, for the mother of these children, and for God to bring them to us to raise in His perfect timing. We are so thankful to be able to share this with our congregation so that they can be on this journey with us. They will have a big part in helping us to raise them in the Lord, and we can’t wait to share with our children how may people have been praying for THEM!  In fact, when we got home yesterday, we had a card in the mail from a home care group that has been praying for us, many of whom we don’t even know personally!  I love the community of God!

That Sunday was also memorable to me because it was Palm Sunday. It reminded me of the Easter Sunday just before our firstborn Erin was born. We had a very scary previous week in the hospital during my 29th week of pregnancy, being told Erin was going to be born and all the dangers that come with premature births. The doctors then ended up sending me home, very surprised that I had gotten better, thinking they may have even misdiagnosed my condition. They told me I could go home on bed rest and that I could attend church on the following Easter Sunday. I will never forget the overwhelming emotions I had as that service began with a rousing, organ-led “Christ the Lord Has Risen Today!” I knew I had come home from the hospital because of the prayers of the saints and I knew, to my very core, that Christ was indeed ALIVE! Incidentally, the doctors had not misdiagnosed me, and Erin was born by emergency c-section (along with a surprise emergency liver surgery for me) the following Sunday at 32 weeks. I know that because of the prayers of my brothers and sisters in several states, Erin was given a couple extra weeks for her lungs to develop, and He sustained and saved both of us from other possible devastating complications.

The song gift that God gave me this monumental Palm Sunday 2010 was “Hosanna” by Brook Frasier. I have always loved her spirit for the poor and lonely. The line in the song that has always grabbed hold of me is “Break my heart for what breaks yours.” I know it breaks God’s heart for there to be hurting and lonely people in this world, especially the vulnerable orphans and the oppressed, and I know it is our job as Christians to do whatever part God has called us to care for them in His Name. Lord, “give me your eyes” and “break my heart for what breaks yours.”

So 14 years ago I married my best friend, 10 years ago we had our first child, and this week we sent off the paperwork for our little Ethiopian blessings. This is a good month for anniversaries.

Posted on

Swim lessons

The kids have been in swim lessons the last two weeks, which has left us all a little more tired than usual (thanks to later bedtimes).  Worth it?  You bet.