Home Study Completed and a SURPRISE!

Happy 2014 everyone!  2013 of course closed out for us in a very exciting way, and now 2014 is off to a very exciting start as well!  We completed our home study last week, so now we wait for the actual home study report to be finalized...which *hopefully* will be by the end of this month.  As soon as that hot little thing is in our hands I will be jumping up and down for a few reasons.  First of all, that gives us the green light to send in our I 800 A approval, which is a document required by US immigration.  It is an application to adopt a child from a certain group of countries, which China is one of them.  I am currently working on filling out this application because it needs to go out seriously like the day after we get our home study report!  Our agency told us this week that immigration has been running about 90 days on processing these applications, which is making me a little bit very nervous!  Our dossier has to be to China by the first week of June, so if we got the I 800 A into immigration by the first part of March, we would only be sitting a month short of our deadline by the time we received it back from them in May.  Again, I'm really concerned that the home study report will not be finalized by the end of this month, so we will be pushed much, much closer to the first part of June than I care to admit!  Nevertheless, we are moving along and gathering all of the documents that we need for the dossier gathered and notarized, so we are good there!

Something else very exciting happened this past month as well!  One of our new found adoption family friends who are also in the area AND adopting a little guy from China, the Whitacre's....well, more specifically Jessi Whitacre, (you can find info about their adoption journey here,) posted about a contest from Compelled Designs, an awesome pottery jewelry company that specifically works with families and groups to raise funds for things like adoption and missions trips, on her Facebook page.  I figured, why not register for the contest as well? Well I'm glad I did because I WON!!!!!  Whooo hooo!  What does that mean?  It means that I was sent a great selection of awesome pottery jewelry to sell to raise funds to bring our little man home!  Yippee!  My little package arrived yesterday and I was super excited!  I mean, just look at these awesome pieces!  You know you want one...or two...

So how do you acquire one of these glorious gems you ask?  I will be creating a separate posting for them individually listed later, (either today or tomorrow,) with numbers for each.  Each piece is $25 each, which includes $1 for shipping.  If you are local, you can save yourself the $1 :)  What is super awesome about these necklaces is that they are beautiful, each has a Bible verse reference on the back, AND...ALL of the $24 goes straight towards our adoption!  Can you tell I am just a little excited about this?  Michael is begging you all to help him out and to buy these pieces, because honestly, I wouldn't mind keeping every last one of them for myself!  Obviously counterproductive!

Thank you all for your continued prayers and support!  We are so thankful and grateful that we have such wonderful friends and family to walk this journey with us!  Again, please continue to pray for our sweet little man, and for a quick turnaround of our home study report!