Catching Up!

Here are some pictures of just some of what our family has been up to since May.  Everything to fun outside and fun with friends...

 Mother's Day 2013

 Grace's End of Year Gymnastic Program St. Luke's

 Graduated 4 year Pre-K!

We've spent lots of days at Magic Springs!! This girl loves the water park and Momma does too!

 Daddy's girl!! 

 Grace and some of her best buddies Kendall and Arden

 Pirate's Cove Adventure Golf as a family!! :) Special times!

 Fun at the Park

 Such a fun and nice night watching Fireworks at Magic Springs for 4th of July!

Another sweet friend over for play.. Windsor!

We've also helped with and been a part of Vacation Bible School in one of the local parks this year with our church.  Grace has had fun on her new bike. I will share pictures on my next post.  Also, we had lots of fun with water guns and the sprinkler right here in our own yard! Sweet memories!

HUGE News and Change of Plans

Well... I sit down to write this and my heart starts pounding. We want to tell you by the grace of God ONLY, I am PREGNANT! 

This is news that we found out about a little over 3 weeks ago, when we were totally SHOCKED!  I honestly had felt like I would NEVER be pregnant again and honestly I was okay with that. I had dealt with it.  As you all know, we were 4 months into an adoption process and actually just got approved by our agency after the home study and interviews.  We were officially in the wait to be chosen by a birth mom.

So what now??  As soon as I found out, we called our agency totally thinking we would just have to update our home study and carry on as usual.  We found out that our agency requires our adoption to be put on hold for 1 YEAR from the babies' birth of the one I am carrying now.  At first, that was a little disappointing because we were ready to adopt.  But, we quickly realized GOD'S timing is PERFECT and He knew exactly what was going to happen and that we know this is how it is meant to be.  So we WILL adopt, just later!!

So, after 2.5 years of trying to have a baby, totally enthralled in adoption, here we stand. Totally in AWE of God.  I don't understand His grace and mercy on us.  All I can say is we are SO VERY grateful for this gift and we praise God!

Today is the day that we decided to share because I went to the doctor for my first OB appointment. As I sat on that OB table after seeing the doctor and the doctor said "you are definitely pregnant!!"  It was REAL! The tears started to flow and I sat there thanking my heavenly Father!!

We found out I am 7 and a half weeks pregnant after doing a ultrasound and heard our babies' heartbeat... at 154 beats per minute.  Due date will be Jan. 6th as of now! :)

Grace is beyond thrilled as you can imagine!

Daddy Fun

Just one reason why I love this man and why Grace is CRAZY about her Daddy :)

In other news, I also took Grace to Lakeside to register her for Kindergarten!!  It became all too real that day that Momma's baby is growing up. She had to take a test on a computer that took over 30 minutes, by herself! I am amazed at how things have changed in the world of education and the expectations.  I am appreciative of all she has been taught at preschool to get her ready for this!

April Birthdays!!

This year was a great year celebrating mine and Grace's birthday.  Nana and Grandma came for a visit this year to be here to celebrate our birthdays.  It was the first time Grandma had been to our house here in AR too.  I had to work on my birthday of course, but it was a late day at work too so I told them I would just meet them at Olive Garden after work for a birthday dinner. So you can see I look tired and am in my work colors. :) Supper was wonderful though and we went home to cupcakes and ice cream.  Below is Daddy and Grace enjoying theirs....

  

We had a lot of wonderful time together that week and we also went to Benton one day while Adam was working and visited some of my more distant relatives that live around the Little Rock area.  We ate at Western Sizzlin and Grace felt like she was getting her picture made with Si from Duck Dynasty.. (really my Dad's cousin)   :) We also stopped in at Target and Kohls too while in Benton. 

 For Grace's actual birthday Nana bought her a cookie cake to take to school to share with her friends.  She wore this Happy Birthday crown to school that day too. :)

 

That night she got to decide where we were going to eat and of course she picked her favorite place, ChickfilA!! :)

Saturday was her Birthday party.  Grace turned 5!!! It's hard to believe our baby is 5 now!!  This pic of Grace and Grandma before the party.  Below is the Doc Mcstuffins costume from cousin Vann and Amanda.  

 Grace had a GREAT party.  We had it at our church in the indoor playground.  It was perfect. A really good turnout and she was a happy little girl!! Here are some pics of all the fun, family, and friends!

 

Happenings in Feb and March

Playing catch up today...

First in February, we had an Experiencing God Together weekend at our church, Crossgate.  It was a HUGE turnout and was WONDERFUL!! We were so glad we were a part of that! It renewed both of our spirits and ignited a new fire within us to Experience God more! It followed up by a 9 week book study and small group meeting once a week for 9 weeks. Unfortunately, tomorrow will end this study! We will miss this small group!

February is also Adam's Birthday month.  Grace and I made Adam a Birthday cake and planned to surprise him by making the cake and put up some last minute decorations that we had already.  Adam was working inventory the weekend before his birthday and I realized we were going to be working opposite shifts on his actual birthday so we would celebrate on Sunday before... Well, it ended up inventory went very long so Adam was late getting home and we didn't get to enjoy cake until the next day but nonetheless, Adam was pleasantly surprised when he saw our decorations after walking in from work late that night! It's not even pictured but Grace also hung a little birthday banner in the living room for Adam and left some 'confetti' in the hallway.  :)

Adam's parents came for a visit in March.  It was a pretty quick visit but Grace loved all the quality time she had with them.  They watched Grace on the Sunday so Adam and I could go to Winter Jam in Little Rock. It was a great date for us. We went straight from church and ate at our favorite restaurant in Bryant... Zaxby's and then on to Little Rock.  It sprinkled rain for a little bit so we stood in the rain under umbrella's part of the time, but then it stopped and the sun came out and it warmed up.  We even ran into one of our friends, Evan, who had his youth with him, so we were entertained! :) Winter Jam was AWESOME as always!!

With the end of March, came Easter!! I sang in the Easter Celebration Choir that morning and it was a great day!  Church was awesome as always and we hid eggs in the house due to the rain.  It later warmed up but we had a social with our Experiencing God Together small group at the church as well as the kids. We did pizza and games and just hung out. It was wonderful to get to know them more! LOVE getting to know couples/ families that are close to our age and just experience life together and encourage each other in the Lord!

 

Adopting!

Well, it's old news now that we are officially adopting.   As you can see I have not posted in a long while because I have been busy with most things pertaining to our adoption.

This journey started for us a few years ago. The Lord really laid it on our heart to adopt a child because it is biblical to take care of orphans and He revealed that we are all orphans until God adopts us into HIS family.  Since then, Adam and I thought we would 'try' for another biological child first and then adopt later.  Well, that did not happen.  Really, all along I knew that God's plan for us was to adopt NOW!  Of course, timing is always an issue, as well as finances, but the Lord brought all of this to fruition the end of last year in 2012.  We had first looked into fostering with hopes to adopt through DHS.  With this of course if wouldn't cost anything but we decided we didn't know if Grace could handle having to possibly say goodbye to what she thought was her forever sibling who she would grow to love.  Also if you adopt straight through DHS in AR they don't adopt out younger than 3.  Due to Grace's age we wanted to make sure and get a child younger than her and the younger one's are harder to come by.  So with this said, after 2 meetings about fostering we felt like we needed to go a different direction.

We have wanted to do an international adoption and spent months looking into this and weighing our options.  We were very close to signing the contract to adopt from Ethiopia in Africa.  After reading the contract, it was intimidating talking about all the possible circumstances that could happen and you won't get your money back and it is $30,000 to adopt one child from there.  Also, the shortest wait time now is about 2 years. I know, it is totally stepping out in faith, and adoption is totally a faith journey.  We just ended up going domestic especially considering the debt we could incur. 

So... we looked into a good many different agencies.  We ended up deciding on an agency based out of Memphis called Life Choices. This is a Christian based pregnancy medical clinic.  The whole idea is they take in women who are very high risk for abortion and education them on abortion and it's effects on you and do an ultrasound to show viability. The whole idea is to veer these women to either help them parent their children, or help them give the baby up for adoption.  So every lady that is in the counseling program is at a 98 % risk for having an abortion!  With this, Adam and I feel this is huge because we always say we are against abortion but Adam asked one time.... "what are we doing about it?"  Well, this is it!  These babies need a family.

So with this said,  we mailed off our initial application in the end of December to our agency and announced to our family about our plan to adopt.  The beginning of January was our first home study interview and an interview with our agency. Since then, it has been a SLOW process. It took over 3 months for the home study to be completed and then had 2 more interviews with the agency.  Any day now we will be getting a letter to say we are official and then our profile can be shown to birthmothers.  The birthmom will not know where we live or our phone number or even last name or our email address. She will only know our first names.  We are adopting a minority race child.  We make no exception. This is an extension of our love for ALL people!

While waiting on the home study, we answered MANY questions about what we believe on every aspect of everything and had some reading and questions to complete about transracial adoption. I also compiled our profile booklet.  It is our "family story" with pictures and tells all about us.  From this, the birthmom will pick us if she likes what she sees. :) The average wait time is 10 months.  I also have been working extra to save for this adoption.  I have been working 12-16 extra hours a week.  

So now, we are at the fund raising stage.  We are applying for grants and this can be a daunting task.  I have been working on this a lot the last few days.  Please pray that we will be approved for these grants especially a matching grant as well. With a matching grant we would mail out letters asking for financial support and the grant would match dollar for dollar up to a certain amount.  The only thing is it may take 2 to 3 months for our grant application to be processed even if we are approved. Hopefully, it won't take that long! During our final interview, our case worker made clear to us that we need to have our placement fee ready at any time really because we never know when we will be chosen.  The placement fee is $10,000.  We anticipate the total adoption to be around $15,000 with everything including home study, post placement, legal fees, and travel.  Just being totally honest, we only have about $6,000 of the total cost taken care of.  So we will be doing some fundraising. 

We know this is all in the Lord's hand and we have absolute confidence that He knows how each and every detail is going to work out, including every last cent.  We know this is God's plan for our family and we are thrilled to be on this journey! Please pray for us in the months and weeks ahead.