Celebrating, Paper Work, and What's Next

It has been a fun week of telling our friends and family about our little girl in Ethiopia. It is such a good feeling to be able to celebrate with people who have been praying for us and our Mia for so long.
Here is a picture of us accepting our referral. Our caseworker (K) has been incredible to work with. She has been so patient and supportive this past month. It was so nice to be able to rejoice with her that our sweet Mia Grace M now has a family.

We went to dinner with our sweet friends, the Strains, on Tuesday to celebrate. This picture isn't very good, but it's all I have from that fun night of celebrating our referral of our daughter. This family is so, so, very precious to us. They have been a huge support to us during every step of the adoption. Megan has been there to laugh with me, cry with me during the hard times, pray for us, and just listen to me. I am so glad we get to do life with this wonderful family.
It's so crazy that we are going to soon need a table for 10 when our 2 families meet for dinner. Their two girls have been praying for baby Mia from the very beginning. I'm so glad they will get to see their prayers answered as we bring our daughter home.
Sawyer and Jolie are fun friends and they just had to have their picture taken together.

In other news, Justin and I turned in all of our referral paperwork on Friday to officially accept our referral. Yay!!!

This week we will have our Next Steps phone call to discuss what to expect from now on. The big question I get from every one is "when will she be home?" At this time we really don't know. We have to do some more waiting, of course. We have to make 2 trips to Ethiopia. During the first trip we will meet our daughter, spend time with her, and go to court to hopefully have the judge say, "she is your daughter." So, for now we are waiting for a court date. I am thinking this could be sometime in January, but we really just have to wait and see.

So, what are we up to while we wait? We still have some money to raise in order to be able to get our sweetie home. So, we are in the process of applying for grants and continuing to fundraise. Justin is still taking pictures and has a lot scheduled in the coming weeks. If you are local and want to have Justin do a photography session for your family, please let us know. We are also hoping to have a garage sale.

We also need to get Mia Grace M's room ready. I'm so excited to have a girl this time. We are also currently working on updating our home study. It expires in November, so we were already in the process of updating and paper chasing once again. We are waiting for our fingerprint approval from the FBI. I have no doubt we will be busy while we wait.

We also appreciate your prayers as we wait and work to get our girl home!

Mia Grace M

We are so overwhelmed by the outpouring of love we have received from family, friends, and even strangers since we have told everyone about our daughter. Our daughter, those are my two new favorite words. My heart is so full as I think about our sweet girl!!!

We will not be able to show pictures of her sweet face on the internet until she is home. Of course, if you are live near me, I will certainly be delighted to show you her pretty picture.

We also, will not be able to share her Ethiopian name, but I do want to tell you a little about her name.

We chose the name Mia Grace for our daughter over a year ago, when we still thought our daughter was an infant in Rwanda. I announced the name and blogged about it here.

The name Mia means mine or my, and of course you know what Grace means. We chose 2 Corinthians 12:9 for our daughter and for our adoption journey.

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.

The Lord brought this verse to me often during our adoption journey. I usually just concentrated on the first part.

When Rwanda stopped accepting dossiers and we had to switch countries, I remembered, "My grace is sufficient for you."

When we found out our wait would be longer than expected and when things were uncertain with the Ethiopian courts, I remembered, "My grace is sufficient for you."

When we first started praying about baby M, the Lord reminded me of the verse again. This time I really thought about the whole verse and what it meant. It says, "my power (the Lord's power) is made perfect in weakness. Wow!!! I love this so much. When we learned about Mia's special needs, all of my fears and weaknesses became forefront in my mind, but the Lord whispered this verse to my heart to comfort me.

Mia Grace's Ethiopian name means mirror. So all together Mia Grace M means a Mirror of my Grace. I have been praying every single day that she will be a mirror, a reflection, of God's grace and love. I can tell you that for us she already is. I can already see the amazing grace of my sweet Lord for leading us to our girl. The Lord has already worked miracles in our daughter's life and I pray that when people meet her or hear her story they will remember how much our Heavenly Father loves his children.

Unexpected Bessing

I have been wanting to write this post for so long and now I can't even think of how to start. Yesterday, Justin and I accepted a referral for a beautiful little girl!!!! We are so in love and we can not wait to have our girl home.

If you have been following our adoption journey then you know that our September number was 47 for a girl. No, we did not jump to the top of the list in less than a month.

I need to rewind a bit to begin this story. On August 17 our adoption agency sent out an e-mail to advocate for two new "waiting" children. This means these children were not within the parameters of anyone of the wait list, including us. One of them was a sweet little boy who is still waiting for his forever family and who I pray finds one very soon. The other was a beautiful 2.5 year old girl. (I can't share her Ethiopian name, so I will call her baby M for now). As soon as I saw her picture and started reading about her, I said out loud, "Is this our Mia?" I really can't explain it, but there was just something about her that captured my heart.

I told Justin about baby M when he got home and we began to pray that the Lord would bring her a family. A couple of days later I just could not get her out of my mind. I came to Justin, crying, and told him that I couldn't stop thinking about her. I didn't know if we were the family, but I knew that I deeply wanted her to have a family. Justin told me I should e-mail our caseworker, K, and let her know that we were interested in learning more about baby M. So, I did.

A couple of days later I heard from K that there was another family who was already looking into adopting baby M. I was happy that she had a potential family, but also a little sad that we were not the family. I continued to pray for her and wonder about how she was doing.

On August 30 I got the call that would change our lives forever. I was sitting down to check my e-mail when I got the call from K. I knew that it was not time for an update call, so I was freaking out a little inside when I answered the phone. K told me that they were still looking for a family for M and asked if I wanted to learn more about her. I told her I did, but asked if I could call her back on my home phone. I sent Justin a text to tell her I was about to talk to K about baby M. He text me back that he was in staff meeting, but he would pray.

K told me all that she knew about sweet M as I listened and wiped tears from my eyes. I will not share all of our little girl's story, because it is her story. I will tell you that she does have special needs. We had not originally requested a child with special needs, but the Lord had been working on our hearts for some time now in regards to this issue. I will write more about this another day.

So, for the past month we have been talking to an international pediatrician, working with AGCI to find out as much as we could about Baby M, praying like crazy for God to show us clearly what to do, and ultimately falling in love with our sweet girl.

When we started our adoption we thought we would be adopting a baby girl 0-12 months from Rwanda. I never would have imagined we would be where we are today, but I know without a doubt that God's hand has been guiding us the entire time. I know He has been preparing our hearts for our little M, since before we even said yes to adoption.

I am happy to say that baby M is the Mia we have been waiting for. Yesterday, we called K and told her that we wanted to adopt baby M. I think we have known in our hearts for a while now that she was ours, but we just wanted to be sure. I can now say that we are sure that sweet M is the girl God has chosen for our family. We are no longer on the waitlist and she is no longer a waiting child!!!! Praise the Lord!!!

"In his heart a man plans his coure, but the LORD determines his step." Proverbs 16:9

Celebrating Jax

My baby boy turns 4 on Tuesday. I really can't believe it. We celebrated his birthday this weekend. We started with our traditional birthday breakfast on Saturday morning. We normally do our birthday breakfast on their actual b-day, but since Tuesday is a school day, we went ahead and celebrated on Sat. Justin's mom (aka LuLu) and sister (aka Auntie Jessica) stayed with us Friday night. Jax had blueberry muffins and candy for breakfast. This boy LOVES candy, so it was only appropriate to let him have some for breakfast. He opened some of his gifts and enjoyed his treats before we went to big brother's football game.
I really can't believe how big my little boy is getting. My parents (aka Nana and Poppy) met us at the game and spent the night on Saturday. Here is Jax sitting between his Nana and his LuLu.
We celebrated Jax's 4th birthday at a local gymnastics place. He had a blast! He loved the parachute games.
I love this picture of my little rule breakers. I am sure this was taken right before they did a flip.
This place is great for parties, because they take care of absolutely everything. All we had to bring was the cupcakes, ice cream, and kids.
I made cupcakes with Super Mario toppers.
Happy Birthday to my sweet blue-eyed boy. We love you to the moon and back!!!!

September Numbers

We got our updated numbers this month. They were lower than we expected which is always a nice surprise. We moved 6 spots from last month bringing us to 47 for a girl. We started at 97, 9 months ago, so we have moved 50 spots in all on the girls' list. We finally hit the half way point. On the siblings list we moved 2 spots from last month bringing us to sweet 16.
Praying for lots of good news and an abundance of referrals this month.

My Little Football Player

I decided last minute to sign Sawyer up for football this year. He is on the 5 year old flag football team with other little boys from his school and one other school. He had his first practices last week and a scrimmage Saturday morning. Justin is not the coach, but is helping out as much as he can. Sawyer is still trying to figure it all out. We are proud of him for trying something new.
Yesterday evening I had to run a couple of errands, so I decided to take Sawyer with me. I rarely get to spend one on one time with my kids, so even a trip to the store with just one kid is a special treat.

After our errands, I took him to Arby's for a mommy/son date. He loves the ham and cheddar sandwiches. He says they are scrumptious (his new favorite word). He chose a table for two in the back for us.
We had so much fun talking and laughing together. I am so proud of the little man he is turning into. I am so thankful for our special "date".

Overdue

I am quite overdue on updating my blog. Things have been different around here since the boys started school. They are loving it and doing well, but I am still trying to figure things out. I am still teaching Mother's Day Out twice a week. We started last week and I love my sweet class. I thought I would be so bored on the other days, but so far I have been very busy, and not bored at all.

I have signed up to substitute teach on the days I don't have MDO. I haven't had any jobs yet, which is ok, since I have been so busy with other things. I think I am ready though, so it would be nice to get some calls soon. I am hoping to put all the money I make towards our adoption fund.

Speaking of our adoption, our Lilypie ticker shows that we have been on the waitlist for 9 months and 1 week. If I was pregnant I would be overdue and miserable right about now. When we got on the wiatlist we were told the wait would be 9-12 months. A few months after that the wait was increased to 12-18 months. So, we may be half way through our wait, maybe closer, we really don't know.

Our home study expires in November, so it is time to start updating everything. Justin and I are going to get fingerprinted (again) on Friday. I just made check-up appointments with our doctors for the whole family. It is a little less exciting this time around, but I know it is all just a part of bringing our girl home.

I feel like I have many more things I could update on, but they are all totally unrelated. I guess I will just have to start blogging more, so I can catch up.