Thankful Hearts

As I was sitting here, I began to think about how much we have to be thankful for.  We have a God who loves us so much that He sent His son to die for us!  I am thankful for having a very loving, devoted husband.  We have 6 healthy children.  There are so many people out in the world who can't have children, and God has truly blessed us with many children.  I feel so blessed that God has laid it on our hearts to adopt a child.  It has been on our hearts for a few years, but now we are really listening to God's call and following through with it.  I know we will have to sacrifice a lot to raise the money, but the thought of providing a child in need with a family, just warms my heart! Our children are also becoming more excited about bringing a child into our home.  They just don't understand why it takes so long.  Here are some things our kids have said that they are thankful for:

Tyler:  I am thankful for food! 
Jacob:  I am thankful that Jesus died on the cross for me! 
Zachary:  I am thankful for what my parents provide me with!
Logan:  I am thankful for my parents & God!
Mason:  I love strawberry milk!
Kyndal:  I love Dana(her baby doll)!

Christopher:  I am thankful for God creating a person better than me and allowing me to have her as my wife!

The Lord has truly blessed our family!  We have a wonderful church family & friends!  My daycare is going very well and God keeps blessing us with more children.  All the extra kids that have came is helping pay the expenses for our adoption.  I feel like The Lord just continually shows us that this is what His will is for us.    

Fundraisers!!!

We have some new fundraisers for our adoption.  Everyone loves to shop through Amazon, right?!?!  Our fundraiser is with them!  If you click our link to get to Amazon, and place your order through it, they donate 4% of your order towards our adoption!!  It doesn't cost you anymore than it was originally.  I know we buy a lot through Amazon, especially for Christmas and on cyber Monday which is coming up soon!  We would appreciate it so much if you could share the link with your friends and family!  This account will remain open through our entire adoption process!  The link is below and on the left side of the screen.  You can click it and it takes you straight to Amazon!
Here is the link:
http://tinyurl.com/mvwdqhb

In November, we are doing another fundraiser at a restaurant.  The fundraiser is at Arby's in Fishers on November 10. The address is 13094 Publishers Dr.  Anyone who comes in between 5pm-9pm, Arby's will donate a percentage towards our adoption.  They don't even have to mention it, they donate a portion of everyone's meal between those hours.  I thought that was very nice of them to do!  We will be there after Church Sunday Night!!  Please let all your friends know that they can eat some yummy roast beef sandwiches and help a child at the same time!!

 
 Thank you for all your prayers and support, we love you all!

Waiting isn't Easy

I have been following this Ethiopian facebook board for our adoption agency.  It helps reading what others are going through on their journey of adoption.  Everyone is at different points.  Some are just starting and others are writing that they leave the next day to go to Ethiopia to pick up their child.  It's all so exciting and so helpful how everyone tries to help and give insight to others.  I'm sure as we are waiting over the next 2 years to bring our daughter home, all these families and us will become close and help each other through the waiting.  Waiting has never been easy for me!

We will be having more fundraisers coming soon, stay tuned for more details on them! Please continue to pray with us about our adoption!

  

Fun Night

We had such a fun night hanging out with everyone last night!  We just want to thank everyone who came out to support our adoption at Chick-fil-A!  We are so blessed to have so many friends who care about us.  We had another friend who contacted us and offered to watch our kids for us for the evening.  Such a blessing!  The total raised for the night was $117.00!  This brings us up to $2,300 raised so far!   
Here are a few pictures of the night!  Sorry, I didn't get pictures of everyone who showed up!

 This was the crowd of friends that came in late for the evening!

Chicken Anyone?!?!

We are so blessed to live in a community that is so giving!  God has truly blessed us!  We are really excited for this Thursday!!  We are doing our next fundraiser at Chick-fil-A.  I love Chick-fil-A!

 So far, we have raised about $2100 towards our adoption.  We had some furniture donated this past week that I sold on FB & Craigslist.  We are really excited to reach our first goal ($5325) so we can get the process moving!  I am so eager to hold our little girl and kiss her sweet face!!  This image is what keeps me going through all this fundraising.  We are also doing one more garage sale on August 2, 3, &4!!  Be sure to come check it out.  We have had lots more donated and still accepting more if anyone has anything they want to get rid of.

If you are available and want to be apart of us bringing our little girl home, come join us this Thursday, July 25 at Chick-fil-A in Noblesville between 5pm-9pm.  Just tell them you are there for the Fresh Adoption or print out the flyer.  They donate 20% towards our adoption.  They are such a generous company to do this for us.  I hope we see you there!!  God Bless!
  

The garage sale was a Huge success!!

We feel overwhelmed by all the generosity we saw over the days of our garage sale.  We are so very thankful to everyone who helped make it happen.  Thank you so much to everyone who donated items to us and everyone who helped us set it up and put it away.  I want to say an extra thank you to Mendie who helped me all 3 days with so much!  We are so blessed to have such amazing friends supporting us in our adoption.
Here are some pictures of what our sale looked like all setup.  There was so much!!  Some called it a flea market!

      There were so many generous people that came to our sale.  The total we raised at our garage sale towards our adoption is:         $2109!!!
We still have a lot of items left, so we have decided to do one more sale on August 2 & 3!  We will be accepting more donations of items if anyone has anything they didn't have time to give to us before this last sale!  Praise God for all His blessing!!

First Fundraiser!!!!

I can't believe it's almost time to do our very first fundraiser!!!  Our garage sale is this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!!  I feel so blessed by all the donations we have received.  We have filled a 10x20 storage unit, our garage and our office.  We still have more donations that are going to be dropped off on the first day of the sale.  I never thought we would have this many donations.  Chris didn't even think the garage sale was a good idea, until he saw how may donations I've been receiving from other people.  God is so good!  I have been so busy this week getting ready for the sale.  We still have to go get everything out of storage tomorrow evening and get it all set up Thursday morning.  It's going to take a few hours to get everything set up on Thursday morning!  I am so very thankful to have friends that are willing to come over and help us set up and help with the garage sale!  Thank you Anna for the flyer you made for us!!  I will update everyone on how we do with the garage sale when it's over!!  Let's see how much we can make the thermometer rise!!  This is all so exciting to me because these are all steps in bringing home our daughter from Ethiopia.   I look forward to seeing everyone at the garage sale!!!

 

Blessed with Donations

We have been so busy this past weekend collecting donations for our adoption fundraiser.  I feel so blessed by all the donations we have received.  I have been handing out flyer's to people having garage sales on Saturday explaining our fundraiser we are doing.  Many of them were very happy to donate the rest of what they had to us for our garage sale.  They were excited to help us with our adoption!  We have filled up our garage and now we are filling a storage unit that we rented.  We have also had some donations from friends.  We are getting very excited for the garage sale.  It is going to be on July 4, 5, & 6.  That will be Thursday- Saturday.  We will be accepting cash & credit cards.  I hope to see everyone come by and check out what we are selling!!  At least come and say hi!
Here are some pictures of our 10 x 20 storage unit filling from nine people donating in one day.

 

My handsome husband lifting and moving all the stuff we collected.

We still have about 2 more weeks of accepting donations and then it will be time for our garage sale!!  Thank you so very much to everyone who has donated!!

We are in need of some tables if anyone has any that we can borrow for those 3 days. 
I also was able to finally go and open our savings account for our adoption!!!! 

First Steps in Bringing Home A Child From Ethiopia

We are very excited about starting our process to adopt a child from Ethiopia.  To adopt internationally is about $30,000-$35,000.  Obviously many people do not have that kind of money sitting around, including us.  We will be doing everything we can to earn extra money for the adoption.  I am trying to start watching more children in the daycare to help earn more money and Chris is building up his business of cleaning houses.  We plan on starting the paper work in January.  We would like to have $5000 before we start.  This will help pay for our application fee, part 1 of agency fees and our home study.  I have been doing lots of research online from others who have adopted and they have great fundraising ideas.  We would like to try to pay as much as we can ourselves for our adoption, but we will do a couple of fundraisers too.  One of my favorites that I read is to do a large garage sale (which I love doing) with the help of donated items from friends and family!

On the weekend of July 4,5,& 6, we are going to have a huge garage sale and all the money will go into the adoption fund.  So, if you have anything that you would like to donate that is annoying you in your house that you want gone or would be taking to the goodwill, we would love to pick it up and sell at our garage sale.  It could be anything from baby items, clothes, toys, nick knacks, or whatever.  We would appreciate any help we can receive from our friends.  Please share this with your friends and family.  We would love to get a lot of people involved and share in our adoption journey in bringing home a child from Ethiopia.  Anyway you want to help with the garage sale would be a blessing.  I am here all the time for drop offs or we can arrange a time to come pick up any items that you would like to donate.  If anyone has any tables that we can borrow for the garage sale would be greatly appreciated.  I am working on designing some kind of a card to hand out about our fundraising garage sale to get the word out.
I also read on other blogs, that we should give our friends and family a way of donating money towards our adoption if they so desire.  So, there is a paypal button on the right side where you can donate money towards our adoption if you ever feel like your heart is leading you to.  I have also placed a thermometer to help keep track of have much we have put in the adoption account that we have made and fundraised.  I am opening the account with our first $25 towards our adoption!  Once our home study is complete, we can then apply for adoption grants to help with some of the fees for our adoption.  You can call or text me @ 317-654-0638!
God has blessed us so much by placing us around such amazing believers in Christ.  We feel so blessed by our family and our friends.          
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.- James 1:27