Following God's Calling

We have been feeling led in another direction recently by God.  It's not the first time we have felt called by God in this decision.  But this time we are listening and trying to accept this calling from Him.  After much prayer, we have made the decision to move forward in adoption.  We have been thinking about this on and off for the last seven years.  We just tried to ignore the calling in the past due to finances.  When you are called for something great, God doesn't stop calling you.  He's there waiting for you to respond to His will.  Our children are very excited to add another child to our family and think it is wonderful that we can do that through adoption. 

It is amazing watching people around us with their children that they have adopted or listening to others going through the process of their adoptions. It touches my heart to help orphaned children in the world.  A lot of you may know that we have been licensed foster parents for the last 2-3 years.  We aren't able to adopt here locally because we have six children.  We have decided to adopt internationally.  We have chose a country that we want to adopt from and we are still checking out different agencies.  We do have a favorite agency so far, but we want to check a few more out just to be sure.  The country we have decided on is Ethiopia.  I have been reading lots of blogs and watching many videos of others experience's going over there to pick up their children.  One word, Love.  God is love.  John 14:18 says, I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.    

   
So, for the next 6 months or so, we are going to continue to pray and try to cut down our debt as we start this new chapter in our life.  We ask that you pray with us in obeying God's will for His Kingdom.

 

   

Finally Moved In!

We are all moved into our new house now!!!  Thank you so much for everyone who helped make this happen!!  We love it!  Our family has grown so much over the last 8 years and the other house was way too small for our growing family.  We have so much more space in our new house.  The kids and dogs are adjusting well.  This house is insulated really well.  You can barely hear the kids throughout the house.  I managed to get the house pretty much unpacked in a matter of 2-3 days.  I didn't realize how much stuff we have.  We managed to fill a 26 ft truck up a couple of times and we still have some stuff in our old house that we need to pick up.

It was a rough first week in our new house.  Our lawn mower broke, washer machine broke, and transmission went out in our van.  So far, we have managed to fix our van.  Thank goodness for warranties.  We also have a warranty on our lawn mower, so hopefully that will be fixed in the next couple of weeks.  Our poor washer machine has no warranty, boo.  So, it's not fixed yet!

We had a lot of friends over for Memorial Day!!  There was about 45 people that came!  Luckily we have a large back yard and home now to entertain this many people.  We love having friends over for BBQ's.  We are hoping this summer to have our youth group from church over for a BBQ. 

New House

We are very excited to tell everyone that we are moving.  Not very far, but still it's exciting to be moving.  We have lived in our current house for the last 8 1/2 years.  We moved in Christmas Eve, 2 weeks before Zachary was born.  It's amazing that when we moved in this house, that we only had 2 kids.  Now we are moving out with 6 kids.  We have definitely had great times in this house as we have been expanding our family.  Most of our kids have learned to walk in this house and this house holds a lot of memories.  I would say that Zachary is having the hardest time with the move.  He doesn't want to leave our current house.  I'm sure he will change his mind once we are moved in to the new house.  We went to the new house last night and the kids loved it.  The back yard is at least twice as big as our current back yard we have now.  We are a large family so I was very excited to hear that is has 3 1/2 bathrooms.  Here are a few pictures of the house.....

   

I love the kitchen, it is very open!

The laundry room is huge, for me anyway!!  This is just one side of it!

This is one side of the backyard from the deck!  The kids had fun last night

 running back and forth across it!