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

Why Ethiopia??

Why Ethiopia??  You may be wondering why we chose Ethiopia over other countries or domestic adoption.  We have known that adoption has been on our hearts for a few years.  We just didn't know if it would ever happen.  We knew international adoption was really expensive, but our heart has always been in foreign countries with orphaned children.

We originally got our foster license hoping we would be able to adopt our nephews, but that didn't happen.  The state of Indiana would license us to adopt our nephews, but not other children.  They don't let you foster other children if you have 5 or more in your home.  We have been licensed for 2-3 years and have only had one placement for one day.  That was only because they couldn't find anyone in the middle of the night to take a newborn baby.  They took her the next afternoon and moved her.  We have never had another placement.  So adopting a infant from the foster care system will never happen for our family.

As far as trying to adopt an infant straight from a birth parent domestically is very unlikely.  It is very doubtful that they would choose a large family.  There are so many families out there who are waiting to adopt a baby locally, that we figured we would leave the US to them.

 There are a lot of countries that adopt children out to the US.  There are not very many countries that we can adopt from though.  There are only a few countries that will adopt out infants and that allow families with more than 4 children to adopt.  We have 2 friends who have adopted from Africa, we have another friend who will be starting the process soon and another friend who is adopting from Europe.  I started looking up information about these different countries that we could adopt from.  The different things I was reading and watching on the internet basically all had the same statistics.  With 150 million orphans in the world, 48 million of those orphans live in Africa, 5 million of those  children live in Ethiopia (half the size of Texas).   Half of those children will never attend school and 88% will never attend secondary school.  1 in 10 children die before their first birthday.  The average income is under $1 a day. After reading all those statistics (everything I researched, they kept coming up everywhere)and watching gotcha videos from Ethiopia, I knew that was the country we would adopt from.  I prayed about it and talked to Chris and then we both prayed about it.  We talked to some friends and they prayed about it for us too.  We know this is where God is leading us to adopt from.  This is my favorite gotcha day video that I saw!!  I bet you can't watch it and not cry your eyes out.  This is the video I was watching when Logan came up to me, looked at the tears going down my face and sat down to watch it with me.  I read all the statistics out loud and he saw all the babies and told me we need to go get one of those babies!  In my mind, I was thinking, I couldn't agree more!