>Home study finished!

>Yay! We had our last home study visit yesterday! I am so thankful that is all taken care of! What a blessing! Our social worker said she’d have it finished within 2 weeks. We are grateful she has been doing this for 20 + years, so she knows exactly what she’s doing! She said she’d send us the draft for any corrections that need to be made, then send it to our agency. They’ll send it to the USCIS! Now we’re waiting on our fingerprinting appointment, then approval from USCIS to adopt, then the paperwork is off to Korea! Yay! We’re getting closer!

The visit yesterday wasn’t bad at all. I know everyone said it would be fine, but I guess I just wasn’t sure until it happened! In the back of my head I kept thinking, “Ok she hasn’t looked at the house at all yet, so this last visit she’s gonna scrutinize everything!” Of course that’s not what happened. We finished up with all the home study questions & then she took a very brief tour of the house! It wasn’t what I’d worked myself up for.

One of the things we had to talk about was finances. I don’t know why they need to see access to all that money up front! Hopefully what we’ve told them will be enough. We also added all of our fundraisers that we or others are planning on doing. Another thing our social worker suggested was to see if we knew anyone with frequent flyer miles that they may want to donate to us for our trip over to Korea. I hadn’t thought of that. We don’t know many people that travel either, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to send out an email or letter & see what response we got. Well, today right after church a dear lady came up to me & asked when we were going to Korea to pick up our baby. I told her it would be a while probably towards the end of next year, & she said that she wanted to pay for our flights to get our baby! Wow! I was overcome! I hadn’t even had a chance to even think about sending out the letter or email to our friends & family! God answered that prayer before I even had a chance to really even ask! Praise! He is so good to us! We don’t deserve all of this, but He is continually blessing us & we KNOW that it is from Him & no one else! To God be ALL the glory!

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>Remember

>Just wanted to take a minute in the busyness of this season to remember. I want to remember what my Christ did for me. I don’t deserve the love, sacrifice, and mercy that He has shown me. Jesus came as a precious baby into this world for a purpose. The purpose was to live a perfect life in order to die for our sins. He went through so much and was humble through it all. I hope He accepts my unperfect love and faith, which fail time and again. Let’s remember what we truly should celebrate this season! I’m sure we all have read the story of baby Jesus many times, but if you think about it in the next couple of days take a minute to read it again. Look in Matthew 1 and Luke 1-2. He made a way in a manger!

Merry Christmas everyone! God loves you so much! Just look at what He did for all of us if we only accept His gift.

Saw this on a friend’s blog. My computer won’t load it to here for some reason, so go check out the song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cejDvTk5wKs
Merry Christmas to our baby, wherever they may be.

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>Final Visit

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Our last visit is for Saturday @ 1:00! Yay! We are so excited! We are going to begin on our “dear birthmother” letter, and have already began gathering photos of our family & friends! We will take plenty of pictures this Christmas to send over! They said they like holiday photos. We’ll have lots to choose from I’m sure! So after the visit Saturday, we’re just waiting on our USCIS fingerprinting appointment! Unless there’s something I’m forgetting, which I’m sure can happen, but we’ve got our checklists, & they seem to be pretty much complete! Except for the last homestudy visit, fingerprinting, “dear birthmother” letter, and photos! That so exciting! We’ve been so blessed and can’t wait to see how God is going to send more blessings, whatever way He chooses!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while! I’ve been a little busy! My wonderful friend Lindsay got married this past weekend! I can’t believe it’s over! She was a beautiful bride! So after all the wedding festivities, I had to catch up on Christmas stuff that I hadn’t had the chance to do. As well as catch up on my house! Whew! I only have a few more gifts to wrap. Normally I’ve been finished with wrapping for a while now! Oh well!

Wanna see the beautiful bride?

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>Small Update

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Well, not much of an update. We had our physicals for the adoption today. Thankfully I had a MD appt. because yesterday I had the worst headache ever, and then last night after church I got home and started feeling really bad. I had a fever all night, had body aches and just felt horrible! Well, the MD said it was just a viral infection. Which I came to find out had been going around. I’m thankful it was just that because I’ve got a lot to do this weekend! My friend, Lindsay, is getting married! YAY!

So anyways, the appt’s went good. They filled out our papers right there. Bill just has to go back in to get his TB test read on Sat. morning, and then we’re good! Now we’re just waiting to have our last home study visit! I hope we can squeeze it in before Christmas!

Just for fun, here’s some gingerbread cookies my sister-in-law, my step-mom, & I made! Aren’t they cute!?

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>Blessed

>We truly are blessed! We have wonderful family & friends! I was blessed this morning to sing with my brother in church. He played the guitar & then we harmonized! I love singing with my brother!

After church we had a bake sale to raise money for our adoption! Again we were blessed more than we ever would’ve thought! Our God is faithful! He has provided already for our next big payment. It’s not due for another month or two! We are so blessed! Now we have to start saving for that big chunk to send to Korea! It’s definitely more than what we’ve raised so far, but like I said, God is faithful!

Hope you all had a great Sunday!

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>Praise!!!!!!!!!

>So, you know we’ve been waiting for USCIS to receive our I-600a form. I sent it certified with return receipt on the 1st so it should’ve been there by now. Well, this morning the status @ the USPS site still said it was forwarded, to where I don’t know, on the 5th. Still no return receipt either. However, today in the mail we received our I-797c paper! This doesn’t really mean much except they received our application and money, and our application is in process. They’ll send us our appointment for our fingerprinting soon hopefully. So, I checked the USPS site again just to see if it had changed since we now had this. No change! No return receipt or anything! I’m so happy they got it, but I was worried for no reason, except that someone didn’t do their job in scanning our letter! I paid the $5 or so for the certified mail with return receipt for nothing! I know it’s not much, but right now, every penny counts. Oh well, I’m just so glad they did get it and everything is moving forward. I was worried this was gonna set us back a month or so by the time we got it back and had to re-send and all that. Whew! Praise the Lord! He’s AWESOME!

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>Education…check!

>Well, we just finished our education for the adoption! Yay! I’m glad that course is over! We took “With Eyes Wide Open.” Some of it was kind of silly, but it was required. In the spring we will go to 2 classes each on a Saturday from our home study agency. They aren’t required, but are good for us to go to and were included in our costs to them. So, we’ll go!

On another note, I’m getting worried about our I-600a form. I sent it all on 12/01. I sent it certified with return receipt and haven’t gotten the return receipt back yet. So, I looked up the tracking on the USPS site, and it says it was forwarded on the 5th. It just says they were directed to forwarded it, or something was wrong with the address. I thought I looked at that thing about a hundred times before sending it, but I don’t know. Now I’m just wondering if maybe they asked them to forward it to their PO Box or what. There were 2 addresses. A physical one and a PO Box. I sent it to the physical one since I had a return receipt on it. I’m just wondering where it’s at! That had important info. in there as well as some checks! I hope tomorrow when I look it up, it says it’s been received. Hopefully I didn’t do something wrong! 😦 Oh bother……………

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