Thank you....

      I just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you. So many people have just been so amazing in this process. Family, friends, old friends and old aquaintances, and literally complete strangers have shown us support.  It just is really amazing to see God bringing all of us together to help one little boy, that none of us have met.  It brings me to tears.  I have always thought that I was a giving person, at least I tried to be, but one thing I know for sure now, that even if I was giving, that I know I will be way more purposeful in my giving (time, money, etc) if that makes sense. Not in a righteous way but just realizing the struggle it takes to complete an adoption is mindblowing, and so many people have been so helpful along the way. I know I have given and I know I have volunteered but alot of these things were by chance.  For example, giving to the boyscouts in front of the grocery store or hearing a radio station trying to raise funds for a children's hospital, when a natural disaster strikes donating to that go fund me, or volunteering for Red Cross. So I can not say they were actually purposeful. When the opportunity arose in the past I gave, either time or money, no , not every time of course but alot. I am not sure exactly of what I am saying right now but I just know that I want to seek ways to help not just neccesarily opportunitites for me to help finding me?  The thing about it is, we have so much time in the day, right? How much of that time is wasted on simply ridiculous things.  What could I be doing with this time? I could be doing more.  I mean well almost 2 years ago now I quit my fulltime job and I went on to a volunteering site online just to check it out.  Some of the things on that site are as simple as sending a card to an elderly person with no one. That takes 5 minutes. I did not do it.  I will. The thing is ...some people have given to us in really amazing big ways during this adoption, which is soo amazing and we are so grateful. Some people have given in really what you would think "smaller" ways yet have had the same affect.  I am pretty much just rambling right now. I just want to say thank you to all of you that has supported us in any form, from prayers to donations of time or money or even just advice. This is no small feat and I am just simply amazed at the work at hand, I am also amazed at the affect it is having on me.   I want to wake up in the morning and seek ways to help....I want to use the time I have.  Even though I have always had a great desire to help...this journey has inspired me to be even more purposeful in this way, and way less fearful.  When I say fearful it can be a number of things, for me, alot of times it is shyness.  The biggest thing that has ever held me back was just my social shyness...and when you wan to help, or fundraise or whatever..that is a huge wall to climb over lol.  God has taken care of me so well...fear should never stop me.  "For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”

Up and running....

   It has been awhile since I have written anything and for that I apologize! I am going to be better now I promise ! So here is what is going on in the process...due to some amazing family, friends and complete strangers we had raised enough money to start the process of going to get Nick. Since that time we hired our adoption agency and commited "officially" to Nick.  We started our homestudy and are pretty much done ! I just went over the draft today and we just need to make a few tiny corrections, but that should be done and I am hoping to send off our homestudy to be approved by our facilitators in Nick's country and then send it to immigration here in the States by early next week.  I am basically finished with my paper chase for our dossier(which is a pack of paper to be sent to our adoptive country).  After we get approval from immigration here, which will take approximately 6 weeks (fingers crossed) we will send our dossier to Nick's country and then from that point on we need to be ready to leave to go meet and hopefully bring him home ! We will get a phone call from his country with an appointment for their department of family services and we need to be their by that date ! This seems to take around a month to get an appointment ! So we are praying to have our little guy home this spring if all goes well ! That is basically why I have not blogged much, I have bee very busy working on this stuff and plus we had the holidays upon us!
   We still have a long ways to go with fundraising but I will be basically devoting more of my time to this now since our major paperwork is done ! We have a family sponsorship page set up with Reeces Rainbow(http://reecesrainbow.org/102613/sponsoryaklin) and will be adding a link for that to this page ! Please pray for our little guy that God would prepare his heart for us ! Pray hard for a speedy process so we can get there and bring him home ! We are so ready to hold him !