God’s Gift From India

December has been a crazy and exciting month! At the beginning of this month we filled out a packet of starter paperwork and mailed a check for our first two big adoption fees. Since then we’ve been working on renewing our passports, getting some “pre-home study” paperwork together, fundraising and filling out the applications for two home study grants that would help offset some of the costs of that portion of adoption.  We want to share some huge PRAISES from this last month... 1) We’ve sold ALL 500 pieces of our puzzle... that’s SO amazing! A huge thank you to all who gave! We’ve been so blessed by people who gave to buy 1 piece all the way up to 150 pieces! Every donation we’ve gotten is a reminder of what an awesome community of family and friends we have... this has been so encouraging to us and we appreciate each one of you! (The picture above is the puzzle completed... the back is filled with names of those who gave) 2) We finished and mailed in our starter paperwork

We have some exciting news… we are almost 1/4 th of the way to having our puzzle completed!!! (See the picture at the bottom of this post) That is so exciting for us because that means we are even closer to having our home study fully funded! THANK YOU SO MUCH to those who have given online or in person! What a blessing it has been for our family to read your sweet words of encouragement, to hear that you are praying for us, and to know that your support is getting us a little closer to having our little one home! The cool thing about being closer to having our home study portion funded is that once our home study is complete we are one big step closer to being matched with a child! Also, most adoption grants require a completed home study to apply… so once our home study is finished we can apply for a lot of different grants that will hopefully help with adoption costs as well! We still have about 390 pieces of our puzzle that need to be “bought” before it is comple

Since we have announced that we are adopting, it has been awesome to hear from so many family and friends who have committed to praying for us as we begin this journey! What a gift it is to know that that our family, this process, and our sweet little one are being covered in prayer! To those praying for us we want to say THANK YOU! This is the greatest need we have as we eagerly anticipate welcoming another child into our family! Some of our family and friends have asked how else they can support us as we begin this process. Aside from your prayer support, we are also fundraising to cover some of the costs of our adoption. To be honest, adoption is expensive... and the big numbers we see on our fee sheet can be a bit intimidating! Throughout our adoption process we will pay for things like agency fees, a home study, background checks, fingerprinting, psychological evaluations, adoption training/education, visas, passports, flights.... and the list goes on. All of these expens