Just a little bit of news

As the title of this post indicates, we don't have much to share at this point. We do have a few items of praise.

#1. We now have a location for our fundraising event on December 8th. It will be held at Community Christian Church in Fairfield Township. I have never had any connection to this church before, but both the head pastor and executive pastor have been as gracious and accommodating as they could possibly be. We have been surprised and touched by the warmth of their interaction with us.

#2. God has continued to provide funds, and we were able to make another payment to our agency this month.

#3. We have already gotten our fingerprinting appointment for our USCIS approval. For those of you who are not familiar with all the steps of an adoption, one of the pieces that is always necessary for an international adoption is approval from the US department of Immigration. First, you submit a form and fee to the department. Then they send the form to the part of the department that actually processes it. (We still can't figure out why they won't let us send the form directly to the correct part of the department, but that is just the way that it works.) Then you get a letter from the department with an appointment to get fingerprinted. Often the appointment is as much as three weeks to a month away, but ours was only a week out. Once they have your fingerprints, the department processes your request and sends you a letter of approval. That letter (the 797) is a really big deal, and usually the last piece you wait for before sending in your dossier. We are very thankful to have our appointment scheduled, and much, much sooner than we thought would be the case.

#4. We have our first coffee buyer! Thanks to their purchase, Isabelle and Hallie's adoption fund now has five dollars in it. We bought some of the Just Love Coffee through a friend's store front, and we can tell you that it is very good. We tried their Sumatra, and were quite impressed.

We also have some prayer requests.

#1. Please pray that God will bless our fundraising efforts. We have submitted another grant, are working hard to plan this silent auction fundraiser, and are still trying to spread the word about our wristbands and coffee store front. We also have a Thirty-one gifts sale scheduled for November 10th. If you live in the Pittsburgh area and would like to attend, let me know, and I will have an invitation sent to you. If you live anywhere else, the Facebook page is now active, so you can participate there. Just let me know that you would like an invitation, and I will send you one.

#2. Please pray for us as we work on our dossier. The two most challenging parts at this point are our medical exams and employment letters. Because I am self-employed, mine must be written by a CPA, and that can be challenging. Pray that God will enable us to gather all the needed pieces.

#3. Pray about our fingerprinting appointment. My fingerprints have been rejected in the past, especially in the winter time, because my hands get so dry that my fingers crack. I am using lots of lotion, and praying that the prints will be accepted this time around.

#4. Pray for Hallie tomorrow. November 3rd is her birthday, and it makes us very sad to think about how far away she is with no one to celebrate with her. She will be three years old.

Wow, I guess we had more to share than I realized. I expected this to be a much shorter post. Sometimes it is good for me to sit down and write out everything that is going on, because it reminds me how much God is working in our story.

Thanks,

Kristie

Update and a change of date

I have a few quick updates. Donations are continuing to come in, and we will be able to make another payment to our adoption agency this month. Although we are still far short of the amount that we owe them, we are thankful for each step, and greatly appreciate all of the people who are helping us bring our daughters home.

In our last update, we mentioned that we had a silent auction fundraiser coming up on November 10th, but we are going to have to move the date. As you might remember, we are hosting this event with our good friends, and they just got news that their paperwork is being processed several weeks ahead of schedule, and they will be in Russia for the first of their three trips during the first half of November. We are overjoyed for them, and quite relieved to have an extra month to plan this event. The new date for this fundraiser is December 8th. We already had a craft sale planned for that week, so we are going to combine the two events. If you are in the Cincinnati area, please stop by. You might be able to find some great Christmas presents there. And for those of you who don't live in the Cincinnati area, the items that don't sell on the 8th will be available online afterward.

My sister-in-law is going to be hosting a Thirty-one party for us in the greater Pittsburgh area. The Thirty-one consultant has agreed to donate her entire commission to Isabelle and Hallie's adoption. That will be 25% of the sales that day. This event will be on November 10th (That is not a mistake. The date really is the same as the original plan for our silent auction), and again there will be a way for people to participate on-line if they don't live near Pittsburgh, so stay tuned for details about that. This could be another way to help our girls while doing some Christmas shopping, so please considering being a part of this.

Thanks for all of your prayers and encouragement. This process is long and tiring at times, but we just keep thinking about how wonderful it will be to have our girls home with us.

Kristie

Fundraising Update

We just want to give everyone a quick update on the fundraising opportunities for our adoption.

Grants:
We submitted a grant to National Adoption Foundation the middle of last month. Their board was supposed to meet the last week of September, and recipients were to be notified in the next two weeks. We are now two full weeks into October, so we are assuming we did not get that grant. We are disappointed, but we know that God has the perfect plan of the funding of our adoption. We are able to resubmit our application for consideration next quarter, so we are planning to do that.

We submitted an application to Help Us Adopt near the end of last month. The deadline is the middle of this month, but they won't make a decision until early December. We would appreciate your prayers, as they tend to give priority to childless couples.

We are nearly finished with our application to Show Hope. The deadline for that one is the end of this month, and we anticipate sending it in at the beginning of next week. They will make a decision within 90 days of that point.

Other fundraisers:

As I mentioned in a previous post, our pancake breakfast and silent auction fundraiser was a great success in spite of a smaller crowd than we had hoped for. As a result of this fundraiser and a few donations that came in afterward, we were able to submit our 800a and make a small payment to our agency. Praise God!

We're having a similar fundraiser on this end of town next month. Since November is national Adoption Month, we are hoping for a better turn-out. We are also having this event in the evening, not the morning, so hopefully we won't have all the sports and work conflicts that we had the first time around. We are going to do a dessert and silent auction this time, and might even have some live entertainment. We already have a few donations in hand, and several more are already pledged.

Greg already wrote a brief post about our wristband fundraiser, and we have had some success with that.

We also have a new opportunity to benefit our adoption just by buying coffee. Simply follow the link to our store front https://justlovecoffee.com/godwinadoption. Anything you buy will benefit our adoption. All of their coffee is Fair Trade, and as much as possible is also organic and shade grown. Check it out.

I think that's probably enough for now. We have two more fundraisers in the early planning stages, but I will save them for a later post.

Kristie

Wristbands for Our Girls

As a way of raising funds for Isabelle's and Hallie's adoptions, we are selling wristbands imprinted with their names. We are wearing them as a way of reminding us to pray for our girls constantly, and as a way of starting conversations with others about them. I haven't had any luck with that so far, but who knows, maybe someday somebody will ask me why I have a couple of wristbands on my arm. If you'd like to have a pair to wear along with us, then click here to order a pair. We're asking for $5 per pair, and you'll get a receipt for a tax-deductible donation of $4.23, per IRS regulations. They'll be up on the right-hand side of our blog, too, so you'll always be able to find them there.

I'm sorry for the lack of posts this week. Everyone in the family—except for Gabriela—has gotten sick over the past five days, and we're spending our evenings working on grant applications. Over the past two weeks, we've managed to submit two applications and have another just over half-way done. We expect to get an answer on the first grant we applied for in the next 7-10 days, and we are anxious to hear their answer. Thanks for all of your prayers, and we hope to give you a longer update before too long!

Greg

Fundraiser Update

Well, we had our fundraiser today, and it went really, really well. We were praying that it would bring in enough money for us to submit for our USCIS approval, and although we didn't quite make that goal, we did get pretty close. I think we are only going to be about $200 short now. We were so touched by the people who came out to support us by volunteering, bidding or donating. We are planning to meet with the Brewer family in the next week or so to discuss what we did well and what can be improved for future fundraising events. If you were there, we would love to have your feedback on that.

We are all four very tired and sore (Greg's back is bothering him, and I seem to have messed up my knee), but we are happy and feel very blessed by the day. Thank you so much to everyone who came or helped.

Tomorrow is the big day!

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow is our big pancake breakfast and silent auction fundraiser. We would really appreciate prayers as we try to pull together all the last minute details. I think the part that scares me most is knowing that we have to leave here with all four kids at seven 'o clock tomorrow morning. Wish us luck! :-)

Pancake Breakfast and Silent Auction

I have mentioned in the last post or two that we have been working on a large fund raiser, and I promised that I would blog about it soon. I am finally getting around to that now.

Some of our very close friends, Dan and Sarah Brewer, are in the process of adopting a little girl named Anna from Russia. Anna is HIV+, and she will be six years old in December. A few months ago, Sarah suggested that our two families work together to do a pancake breakfast and silent auction fund raiser to support both their adoption and the adoption of our girls. We agreed, and we have been busily putting pieces in place ever since.

The first step was to find a location and a date, and that part was pretty easy. North Cincinnati Community Church in Mason, Ohio has agreed to host it for us, and their kitchen manager and his daughter have even agreed to make the pancakes. The event will be held on Saturday, September 29th from 9:00-11:00.

Once we found the location, it was time to start tracking down donations for the auction. Sarah and I have spent almost every free minute making phone calls, writing letters, dropping those letters off, sending emails, etc. The work has really paid off, though, and the response from the community has been very, very positive. We have received donations from restaurants, entertainment industries, and individuals. Both our family and the Brewer family are really excited about everything that we have received, and we are looking forward to the event.

Now the only challenge that remains is to spread the word and get people to come. We are working on fliers and having announcements put in church bulletins, but the best way to let people know is word-of-mouth. If you live in the greater Cincinnati area and are free that day, please try to come. Please also tell your friends, neighbors, and family members about it. We are hoping to have between 150 and 200 people.

Please join us in praying that this fund-raising event will be a success and that it will get both our family and the Brewers closer to their adoption goals. Even more importantly, please pray that we will glorify God through our actions during this event and throughout the adoption process.