No money, NO problem! =)

After the earthquake in Haiti, we felt an urgent calling from God to help orphans. After praying, researching and through lots of tears of brokenness and surrender, we decided to adopt from Ethiopia. It makes me sad sometimes to think that it took a horrible tragedy like an earthquake to get me to adopt. Why wasn't I open to it before? How had I shut that part of my brain off for so long? The part that knew that there were millions of orphans in the world??? But, instead of wondering why it took us so long, I'm going to just be thankful that we are aware now, and doing something about it. Once we heard God's calling for our lives, we jumped. We don't own a home. I'm a stay-at-home mom, and we live in a beautiful (read, expensive) beach town in California. Meaning, we don't have extra money. I read a blog friend's post about excuses (read it HERE), and we just dove on in. If God called us to something, we knew He would provide along the way. The quote I hear over and over is, "God funds what he favors." My response to that is, "Can I get an Amen?"!!!

The cost of international adoption is about $28,000-$36,000. It depends on the time of year you fly, and different hold ups, but it's straight up expensive. This amount of money is what I would make if I was working full-time as a teacher. We didn't have any money saved. As in, we had the minimum $500 you need to have in your savings' account, so that you don't incur monthly charges! Where in the world we were going to get this kind of money? Well, within the first 7 months, God provided $16,000! Every step of the way, there has been exactly what we've needed to pay our adoption expenses. Sometimes with just $100 left over in our adoption account.

If you've read our blog, then you know that we've done just about every fundraiser that has ever been done. We've had a great time doing it, and it's definitely been my other full-time job. You can read about our fundraisers HERE and HERE. God helped us raise every last penny that we would need. Now we are just in a holding pattern as we wait for our referral. We are unofficially #20 for a boy and #27 for a girl. We have been on the waitlist for 16 months, and if the rate of referrals continues, we will see our child's face around January. In the meantime, our main set of paperwork (our dossier) is going to expire in November, so we are about to start working on that.

In other news, our oldest daughter starts first grade on Monday. Then, our youngest daughter starts preschool on September 3rd! Never did I imagine I would have 2 mornings a week without a child at home with me. Although I'm going to enjoy the time, (start running again, go to the store alone, run around working on adoption paperwork, and hopefully become a more faithful blogger) we definitely did not plan on this. I will not take these mornings for granted, but I also can't wait for those 2 precious mornings a week that I have alone with our newest child, where I can give him or her all of my focus, attention, snuggles and time.

Hope you all had a wonderful summer! Can't wait to share our referral news with you one day! I like to chant 2012! 2012! or September! September! - like this will help with our timeline or something =)

Love,
Cat