Just Stuff

The kids started their achievement tests today and will be testing tomorrow and Friday also. Then we will be officially finished with school for the year! We are all very excited about that. We are planning to have a family fun night on Friday to celebrate. Soon I will have a 6th grader and a 3rd grader! Wow! I must be getting old. Well, I am planning to attend our 20 year class reunion this summer, so I guess it's true. I am old! ;-)

We are still making progress on our adoption paperwork, but not as quickly as I would like. We thought we sent all our documents to the Indiana Secretary of State, but found out that each document needs to go to the state it originated in to be certified. So, we had to send stuff to 4 states. We have done that and received everything back from 3 states but we are still waiting on Georgia. The problem with Georgia is that they would not certify the state-issued birth certificate that I ordered because it did not have a pen-in-hand signature on it. So, I had to return it to Vital Records and have them ship the new one to the Secretary of State. Hopefully I'll get that back sometime soon. I also started looking into where to send the stuff for the Chinese Consulate to certify (which is our next step). There are several consulates across the US and since we have stuff from 4 states, we have to send the documents to 3 different consulate offices. I know all this work will be worth it one day, but it sure is a pain now!

A new list of adoptable children was published this week, but we didn't find any matches. We are confident that God will lead us to our daughter, and we can't wait to find her!
We had another yard sale on Saturday and raised another $579.66! We took almost everything that was left to Goodwill after the sale but kept a few things to try to sell on Craigslist. So, hopefully we'll make a little more money from that stuff.
Last week Todd took some documents to the county clerk to be certified and it cost him $45. The next day I mailed them to the Kentucky Secretary of State along with a $45 check. The shipping via UPS cost me $10 and some change. That day when I got home we had a $100 anonymous donation come in the mail. It completely covered our expenses for those 2 days. We know that God is working things out and confirming our call to adopt, and we are so thankful!
To date our expenses have been $4,195.36 and we have raised $2,896.53!