Our church yard sale yesterday was a HUGE success!!  We sold like crazy from 6:45-noon and raised more than $1600 to bring our little girl home!!  It was so amazing.  We were showered with gifts last week by my sweet aunts and uncles via our Pure Charity campaign.  These fundraising successes have gone a long way to calm our hearts and minds while we face the next step: a wait.

Yep.  We have to wait.  I broke the adoption process down into four steps in an earlier post: Home Study, Dossier, Wait to be matched, Wait to travel.  After talking with our agency, we are basically going to stop and hold at the end of Step One, the Home Study, until this time next year.  Our home study can't be finalized because it must affirm that we meet China's criteria for an adoptive family, and at this time we do not.  This is kind of a bummer because we were hoping we could at least work on other aspects of our paperwork, apply for grants, etc, but we can't do any of that without a finalized Home Study.  We can do our own fundraising (Cackleberry, maybe a silent auction online, maybe a t-shirt relaunch with long sleeves or a sweatshirt?), but that's all until next fall.  Blah.

Our kids love to watch Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.  (We like to watch it too.)  It's basically their guide to life.  There is a song about waiting: "When you wait, you can play, sing or imagine anything."  It works well for waiting rooms, waiting in line, stuff like that.  We are using it as our guide for this waiting time:

Play:

We refuse to miss this time when Andrew is 6, Anna is 3, and Sam is 1.  By the time baby girl gets here, they could be 8, 5, and 3.  We can't waste it.  So we will play, and lean in, and treasure every day rather than wish it away.

Sing:
We are going to sing our Daniel Tiger songs and play loud happy music in the car.  We will sing songs to God and about God and how he always keeps his promises, always goes with us, and always brings beauty out of pain, even when those promises are hard to believe. 

Imagine anything:
This one is hard, and doesn't make waiting easy.  We are imagining our sweet girl's face and the day when we will meet her.  We are dreaming about the adventure of traveling to China, both for our gotcha trip and as a family when the kids are a little older.  We are praying so hard that she will be surrounded by love every day until we get to her. 

​Thanks for waiting with us.  

Today we had our final home study visit!  In a couple of weeks our home study will be final, which is a huge step!  We had to collect loads of stuff, write loads of stuff, and talk about ourselves for hours, but (for our part) it's finally done, thank goodness!  

This is a transition for us in the process.  Once our home study is finalized we can begin applying for grants, so please be praying that we will have success with that.   Along with grant applications, we are also completing the I800a, an immigration form requesting pre-approval for our daughter's immigration.  This comes with a hefty $775 fee, so that's our next fundraising goal.

We are having a community yard sale at our church (First Baptist of Waynesville) on July 29th.  We are collecting things for the yard sale at church on the 27th and 28th, so if you have anything you'd like to donate, let us know! Otherwise, come out the last Saturday of July and see if we have any treasures you want to take home! :)