SOAP!! and stuff...

J's cousin and his wife sell soap and other fun things on their website. http://www.soapandcotton.com/
They donate $1 to our adoption for every $5 you spend, AND will give us $5 for each sale for the first 20 sales!! You just have to click Stewart adoption under the tab Support a Mission under the Merchandise tab.
We're so blessed to see all the different ways people want to help us bring this little guy home. Thank you all so much!!
J and I had our biometrics appt. on Dec. 17th so we're hoping to get our I171-H pretty soon...we don't have all the money we need to send our dossier yet, but we will in His timing.
We had a wonderful Christmas with our family and are looking forward to next Christmas when we'll have another fun little one around. We are so excited to see what this new year will bring as well. God bless!!

Christmas Cookie Sale

WOW!! That was fun, crazy, exciting, tiring and a HUGE blessing. I had about half a dozen people help bake, a couple people help with set up and the perfect amount of people to buy!! The cookies are ALLLL GONE!! Thank you Lord!! We used a classroom at church to sell the cookies. We put out about 3 long tables covered with tablecloths and put all the cookie platters on them with tags in front of each stating what type of cookie it was. We had a few simple decorations on the tables. We had another table set up with all the homemade flavored popcorn my friend made and another table with all the fudge, pumpkin bread, bark, cookbooks and the scale on it. My brother donated boxes from his bakery that we placed next to some "gloves" (sandwich bags) on a table right by the door. People grabbed a box and strolled through while listening to Christmas music play and picked what they wanted. We weighed the box when they were done and they paid by the pound. We rounded up or down to the nearest pound as I didn't want to deal with 1/2 and 3/4 :) People were just fine with that and the boxes held about 2 lbs of cookies when full. Everyone commented on how wonderful everything looked and how smooth the sale was. Overall it was a great success!! I highly recommend doing this as a fundraiser!! Already trying to figure out what I can do for Valentine's Day ;)
Lastly, we have some family who is selling soap to help us raise money. It smells wonderful!!! Check them out at http://www.soapandcotton.com/!! They will donate $1 for every $5 sold.

Fingerprinting Appt.

Dec. 17th is the day!!! And if we receive our I171-H a week after that then we could possibly be DTE by the end of the year.......HOWEVER, we are praying for a Christmas miracle. We need almost 3/4 of the money to send our dossier...God knows how we'll get it. And I can't wait to see Him work...
I will be happy to be done with this cookie sale after Sunday, it has been quite time and thought consuming. Not to mention there isn't a flat surface left in my house that doesn't have cookies on it!! I am going to decorate the "cookie sale" room today with some friends. It's going to look great!!

Received!

Well the USCIS received our application and now we are waiting for our fingerprinting appt. We'll have to travel down to Portland for that and there is an Ethiopian restaurant down there we can't wait to try.
Getting ready for our cookie sale, my freezer is full o' cookies!! Praying that it will be a successful fundraiser.
We've also applied for one grant already but there suprisingly isn't much else out there. It's hard to believe that in this big, rich country there isn't more help out there to pay a child's ransom. But again, God's economy is not ours-He can and will do this. So excited to watch how He pulls it all together...

Sent!!

Well we've had an exciting few weeks...We got our home study rough draft last week, I reviewed it and got the final draft approved the next day!! Then got the notarized copy of it a few days later!!! This is a huge piece of the process and I am thankful we're done with it. On Friday I picked up the home study report and sent our I600-A that day!! It is a form that once approved means we're allowed to adopt internationally. We will get fingerprinted too. When we get the approval back (called the I171-H) then we can mail our dossier to Ethiopia. Again my goal is to get it across the pond before the end of the year-Lord willing :)
Our home study states that we can adopt a child from 0-3 yr. old and we are approved for more than one child. We did that because we have heard of instances where people get over there to get their child and find out there is a sibling that may have been in another orphanage and even a case where they found out their child was a twin!! How could you leave that other sibling behind?! Whenever I've prayed for our son I would hear sons (plural). Don't know why...we are not looking to adopt 2 but we'll leave that up to the Lord. I know my hubby hasn't felt that leading but again, not OUR will but His will be done. Frankly I want another excuse to go Ethiopia, so I'd rather only get one child this time ;)  I've never been to Ethiopia but there is a piece of my heart there. A son whom I've never met but who God ordained from before the earth began to be a part of our family. How could my heart not ache to be there??
Another big key to getting the home study report back is that now we can apply for grants. We desperately need a big chunk of change to send our dossier to Ethiopia. We're only a quarter of the way to our goal. We have plenty of fundraisers going on right now. I have three friends who are donating a portion of their business sales to our cause. Our cookie sale is coming up quickly. I have many dear friends/family who are going to bake on our behalf :) We'll sell cookies by the pound right before Christmas, how can we go wrong? Pray for this event and God's continued guidance in this process.

More fundraising :)

We had our auction a few weeks ago. It was so fun!! Our auctioneer was hilarious and such a huge blessing. Quite a few people from J's Dad's church showed up and a few others. It wasn't a huge turnout but God still provided and I think it was a blessing to all involved. We also received a check from his Dad's church for all the change they collected over the past month, and they matched funds for it!! So exciting!! So God has provided for the next step as He promised.
We are STILL waiting to get our home study rough draft back-really thought we would've had it by now but our social worker is really busy. We REALLY want it back because the cost of sending our documents to the USCIS to get approved to adopt internationally is going up Nov. 23 so we're praying we get it submitted before that!! Once we get the rough draft, we'll look it over and send it on to our adoption agency. If she approves it then we'll send it back to the social worker and she'll provide us with the final draft. We have all of our documents ready to send to the USCIS, we just need the finalized home study in hand!! Not so sure if we'll be able to send our dossier to Ethiopia (DTE) by the end of the year though...we'll see. His timing is perfect, so I will not stress. We don't have the money for our dossier to be sent anyway, but we know He will provide that when we need it too. I have embraced the phrase, God is seldom early, never late, but ALWAYS on time.
So now that the yard sales, pancake breakfasts, auction fundraisers are over....I'm moving on to MORE fundraisers!!! I am planning a cookie sale at our church Dec. 5th. A dear sister is doing a fundraiser for us where she will donate a percentage of the sales from her business to us!! http://www.ellieannapurses.com/ is the website, you have to mention that you're doing it for us. She has some beautiful hand made purses, jewelry, etc. Another dear friend is doing a Tupperware fundraiser for us. There are some really neat products that are only available through the fundraiser. We're still selling Gooseberry cookbooks as well. Coffee sales from our site are doing well too. You can click on our link from this page to purchase some coffee.
The other big key to getting our home study back is that we'll then be able to apply for grants. There are some neat programs out there that provide them, we just need to have a completed home study!!! Also our adoption agency has a Waiting Children Program for older children, sibling groups and children with special needs. Once we get our home study we can also apply to adopt from there if we find a child we want.
So that's where we're at...just praying that God shows us direction while we wait. There is always a reason for waiting, something to be learned. So we're just being patient and listening and preparing our home for our new child.
Please pray for God to continue blessing this process, to keep our family safe (Satan hates adoption!!) and to watch over and protect our son in Ethiopia and his family as well.

Trust & Prepartion

A week or so ago I was reading in Mark, Chap. 8:1-10. Jesus tells the disciples he feels sorry for the crowds who have gathered and have no more food to eat. Most of them had come a long distance and wouldn't have the strength to get home. The disciples ask how they could possibly feed all the people. Jesus asks THEM how many loaves of bread they have. They answer seven. So Jesus took the seven loaves and thanked God for them, broke them into pieces and gave them to the disciples who then distributed them to the crowd.  Everyone ate until they were full and there were still seven baskets left over. Jesus fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread.
This verse was so encouraging to me and not because I have ever wondered where the money would come from for this adoption but because it just reaffirmed that all He asks is what we HAVE. He will do the rest if we're willing to let Him. God knows we don't have all the money for this adoption but He just asks what we have. Well we have willing hearts, room in our house and hearts and that's all. HE will provide the rest.
I was also thinking this week as we were at J's Dad's church about all the people there who are rallying around us and how God prepared them for that. After a couple spoke last year about Haiti and brought their little boy they had adopted from Haiti with them to speak at their church almost everyone started sponsoring children from Haiti. What if God hadn't primed their hearts for the plight of orphans? I am amazed and yet not at the same time-He is just sooooo good!!
He also brought to my mind all the little boys I've babysat over the past four years. What amazing preparation for our youngest!! Since birth, she's not had all of Mommy's attention. It's always been shared with older siblings and other little boys her age. God is one smooth operator!!!
I love looking back at how God's hand has guided everything. His plan is the only one I want to follow and I continue to look forward to meeting the little boy He has had planned for our family before the beginning of time.

Auction

We are in the process of waiting :) It's the name of the game at this point and only just the beginning...We have had our physicals done and are just waiting for our Dr.'s to get the paperwork done RIGHT. Who'd of thought that it'd take so long for them to figure out how to fill out a form?! No worries though because we're still waiting to get our home study rough draft back from our social worker. The only thing we need other than that is info on J's life insurance policy. I have the forms all ready to send to the USCIS when we get our home study back. If they approve our form then we get the coveted I-171H (which means we are allowed to adopt internationally.) From there our dossier will get sent to Ethiopia after a few hands see it first. So that's where we're at with the paper chase part. We're hoping everything will be sent off across the pond by the end of this year!! Lord willing...
Our auction is this Friday. We're very excited. We've got some great items to auction off and have some yummy desserts on the menu. The gentleman doing the auctioning is doing it for free-we've never met him but he does auctioneering for volunteer purposes only and is a pretty funny guy I've heard. We can't wait to see how the Lord will provide!! Please pray for this event for us. More updates later...

Fundraising excitement!!

The cookbook sales are doing pretty good. Quite a few of my dear friends have bought some and we put some at my brother's bakery as well. Yesterday a lady went into his bakery and was talking about wedding favors and my brother showed her the cookbooks we were selling. So I get a call to see if we could have 100+ sent to her by Friday for the wedding this weekend!!! So today it was confirmed that we could ship 110 of the cookbooks to her!!! Praise God!! I love how the Lord works it all out in a way that we could never do ourselves. I still have some to sell as well as the pocket calenders, so if you're interested...:)
We are also continuing to gather items for the auction which is in 3 weeks!!! I am very much looking forward to that event-it should be a lot of fun! I also have a date set for the cookies by the pound sale in early December...just need to secure the location.
We got quite a few more documents notarized this weekend. Still waiting on all J and I's blood work results before our physicals will be notarized. My brother will be helping me with our photo pages for our dossier as he has a Mac and can do it a lot more efficiently. So other than waiting for our home study rough draft to come back we're looking pretty good. I hope to have our dossier in the mail by the end of this year.
Again, I have to say I have been so blessed with the people who have jumped on board with this adoption and stood with us to help with all that this adoption entails. It is certainly not a solo effort and I truly am beyond words at what people have done for us. It really is so neat to see how this is affecting so many people and touching so many hearts. Adoption was His plan from the beginning and as I've just finished the Old Testament it was so neat to read it with that in mind. Esther, Jesus and more throughout the Bible were adopted. I bet God has big plans for our son too ;)

While we wait...

While we wait for the perfect timing...




they hope they can wait another day.





While we wait for more money...



they wait with nothing.





While we wait for a bigger home with enough room...



they wait for room in our hearts.







While we wait for others approval...



they wait with any dignity they can find.









While we wait for the ideal child....



they wait knowing they are not.



While we wait trying to decide if we can manage another...



they wait trying to manage on their own.









While we wait to see how much we have to give to them...




They are waiting to give us even more.





While we wait for God to provide...



He waits for us to take the first step so He can.



We must NEVER use 'waiting to hear from Him' as an excuse for not doing what He has ALREADY commanded in the bible for us to do... proclaim the truth, care for orphans, serve others, be His hands of justice for the poor, and show compassion.



So, what are you waiting for??

Checklists & Fundraisers

HOME STUDY IS DONE!!! Normally it takes 4 weeks to get the report back but it will be about 6 for us as the lady who did it is on vacation for 2 weeks. Again, in God's perfect timing everything will happen exactly when it's supposed to. Jonathan is now finished with his online training and we both have passports in hand ready to go!! We have a bunch of paperwork to get notarized and I still need to have my physical done. Well I tried to have it done last week and waited an hour in the waiting room when they came out and told me my Dr. went home sick!! Go figure. So it's rescheduled for next week. Jonathan also needs to get his updated as they didn't do all the blood work that was required. We have a little time though as we have to wait on the home study report to come back before we move forward with the next steps. We have all three reference letters from our dear friends and just need to get those notarized as well.
On the fundraising front...we are selling Gooseberry Patch books and calendars. They have the cutest stuff!! Check out their website if you are not familiar with them. Or let me know if you'd like to purchase either or just want information on them. We are also in full swing of planning our auction/dessert/coffee bar event!! We are doing it in the County (!) October 22 at 7pm. We have a saint up there pulling together the event (collecting auction items, etc) and J's Mom is doing her part and collecting items, etc as well. I am working on getting auction items from our area. We now need to work on getting all the desserts together. Anyone want to bake?? Very exciting although I must admit I am having a hard time letting someone do all this work for us. But when I think about it, it's not really for US, it's for a child, for the Kingdom, for what God has called us to do. This adoption has never been about US. Some days I am quite comfortable with where we're at, with our THREE children. But God doesn't want us to be comfortable, He wants us to be more like Jesus. Jesus wasn't comfortable on the cross, but He was being obedient. And that's simply what we're doing, being obedient.
"Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, `Give them up!' and to the south, `Do not hold them back. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.'" -Isaiah 43: 5-6

Reality Check

So I read a great blog post this morning, although my hubby may disagree as he woke up to a weepy wife. The lady had adopted two children previously and is in the process to adopt another. She was writing about the "other" side of adoption. The one not many people consider. Most people think about what they're doing for the orphan and how they'll really be able to bless that child. However, how many of us consider what that child has been through? What the mother/family has gone through? Was the child hostily taken? Did the mother walk away after dropping her baby off, crying? Was the child abandoned somewhere? My heart just broke at the thought, the emotion of what it would be like to have to give up my child because they weren't the "right gender" or because we couldn't afford to feed him/her. We've been praying for our little guy but my prayers have turned to his family as well. It breaks my heart that he'll have gone through more in his few years than I have in my whole life. He's going to come with baggage to his forever family, but hey, didn't we all come with baggage when our Heavenly Father opened His arms to us??

Check, check

I have finished my 8 hr online adoptive parent training course!!! J still has his to do (with all his free time ;)). We finished our 2nd home study and have two more to go, which are scheduled for September, (they were supposed to have been done by now but our home study lady is busy-all in God's timing!!). J got his employment verification form notarized and will pick up his police record on Monday. Once school gets underway a bit for the kids (our 4 yr old is going to Pre-K!!) I will start planning a silent auction/spaghetti dinner. We're still waiting to get our passports-should be another month or so. So there is your brief update-just a few more things checked off our list!! :)

Clean Record

So I am going to get a little personal here but it's all for the glory of God so here goes...As I went to pick up my police report today (which is clear, don't worry) I started thinking about how He had protected me even when I didn't know Him.
Before I was ruined by His grace at the age of 21 I lived according to my will which definitely put me in many an unsavory situation. How many times had He protected me from being in the wrong place at the wrong time? And saved me before I headed down a path of self-destruction? I am so thankful that He loved me when I lived like a complete heathen, that He kept me from taking that one more step which would have made me fall off a cliff, that He had a perfect plan for my life. I am thankful for the things He brought me through so I could look back and see His hand upon my life before I knew it even existed. I am thankful for a clean record.
"I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me."-Acts 26:17-19
"In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding." Eph. 1:7-8
T

Paper Chase

Well I've been gathering documents like a mad woman!! I've gotten my birth certificate, our marriage certificate, picking up our police reports tomorrow, scheduled our physicals, sent for our passports (we'll need copies of those), waiting for our dear friends to write referrals...J's birth certificate was sent in with the other papers to get his passport, so we'll have to wait until we get that original certificate back so we can send that along. Our family coordinator through our adoption agency wants to see all of our documents to make sure they look good before we send in our final dossier. I had to write a "non-employment" letter stating why I don't work (ha!) and we need a letter from J's employer. We also need to get a few letters of reference for our home study lady (I am sure there is a better name, but I like that :)) So it's not actually as bad as it seemed when I first saw THE list of documents.
We had our first home study today. It went really well and she was great to talk to. She's a Christian so when she asked us why we were pursuing Ethiopia we could tell her God led us there and she didn't look at us like we had 7 heads. The kids were fine but were kind of stuck in front of the t.v. all day on this gorgeous day so it made me a little nutty. Also we were babysitting but the boys might as well not even be here because they are so awesome!! 1 down, 3 left to go!
J and I have appx 8-10 hrs of adoptive parent training to get down in the next week or so. I've done almost half of it and J has done a few hours. Soooo much reading but very informative and good for those who may be going into the process with lofty ideas of how it will be. I told my dear hubby who doesn't LOVE reading about the 55 page article in one of the modules we have to read and he said, "Whatever it takes to bring him home!!" Wow, God is good!! Just another confirmation to me that this is indeed HIS will and not ours. Have I mentioned I am SOOOOOOOOOOO excited about this???
The chase continues...hope I don't get frost bite!! (see previous post ;))

COFFEE'S ON!!

Please visit our site to purchase fair trade coffee from Ethiopia and other countries. We receive $5 per bag purchased which will go towards the adoption cost!!! So get out your favorite mug and order some up!!


www.justlovecoffee.com/TheStewartClan

Blessings

I decided to do another yard sale this weekend as our shed was so full of things from our last yard sale in June that you couldn't even walk in it (my husband loved that!) I HATE having yard sales. But this isn't about me, it's about saving a little guy from Ethiopia so I would do whatever it takes to bring him home. On Thursday morning  however I woke up with a majorly stiff neck. I could not turn my head to the left AT ALL. I was babysitting that day and was trying to bake goodies to sell as well, so organizing for the yard sale became out of the question. Oh and I was trying to get the house picked up for our first home study on Friday at 1pm. So I was going to have a yard sale in the morning then go have lunch and get ready for the lady to show up. (I know, I do this kind of crazy thing ALL THE TIME! How much can I cram into one day?? My husband loves it ;)) So God saw my dilemma and had our home study lady call me and cancel our appt for Friday. Now normally I would be stressed out because I like everything to be done NOW, but I was so relieved she probably wondered why she could hear me smiling over the phone. So that was a huge blessing. J had insisted I not do the yard sale this weekend and as much as I am a submissive wife I knew he'd be around Friday to help out if needed :)
So I've sold my last yard, however we still have lots of clothes left so one of my dear friends is going to help me sort and list the clothes on ebay. We also had a lot of "stuff" left over as well, so dear friend's hubby loaded up his truck and took it to Salvation Army for me. He chatted with the guy that worked there and told him where the stuff had come from and what we had been doing the yard sale for. So the guy asked dear friend's hubby how much he thought it was all worth. He said about $1400!! And the guy said, "OK". So we got a receipt for that much which we'll be able to claim on taxes!! Sooo exciting!! We also got to meet some great people from church, one of which is a notary and will notarize ALL of our documents for the paper chase for FREE!!! What an enormous blessing that is!! For those of you that don't know, the paper chase as it's called (I would call of it more a hunt through the Maine woods, in the snow, in below zero temps, with sandals on) is a gathering of 8 million documents that each require a notarization and 3 photo copies. We need letters of reference, birth certificates, marriage certificate, passport copies, physicals. ALL notarized. I am looking at everything we need and would quit except this a human life we're talking about and it will be more than worth it. I love this little guy already and don't even know who he is or what he looks like-but he's our son and he's somewhere in Ethiopia right now. Isn't that awesome?!  Anyways this paper chase takes appx. 4-6 months to complete but I have some amazing friends that have gone through the process and are excited about helping me do it. (They're nuts). The people we've met since we started this process only a month ago are such a huge blessing already. Their willingness to support, help, etc is priceless. I am so touched by these people I really can't describe it. The family of God is amazing. We serve a very real, powerful God who knows just the right people to put into your life at just the right times.

His ways are not our ways...

Well my first blog post was more of an update as to what is happening with the adoption. I just wanted to share some of how this started for me. Even as a child I always thought adoption was such a neat thing. Giving a child a home that didn't have one, what a privilege!! Fast forward to after J and I had the two older kiddos. I wanted a 3rd (and perhaps a 4th and 5th) and J was content with our boy and girl. At 24 I knew I couldn't be done having kids. I LOVED children. I always babysat while I was in jr. high and h.s. I was going to college so I could get my degree in early childhood education when we got married. I taught Sunday school when we first started going to church. We could not be DONE having children!! I looked into adoption and after much, well, grumpiness, J decided we could have a third child. Phew! Shortly after we had littlest one, we KNEW we were done having children naturally. God quenched that desire when she was about 6 weeks old!! Adopting children wasn't out of the question though but definitely on the back burner. I had been enjoying the freedom of their ages, 4, 6, and almost 8. We are diaperless and have been sleeping through the nite for 4 years. Bliss!! My plans for this fall included homeschooling all 3 kids, babysitting a one year old and another almost 4 year old, 3 days/week, hopefully teaching ballet again at the school, and perhaps leading another study with the girls. But alas, God knocked, I answered, He said we were to adopt, OK, on it Lord!! The tug though started last fall when a couple came to speak at my in-laws church about Haiti, and their adoption of a little boy from there. Oh the tears!! This kid was precious, the story was heartbreaking. So we started sponsoring 3 children from Haiti last Christmas. In January a friend posted about a child who was aging out of an orphanage in the Ukraine (16 yrs old!!) and needed a home. Oh the tears again!! Why did this touch me so? I knew we couldn't do anything (we had zero things in order as far as adoption went). More of these situations came up and just pulled my heartstrings.  J and I had both been reading a book a dear friend wrote called "We're sons of God...so what?" and it talked about how as Christians WE have been adopted by God and the ransom has been paid for us by the shed blood of our Savior. Whoa, never thought of it THAT way!! We knew God was preparing us for something big and didn't know what...We looked into adoption from Haiti but we didn't fit the age requirements. One early June day, the sermon at church was for me :) He talked about how when we're called to do something we need to do it. To trust the Lord, and that He's not using us because we're worthy. I'll share more of this in detail later. So I started filling out our adoption application and after a yard sale we were able to send out the application fee. God led us to adopt from Ethiopia so we're looking to get a little guy from 0-4 yrs old. So that's my story. We don't know all the details of how this is going to work out but He does. So we're sitting next to our Captain and trying to enjoy the ride because He is in control.

And so it begins...

Well here we go at a blog. Yikes. So here is the latest. We've been accepted into the Ethiopia program with our adoption agency. We raised the fees for this first step through the pancake breakfast we held at Ruby Tuesday. We begin our home study this coming Friday (the 13th) and will be finished with it on the 23rd. The home study is basically a visit (4 visits actually) with a social worker who asks us every question under the sun regarding our family, etc. After this is completed we'll have to get a bunch of documents together (called the paper-chase). This process can take 4-6 months. Once all the documents are together it will get sent to Ethiopia and shortly after that we'll receive a referral of our little guy. If we accept the referral then we'll move forward to getting a court date and then J and I will both have to fly there. We'll be there about a week and get to meet him. But then we'll have to leave :( One of us will fly back a month or so later to pick him up. So that is a very short summary of what our next year or so will look like. There will be lots of paperwork, praying, waiting, praying, money, praying and waiting involved. Adoption was something we planned to do "someday" and God has told us someday is here. We're excited, scared and amazed all at the same time. This is so much bigger than we are-everything about it is. This isn't something we planned to do this year, this isn't anything we prepared for or even could prepare for. God doesn't work the way we do, He is not limited by resources and if He wants His plans accomplished, He accomplishes them. He even uses people like J and I. People who have the faith of a mustard seed who are telling this mountain to move. (Matt. 17:20)