Updates

We have had such a busy month-a birthday, a surgery, a pumpkin patch, some cooler weather (so all three kids got new coats for China and of course for here in chilly Texas!) and we are one month closer to getting our LOA!  I always thought that the hardest part of the waiting process would be once we had seen his sweet face and then we wait.  Well, so far, I was right.  I hate the increasing number of days he is in an orphanage of 300 instead of a family of 5.  Everything we do I feel like he's missing out on.  I pray every day that he is safe and well taken care of and someone is preparing his heart for this move and that he hears the voice of God.  Adoption is amazing, but it is certainly like nothing else I've ever been though.  So, we just wait for good news and pray that God will quicken the process and help those lovely people in China finish record numbers of files.  :)

So, I realized that I never did an update for our Give 1 Save 1 week.  It. Was. Amazing.  We loved our video, we had lots of people watch it and prayerfully we inspired a heart for adoption in people who saw it.  We raised (are you ready for this?  Seriously?) $2,366!!!  That is two round trip plane tickets people!  We also did two giveaways, so you can see the videos announcing the winners on our website: foreverhome.us.  Chris did an awesome job with all three videos!

So, we're at the two month mark waiting for LOA.  Praying for some awesome news soon.  We are SO ready to be waiting for Travel Approval!!  Please join us in praying for our sweet boy and for our pieces of paper in China.  God is so faithful, as we have seen so much in the last month, and we know that He is with our sweet boy.  You can also pray for those kids in China who are aging out of the system.  I am on a Facebook group which advocates for orphans and they often list children who are about to age out (which happens at 14 in China, by the way).  They featured this beautiful little boy named Jonathan who was begging someone to adopt him and take him to the United States.  He was saying that he can help around the house and that he was a good student and that the younger children can wait to be adopted, but he can't.  It was seriously heartbreaking.  So far no one has stepped forward to adopt him and he ages out in February.  You can see his profile on www.twentyless.com.  What an amazing guy.  I can't even imagine dreading your 14th birthday because you age out of the adoption system then.  He could definitely use prayers!

Hopefully I can post soon that we are moving forward!  Until then we keep preparing our hearts and our home for our sweet M.

But I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love, for you are my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble.  Psalm 59:16

Give 1 Save 1 Finale Giveaway!!

Okay, so we are about to end our week with Give 1 Save 1.  We hope that you have "liked" them on Facebook or subscribed to their blog so that you can see a family every week that you could donate a little bit to help out with their adoption efforts.  Adoption is hard and paying for it is a challenge, so everyone appreciates help.  We also hope that you have checked out our website and blog and will continue to follow us on our journey.  We always appreciate comments, prayers, support and we are so excited to share all of this with our sweet Marcus some day.

BUT, we also promised an end of the week giveaway for a finale to our Give 1 Save 1 journey!  So, here is....

Anyone who has donated this week up until midnight tomorrow night (Sunday, okay, technically Monday by midnight) will be entered in a drawing for a fabulous dinner/movie/game night pack!

What is included:
-A Chic Fila gift card
-A pack of Jelly Bellies
-The card game, UNO
-A copy of the movie, "God's Not Dead"


We will also put people's names in who have purchased T-shirts this week or donated to participate in the Virtual 5K.  So, check out our website tonight and tomorrow and donate, get a new t-shirt or decide to walk or run a 5K since the weather is getting cooler.  We will announce the winner on Monday!  God bless and everyone have a wonderful end to your weekend!!

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,  to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.  Ephesians 3:20-21

Give 1 Save 1 Giveaway TODAY!!

Okay, it's time for a Give 1 Save 1 Giveaway!  

We will do two giveaways this week, one today (Wednesday) and one Sunday.  Everyone who has made a donation of any amount by 9:00 pm tonight will be entered to win FIVE in the package LEGO movie mini figures!!  We will draw two names and each winner will be shipped FIVE random mini figures.  So, keep sharing our video and donate today!!  Thank you so much to everyone who has blessed us so far with prayers, encouragement, and donations.  We cannot wait to tell Marcus about this whole experience some day!  

Here's the link to the Give 1 Save 1 page:

http://giveonesaveone.blogspot.com

Here's the link to our other website with more information and the ways to donate.  

foreverhome.us

 For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,  may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Ephesians 3:14-19

Give 1 Save 1 Day 1

Welcome to our blog for Give 1 Save 1!!  We are so excited about this week to feature our adoption and prayerfully raise some money for our trip to China.  So, please check out our video to learn a little bit about us and donate to us via Adopt Together, Pay Pal, our virtual 5K or by purchasing shirts from Adoption Bug.  Everything you need to donate is found on:   foreverhome.us

If you don't want to read through all of our blog posts right now, I will tell you a little about us.  We are a family of four with two biological daughters.  We moved from St. Louis, MO to Fort Worth, TX in December.  We began our adoption journey by pursuing an adoption of a child or siblings from Ethiopia.  After years on the waiting list, we then found our son in China.  He is four years old and he has spinal issues.  We have our PA and LID and we are waiting on LOA and TA and praying for a travel date in January.  We are so excited to get to go and meet him and bring him to Texas.  All four of us are going to fly over to meet him and spend family time in China.

We will be doing a couple of giveaways and videos through the week, so stay tuned!  We are loving this journey and just so amazed by how we have seen God's hand through this whole process.  Thank you for being a part of our story!!

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Ephesians 3:17b-19

Give 1 Save 1, LID and Adoption Bug!

So, summer is over, we are on a more regular schedule of homeschooling again and we have had some fun news in the last couple of weeks.  We are still praying that we can go get our little boy before the end of the year or soon thereafter, but we are getting closer! 

So, first in adoption news, we received our LID (Logged In Date) on August 22!  This means that our dossier has been logged into the system and China will translate it, review it and send us our LOA (Letter of Acceptance) and then we wait for TA (Travel Approval).  Right now each of these steps are taking around 60-70 days, so we are praying that ours moves as quickly as possible through the steps.  We have decided to send our little guy another care package.  Although we are trying to save money, it has been six months since we sent him a birthday package and that is just so long for a four year old, so we want to send him an update to let him know that we are thinking about him and praying for him every day.  Whenever we do something fun as a family, I feel like someone is missing and we just can't wait until he is here to participate in everything with us!  We don't want him in an orphanage with 299 other sweet kids any more.  We want him to be part of a family of 5. 

For our first fundraising news, we submitted a video and application and we found out that we are going to be the featured family on Give 1 Save 1 for the week of September 15!!  Give 1 Save 1 is a wonderful organization that features adoptive families each week and encourages everyone who sees the video to Give $1 and Save 1 orphan.  We have all watched our video at least 20 times and we are SO excited to get to share it next Sunday!!!  We are updating our other website, foreverhome.us, and we are so grateful to anyone who will view and share our video, and donate next week! 

In March, we promoted our Adoption Bug fundraiser with some awesome T-shirts that promote adoption and Show Hope.  Unfortunately, Adoption Bug, which is a family run business, will be shutting down in October because the family simply doesn't have time to run it.  So, if you would like to purchase a T-shirt and support them and our adoption, they will be accepting orders until October 1, 2014.  To order from our page, you go to:

http://www.adoptionbug.com/ryanfamilyroundup/

This adoption journey has been such a long four years between pursuing an Ethiopian adoption, moving to a new state, finding our son in China and now spending the last six months pursuing him, we are so excited to meet him and bring him into our family.  We already feel like he is part of us and we haven't even gotten to meet him.  We are so grateful for the support, prayers and financial support we have received through this process.  We are so excited that we are entering into phases like Travel Approval!!  Stay tuned for our video premiere and updates on our Give 1 Save 1 week!!

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.  Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs^.  Know that the Lord is God.  It is he who made us, and we are his we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.   Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.   For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.  Psalm 100

Time To Get Back To Blogging!

We have had a super busy summer!  Lots of fun time together, trip back to St. Louis, camps and VBS's, also some medical issues with our little girl which will result in a surgery soon, but altogether a fun summer which has been keeping us very busy. 

On the adoption front, we got our dossier sent off and it should be completed and shipped off to China any day now.  We received our fingerprint approval, I800A form, on July 10!  Now we just wait on China to (prayerfully speedily) approve our documents and get us LID and Travel Approval!  We are so hopeful to travel for him before the end of the year, but trusting in God's timing.  It's so hard because every fun thing we do I feel like he is just missing out and I wish he could be here with us to start his life as part of our family.  I wonder how he is doing and what he is eating and what he is learning and what he knows and just everything!  We already love him so much and we want to share that with him. 

We have been doing some fundraising to pay for our travel with our agency, buy our plane tickets when the time comes and pay for five of us in China.  We were blessed to receive a matching grant that will cover most of what we will owe to our agency and we have a short term fundraiser and three longer term ones. 

For the shorter term fundraiser, we have a Noonday show this Sunday.  For any of you who do not know about Noonday, it is an amazing organization that allows women around the world to make jewelry and support their family and often help them to be able to keep their children and then people purchase the jewelry here in the states and raise money for adoptive families.  Our Noonday show will be open online for a week starting this Sunday, so if you would like the information, please just leave a comment and I will be happy to get the information to you. 

The longer term fundraisers we are doing are change jars (we have already had friends that have been so generous with these including two sweet boys at our church who took money that they had been saving up and donated it for our sweet boy!) which we are happy to provide to anyone, our T-shirts at adoptionbug.com and our virtual 5K.  You can see information on all of these fundraisers at www.foreverhome.us.

We are getting ready to jump back into a more regular school schedule after the surgery and starting a new co-op with some new friends.  Please continue to pray for our sweet boy and God preparing his heart for this big change coming up for him.  We are so excited for so many firsts we will get to experience with him once he is here. 

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.  Joshua 1:9

Who Wants To Run A 5K?

Since I last posted, we have been moving along as quickly as possible with all of our paperwork.  We received our completed home study and had all of the immigration documents ready to go, so we sent off our NBC application last week.  Now we wait for approval and fingerprint appointments and then, after a few more pieces of paperwork, travel approval!  It's so hard knowing that someone else is putting him to bed each night, and that he is missing out on being a part of a family, but I have also had many friends remind me that things will happen in God's time.

So the other two VERY exciting things that have happened is that we received our first grant (YIPPEE!) which is a matching grant, and our wonderful friend offered to put together a virtual 5K for us!  The purpose of a matching grant is that we are awarded a grant of $2000 if we can raise $2000.  This would then give us $4000 for our travel payment to our agency which includes our travel reservations, hotels, in country travel, etc.  This is all very very exciting, but now we need to fundraise.  This is where YOU get to play a part!

I am putting the link below where my eloquent friend describes a virtual 5K better than I could, but basically you can somehow move your body 5K (otherwise known as 3.1 miles) and you pay an entrance fee the same way you would for any other race and you get a beautiful medal and you get to be a part of our adoption journey and help one less child live as an orphan.  We would love for as many people as possible to participate in this since it is a great way to exercise and to be part of a unique opportunity to help us fundraise and have your donation doubled by our matching grant.  You don't even have to do the 5K all at one time.  It can be broken up over days or however long you need.  We are so grateful to our amazing friend for putting this all together for us and for supporting us in this way.  Here's the link:

http://www.foreverhome.us

We have also had friends ask us how they can specifically pray for our adoption.  What has really been on our hearts is to pray that our sweet little boy's heart is prepared.  No matter how you look at it, it's a scary situation to be handed over to people you do not know, who do not speak your language, who cook differently and act differently and dress differently, and who you have never met before.  We know that living in a family will be better than living in an orphanage, but he cannot know that.  We trust God to be with him and help him, but we pray that he will specifically be prepared for this and to have a sense of joy and peace about it.  We pray that the people around him can be preparing him for this and to help give him an idea of what will happen.  We would be so appreciative if you joined us in praying for him.

Well, that's a lot of information for one blog post, so please check out the 5K website and I will keep everyone posted about any progress!

"However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me-the task of testifying to the good news of God's grace."  Acts 20:24