Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Winter Host Trip 2011

I figured a video would be better than any words I could use to describe our month with Vera.  Thanks to all of you who helped make an amazing Christmas.  We love you guys!!!!!
 (To watch in full screen click the youtube icon on the bottom right of the video, you can view full screen if viewed from youtube website)


Saturday, January 14, 2012

Vera is back in Ukraine for now...

Well, Vera is back in Ukraine. I really hope she realizes how much she is missed. The house is so quiet without her. We are in the process of getting all of our paperwork updated. The adoption agency we were using decided to close so we had to switch to another one. We followed our social worker to Chinese Children Adoption International. They have been amazing!!! They have already updated our home study and have been so kind and caring through this process. We hope to get all the paperwork gathered together within the next month. Then we will send all of the paperwork to Ukraine and keep our fingers crossed! We will keep everyone updated!!

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Only one week left...=(

We are down to one week, actually six days, until Vera must return to her country.  The time we have spent with her is priceless.  What a beautiful child, inside and out.  She has had her ups and downs like any teenage girl but we have all grown so much closer as a family.  She has this crazy sense of humor that fits in perfectly with all of us.  Her laughter is infectious and she loves to joke with people.  We are already choking up thinking of when we must put her on that plane again.  I seriously do not want to even think about it.  It doesn't seem right.  She has a family here that loves her and has been approved to adopt and yet we must send her back to an orphanage to share a room with twenty other kids. 

It has been a long process already.  Vera will become available around April 2012.  We have done pretty much everything we need to do on the US side and are working on putting together our dossier.  Our goal is to time everything so that we are there the day she becomes available,  God willing. 

We will miss her terribly when she leaves but we will be kept busy doing everything needed to go back and get her in less than three months.  We will also be preparing paperwork to do an additional adoption while we are there.  Pray that God shows us our other child and that things go smoothly there.  We had always planned to adopt two (we do have two empty bedrooms!).  God showed us very clearly with Vera, we trust Him to help us find the other orphan who also needs a home.

I haven't had much time to blog so hopefully next week I can update all of the details of this host trip.  It has been such a blast!