a big day!

I really cannot believe April is almost over…where has this month gone?? Does anyone else feel that way lately? I was hoping to have a great adoption update long before now, but better late than never I guess. We FINALLY received a draft of our home study a couple of weeks ago for us to review before our agency could finalize it. Well of course I had it reviewed and sent back to our agency within one hour of receiving it via email (that’s gotta be some kind of record), and we then patiently waited to hear back that the final copy was on its way to us. Two weeks later, after many of our documents that had previously been approved all of the sudden were not sufficient and had to be re-drafted and re-approved, we finally got the email saying the final Home Study was on its way to us. That was on Saturday, and we received the package this morning! I’ve had all of our other documents signed and ready to send to USCIS (US Immigration Dept.) for almost a month now, we were just waiting to receive the Home Study to include in the package, so once it came in this morning, I was able to just slip it in the package and off it went! It feels SO good to have that sent off- now we wait some more to receive our approval letter, which is the last thing we need before we can send the rest of our paperwork (our Dossier) over to Ethiopia. There are only a couple of other items we lack for the Dossier besides the US approval letter, and those should be done within the next week or two, so we literally are just waiting on the US government to approve our application at this point. Our agency told us that it can take *up to* 3 months for USCIS to process our approval, but we are praying that our application makes it into the right hands and that it happens MUCH quicker than that! Please pray with us for favor and speed during this part of the process, and if you (or someone you know) have a testimony of receiving the I-600A approval in record-time, we would love to know about it, as testimonies build our faith that it can be done for us also!

In other news, we have been steadily raising money for our adoption for the past few months, and the financial support we have been given has been overwhelming! I hosted a Noonday Collection trunk show last weekend, which was so fun! 10% of everything sold that week for our show was donated to our adoption fund, which was a huge blessing as well. We also had a garage sale back in March and our friends here in San Antonio donated a TON of stuff for us to sell- and we made over $1,000 in one day! That was particularly huge for us, because that package we just sent off to USCIS today required an application fee very close to that amount, and the garage sale was able to completely cover that cost. God has been so faithful to us in this journey so far, which has been a huge reminder to me that we are on the right path. Thank you to everyone who has been interceding for us in prayer as well during this time, we are really feeling it!