National Adoption Day is November 15th!!!

So November 15th is National Adoption Day! I just found that out! How cool is that!!

I was reading up on it, and people around the country get together to raise awareness of adoptions, especially adoptions in the foster care system.

National Adoption Day 2008 – Goals

Finalize adoptions from foster care in all 50 states

Celebrate and honor families who adopt

Raise awareness about the 129,000 children in foster care waiting for adoption

Encourage others to adopt children from foster care

Build collaboration among local adoption agencies, courts and advocacy organizations

So congrats to all the folks out there who have completed their adoptions already! (Heather and Ryan!)

Why Adopt before we have a child naturally?

I have had a lot of people ask me why Brandon and we want to adopt a child before we have one of our own naturally.

This is something that Brandon and I talked a lot about when first thinking about adopting. We consulted a lot of books and advice from people about "child birth order" and how it would effect out children if we were to adopt first, or if we were to have a child first.

After all is said and done, Brandon and I know that we are "called" to adopt. I do think that adoption is not for everyone, and it is a calling. We feel very passionate about adopting. We feel that by choosing to adopt first, we are giving a gift to our little adopted daughter that no one else has given her. We are CHOOSING her. We are choosing her FIRST. Through some circumstances, so many of these abandoned children have never been chosen for anything other than death. We choose to give our little daughter LIFE and a family and love and joy. We pray for her every day, even though at this point we do not know who she is. (We know God has a plan)

So... enough about that for now... just wanted to share our passion... share our reason for doin what we are doin...

This is for Rick.... eat your carrots while you read :)

We are still in the homestudy phase.... yeah I know - we are taking a long time.

We have moved and therefor need to update our homestudy before we can proceed. We talk a lot about the adoption, and we are still very excited about it. But we know that God has perfect timing, and so we do not stress when bumps come in the road and when things take longer than what WE think they should.

So - anyways, we will have our homestudy update soon (in the next two weeks hopfully) and we will then be on to immigration paperwork!

If you have any great fundraising ideas, please let me know! We are going to be trying to do some fundraising for the immigration paperwork so that we can get that off and started ASAP as well as adoption fees.

Also - please keep South Africa in prayer. Keep the government in prayer. WE HAVE HEARD that they are not very easy to work with, and for that reason we are praying for perfect timing and for God assigned connections.

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers... We love you guys and COULD NOT do this without the support of our family and our "family" :)