Do You Mind If We Dance With Our Date??

You have to read the title like you are that guy from Animal House to appreciate the humor. To say that we are giddy would be an understatement. As a matter of fact, we are a lot of different emotions right now. We got our appointment date (and registration number) for our trip to Ukraine. Our date is .......April 12th!!!! We will be leaving on April 10th. That is not a typo. APRIL 12th!!!!! That is 6 weeks from tomorrow in case you are wondering. It is the Tuesday after Easter. Stacey's semester will not be over yet so there will be some extra work for her to sort out how others will need to cover her while we are gone. God has a wonderful way of working out the timing so we trust that He will work that out too. There will be lots of stuff going on between now and then I would antcipate. The lady that is helping us told us to expect to be gone 4 weeks but we are going to plan on being gone 5. If we get back in 4 weeks, that will be great. Before today, it had just been that we were working on the adoption. It's real now. We have been talking about it and praying with the kids too, but now there will need to be a real sense of urgency in our conversations. I am sure that you can only imagine the concerns as a parent when leaving your children for that long.
The bottom line is that God is good. And no matter what happens, we put our trust in Him and know that he will provide what we need. But for today, please excuse us while we dance with our date.

What Does That Mean???

Don't know if I mentioned it yet or not but Stacey and I aren't much for waiting around. We generally don't like to start something that we can't finish. This especially applies to big items like making big purchaes or house improvement projects. So imagine how much we are learning with this adoption process. All of the waiting and waiting, it gives us plenty of time to question what we are doing and why we are doing it. We still feel like we are doing the right thing. But the waiting has definitely been the worst part so far.

So with the latest round of paperwork updates earlier this month, we should be finished with the paperwork for a while. So what do we do but wait? I did send an e-mail to one of the ladies that is helping us with our adoption to see if she had any news for us. While being very helpful, her responses are usually very terse and susccinct. I asked her to confirm whether or not our paperwork had been submitted to the SDA and I also told her that any information that we could get would be appreciated. She responded that indeed our paperwork had been submitted, that our recent updates were just attached to our already submitted paperwork, and that we should hear something "before too awfully long." Now, I don't think that anyone can tell me exactly how long "before too awfully long" is. And as much as I wish I did, I don't know how long it is either. It is not the answer that I wanted but I do know what it means. It means, "be still and know that I am God." (Psalms 46:10) I am especially guilty of being too eager to have something happen that I tend to get out in front of God instead of letting Him lead me. So what do we do? We are still (as still as we can be), we pray (continually), we plan (as much as we can) and we know that He is God.

One other thing to share. We went to the awards banquet for basketball at Graceland today and the chaplain for the U of L football team spoke to the group. He was a relatively young man that said that he had played football for Campbellsville University. He told this story of how he had taught his oldest daughter (about 3 or 4 years old) to respond to the question "Where does Jesus live?" by saying "Jesus lives in my heart." And it was sort of like a little game that they would play together. One day, they did this in front of a niece or some other relative that was slightly older (perhaps around 6 years old) and she asked (as only little children can ask) "Since Jesus is so big, and her heart is so small, if Jesus lived in there, wouldn't He stick out?"

We Count the Costs Now, But We Won't Count the Costs Later

Before our other children were born, I could quote you the amount of the expenses that were to be coming out of our pockets for each "delivery". After they each were born, there was no amount of money that would have been too much to make me question whether or not it was worth it. Our children are priceless. Stacey and I have been very fortunate in that we have not struggled with childlessness or fertility issues like other couples have. We have not experienced the dissappointment of not being able to get pregnant or the discouragement of failed treatments. We have been very blessed to have had things turn out for us the way that they have. We know it is not something that we have earned but a gift that He has given to us.

With that being said, anyone that knows me very well knows that I have a bean counter's mentality. Another way to say it would be that "I'm a cheap skate". So when we started to discuss adoption, one of the conversations naturally went to the costs. Truth be told, it is probably cheaper in total costs to adopt a child internationally than it is to deliver a healthy child in the US. It just seems so much more expensive because all of the costs come directly out of our pocket for adoptions instead of the magic and mysterious world of health insurance for healthy deliveries (don't get me started there). Any way you slice it, we would have paid all that we have for either one of the children that we already have, so we didn't count the costs after they were born.

As I prepared for this post and got down to the bottomline and saw the amount of money that we have spent in the last 2 years pursuing this effort, I was overwhelmed. I am literaly blown away by how God has blessed us through this. The yard sale and raffle was an obvious way he blessed us, not to mention all of the friends and family that so freely gave and supported us in that effort, as well as other efforts. As with lots of other things in our lives, there is no way that we could have done this on our own. Our budget didn't just have "extra" money in it.

Presented below is a listing of all of the expenses that we have incurred so far. It is not a complete list (I didn't pull out all of our receipts) but I think I captured all of the big stuff.
Homestudy (Including travel) $1,700
Homestudy Update $ 300
Passports $ 200
I-600A application $ 545
I-600A re-application $ 545
INS fingerprints (first time) $ 140
INS fingerprints (second time) $ 140
Ukraine Translation $ 550
Ukraine Translation $ 200
Various Dr.'s Appointments/Tests $ 60
Travel Clinic $ 400
Additional Shots $ 150
State Police Finger Prints (multiple times) $ 100
Kentucky Apostille $ 100
FedEx/Mailings $ 130
Trips to Indy:4 (assume $0.40 per mile) $ 320
Trips to Frankfort : 2 $ 80
Trips to Southeast Christian: 5 $ 120
Copies of Birt Certificates/Deeds/Marriage License $ 50
Adoption Toolkit/Training Materials $ 150

TOTAL TO DATE: $5,980

From talking to some folks that we know that have recently gone to Ukraine and adopted a child, we are expecting to spend approximately another $11,000 while gone, not including our airplane tickets, which we are expecting to run approximately another $3,500. This would bring our total costs to over $20K. That is a lot of money to us. It is probably a lot of money to a lot of folks. But in the end, we don't plan to count the costs. Whatever we have to spend, I know that that His children are worth it. We have faith in our God that he will provide the things that we need, just like He already has time and time again.

I Forgot Something...and Way to Go DHS!!!

First of all, I think I forgot one of the things that really moved me during our paperwork effort that appears to be nearing it's stateside end. Several (I mean probably more than several) years ago, when Stacey and I were still going to Southeast, a very good man entered into our life. We met lots of good people there and are still really good friends with some of them, but God was at work way out in front of us. The Good Doctor as I called him, and his lovely wife, joined our ABF Class. He is a great guy and was quick to over his expertise to any and all friends that needed his help. They moved away from Louisville but eventually moved back about the time that we were deciding to go to a church a little closer to our home. But when we needed a lot of signatures and other input from a Doctor, there was no question in my mind that this guy would help us as much as he could. To say that he was accommodating would be a vast understatement. He provided his signature and a copy of his license at every request. He allowed me to bring documents to his house on more than a couple of occasions for his signature, even though he works long hours and now has a full family of his own. One day, as I was describing to him some of the events that had happened to us along the way, he said to me, "You know why I am such a proponent of strong Christians doing adoptions don't you?" Now, I knew this guy fairly well. We had spent lots of Saturday nights together at our ABF class and also outside of class as leaders of that class. We had spent time together in some social situations that revolved around the class but I did not have an answer to his question. I knew that he had helped other mutual friends of ours in their quests to adopt internationally. He paused and he looked at me and he said, "You knew that I was adopted didn't you??" I didn't. Come to find out, his wife, a wonderful Christian woman and mom, was adopted too. I feel that this is just more evidence that God was working in our lives in this effort a long time before we even knew about it.

Now that I have that off my chest, our paperwork from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) came in today. A few signatures and apostilles later, and we will be in a position to send the last (hopefully) of the stateside paperwork to Ukraine by the end of this week. Time will tell.

I will put a listing of the expenses that we have experienced this far on my next post if I can bring myself to add them up.