We Are Blessed

I first saw Kellin's picture and profile on Reece's Rainbow on April 14th.  Three days later we were able to view his file, and by the end of April, we had committed to adopting Kellin and had started our home study.  And we started thinking about the unbelievable amount of money we had to somehow come up with.  So we jumped in.  We cut down on our own expenses.  We sold T-shirts.  Our daughter started Koins 4 Kellin.  We had garage sales, benefits, and received many, many donations.  In just SIX MONTHS, we have raised the $35,000 we estimate we need to complete this adoption.  Now, more than half of this was from our own savings, but that still means something like $16,000 came from fundraisers and donations.  All I can say is WOW!  We are SO, SO blessed to be surrounded by the supportive family, friends, and community that we have.  We know that there are still people out there who have asked about helping us.  We will certainly let you all know if we end up in financial need again (sometimes there are unexpected expenses), but for now, please consider helping one of these other fantastic families and waiting children!

The Hansen Family
This family lives locally and is in the process of an adoption from South Africa.  They are fundraising just like us, but even as they save for their own adoption, they came to our church benefit, our garage sale, and our Pizza Ranch fundraiser!  I am overwhelmed by their generosity in helping us even as they need the money for their own adoption.  Please check out their blog for ways to help them with their adoption expenses and to follow their family's story.  http://truthsofablessedlife.wordpress.com/

Olen's Family
Olen was our family's Angel Tree child last year.  We spent the months of November and December advocating and fundraising for him.  We have prayed for him every day for nearly a year.  We rejoiced when a family committed to adopting him last spring, and then were so sad for him when that adoption did not work out.  But now he has another family working hard to bring him home.  Please check out this family's sponsorship page and blog, and consider donating to this awesome family!

http://reecesrainbow.org/79929/sponsorstewart-2

Everett's Family
I had the opportunity to meet Everett's soon-to-be mommy a few months ago, just as they were committing to adopting Everett.  This family has been working so hard, selling baked goods every week and putting on a big benefit at their church.  Consider helping them out with your donation this holiday season!

http://reecesrainbow.org/80165/sponsorjohnson-5

Jesse
This little boy has been in my heart for a very long time, since months before we committed to adopting Kellin.  He is blind, just like Kellin, and he is nearly five years old.  He needs a family desperately, but unfortunately many families are hesitant to adopt a child who is blind.  He has been listed with Reece's Rainbow for (I think) around two years and has just $600 in his account.  PLEASE consider donating to his account or even consider adopting him?

http://reecesrainbow.org/59002/jesse

Kristoff
This little boy is SO CUTE!  He is just turning three now, and he has mild cerebral palsy.  From the perspective of an early childhood special education teacher, I notice that he is sitting up nice and straight, supporting himself, and his left hand is hanging on to the toy.  His right hand is fisted and his toes are curled up so I suspect that his right side is more affected by the CP, but I would guess with therapy, there will no limits to what he can achieve!  His account has just $27 in it.  Help him out, please?

http://reecesrainbow.org/?s=kristoff

We have been blessed to reach our fundraising goal!  Now we want to help other families reach their goals, and we want to help other waiting children find their families.

LOA!

Just a quick post to share that our agency received our LOA (Letter of Acceptance) from China today!  Two days ago, they told us it would be 2-3 WEEKS before we received it, and yet here it is today.  We are really moving forward now!  If things continue to go well, we are on track to travel in January.

Progress

For those of you who haven't heard, we have our approval from China!  No hard copy of the letter of acceptance (LOA) as of yet.  Kathleen did look into whether or not we can file our i800 with immigration before we get that...  And they said yes.  So thankfully some of the extra time we seemed to have had to wait for approval will be balanced out by USCIS taking the i800 early!

It was nice to see progress in our fundraising efforts towards our goal.  But even better is seeing progress towards getting Kellin home!  We could have lived with not making our fundraising goal, we have good credit.  We couldn't live with not reaching the ultimate goal of getting our son home!

Thankfully from here on out, stages should move more predictably.  Which is good, because not knowing when to expect something to happen is agonizing.  Now if we could just get an update on how he is doing...

Sometimes it definitely feels like this process needs to get with the 21st century.  As paperwork is snail-mailed back and forth, piled on somebodies desk (?) waiting to be read through.  The same questions are asked and answered on multiple forms...  People always say, "Where there's a will there's a way." Is there really not enough of a will to get children home faster?  Perhaps people worry if the process was too fast then people would not have time to really think it over.  Or that children would get placed in bad environments.  Seems like there should be a happy medium.

To end on a positive, let me reiterate - PROGRESS!!

And just because it is almost Halloween.  Pooh thinks it is time for something sweet.

 

Reached Our Goal!!

We've done it!  Our amazing community has done it, we have reached our fundraising goal!

Here is a breakdown of how the $35,000 was reached:

An explanation of the categories.

• Our Own Funds - both paid out already and sitting in the bank from personal transfers.
• Other - Donation and Sales - means personal donations we received and also left over garage sale items that Kathleen so painstakingly sold off.  Probably should have broken this down, but it was easier not to.
• Reece's Rainbow - both the Kehoe account, and the Kellin account.
• Other Fundraisers - This includes the used book sale at Ferguson Books, the fundraisers at Tropics and Pizza Ranch and Racing2Kellin t-shirts.
• Garage Sale - includes our two small garage sales and the large one at Epiphany.
• Koins 4 Kellin - the coin jars that Rabbit has been collecting.
• Epiphany fundraiser (Light Blue) - got cut off the legend somehow. It was the meal served at our church, with matching funds from Thrivent.

Now that we have reached our goal, we will be encouraging people who still want to help to consider giving to families who have not met their goals.  I'm sure Kathleen will have some suggestions in future posts.

We will continue setting aside our own funds as we can, because we know there are still expenses that will come up right away from lost income from days off, to doctor's visits, and purchase of a larger vehicle.

We still want all of you to be part of our journey, we will continue to update the blog of course, this has not just been about a way to raise money!

We would like to thank all of you for your support, which has come in so many forms!  We hope you will continue to support us with your thoughts and prayers.  Reaching this goal is in a way bittersweet.  It is a relief to have all the needed funding in place.  But raising money gave us something we could actively do to get closer to getting Kellin home.  Now we must wait, and hope the LOA comes soon, as the wait for it has already seemed so long.

"Ready" to Adopt

It seems like I'm coming across more and more blog entries and articles about how people are going into adoption without being "ready."  Some of them even seem to send the subtle message that people should not adopt until they are "ready."  So my question is: CAN you ever be truly "ready" for adoption?

Here are these things that we consider helping us to be "ready" for adoption:

We have three biological children, so we are well aware of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute needs and challenges of raising young children.

We have a child with a chronic medical condition, which requires regular medical check-ups and daily monitoring.

I am an early childhood special education teacher, and I have worked with many preschoolers with special needs, including visual impairments, adoptive backgrounds, different cultural/language backgrounds, and various developmental delays.  Kellin will come with all of these needs.

We have completed training specific to international adoption, read books, websites, and blogs, and asked many questions.

We are not naive enough to expect that adoption will be easy.  Kellin will likely have institutional behaviors and delays, and will be traumatized by the whole experience of leaving everything he has known.  He may have feeding difficulties, sleep issues, and attachment difficulties.  It may be years before he "catches up" to his peers, if ever.

So . . . do these things make us "ready" for adoption?  I don't really know.  But I'm not sure what else we could do to prepare.  While I do appreciate those who write honest, real accounts of the challenges of adoption, I would also like to know what they expect those of us without that real-life adoption experience to do to prepare.  Are we ready?

Changing the subject a little . . .

We have been waiting for our LOA for 68 days.  It feels like it has been way too long.  It is very realistic to expect that we could receive this approval this week; however, I am reaching the point of being afraid to hope when I go to check my email (which I do many, many times each day).  The sadness is getting harder to bear.

We had intended to wait until after LOA to request an update on Kellin, but this past week, I couldn't wait any longer.  We "ordered" an orphanage phone call through an organization called Ladybugs n Love, which basically means we paid them an amount of money and in return, they will call Kellin's orphanage and try to get updated pictures and measurements, as well as asking for answers to the 10 questions we listed.  Hoping to get that information this week also.

Last Saturday was our benefit at Tropics Bar.  Thanks to those who attended!  We believe that it raised around $675 for our account (it is not in the thermometer yet because we haven't received the actual amount yet).  If you do the math, you'll see that we are only about $600 short of fully funded.  $600!  With a good turn-out at our last fundraiser at Pizza Ranch on Monday, we could get there!  Please consider coming to eat pizza on Monday evening, and tell any local friends, family, co-workers, etc. to join you.  We have seen over and over again that small contributions add up to great things!

Randomness

Well, here we are on day 55 of our LOA wait.  The offices in China have been closed over the past week and will be closed for the next couple of days, so we can't expect any change in the status of our dossier until at least the end of this week.  Prior to the closure, our dossier was still "translated" but not "reviewed" (the next step).  Hoping and praying for news this week!

On Friday evening, when the kids and I got home, I realized that the house was cold and the vents were blowing cold air instead of warm (it was in the 40's outside).  Of course, I panicked and started thinking that we were going to need a new furnace, big expense, etc.  I flipped the switch off on the thermostat to stop the cold air from blowing, and nothing happened!  It just kept blowing.  So I flipped the switch off on the furnace downstairs, waited a little while, and flipped it back on.  Voila!  Heat!  Of course, this was AFTER I had put all three of the kids to bed on our bedroom floor with the space heater running to keep them warm all night.  Go figure, it was the best night's sleep I've had in a while - not one child woke up during the night.  No idea what was wrong with the furnace (and we're still going to get it checked out, just in case), but it's WARM in our house!

Our littlest guy Pooh had a rough week last week.  Starting the previous Wednesday, he had a fever and a cold, which turned into a nasty cough.  The fever was kind of off and on, but never very high.  The cough got so bad that he threw up several times just from gagging so much, until I finally took him to the doctor on this past Wednesday (after being sick for a week).  Got him on some antibiotics for a sinus infection and thankfully he is MUCH better now.  Turning back into his happy self, but still adjusting to the fact that he can't have everything he wants, as he was a little spoiled when he was feeling so rotten.

Tigger managed to break his glasses (again! - active six-year-old boys are hard on glasses), so this time instead of a do-it-yourself job, I took them into the store and got them fixed.  Hopefully the repair lasts a little longer this time.

Rabbit had the idea to plan a "surprise" birthday party for Pooh, who turns 3 in a few weeks.  She has been busy all weekend writing down plans and lists, and making games for the party.  Aww, so sweet!  It's sure to be a good time (if Rabbit can manage to wait the three weeks).

We have two fundraisers this month.  Our first is this coming Saturday at Tropics Bar in Janesville.  The amazing thing about this fundraiser is this is a business that neither Eric or I have ever been to, we don't know the owners or anything like that.  Tropics is located in the neighboring town where Eric teaches high school, and he is fairly well known in the community because he coaches and is involved in community events.  Anyway, after our article in the paper came out, the owner from Tropics called and said they wanted to have a benefit for us - and they put it all together!  We have worked SO HARD for all of our other fundraisers, but this one - we just get to sit back and relax.  We know they are having a silent auction and karaoke, and since it's being held at a bar, we're guessing it's more of an adult thing than a family thing.  What an amazing thing for them to do for us.

Our other fundraiser is at Pizza Ranch on October 20th.  We provide workers to clear tables and do some cleaning for the evening, and we get a portion of the profits and all cash tips.  Should be a fun night and hopefully profitable!

We are getting so close to our Kellin!  Please keep us in your prayers and thoughts!

Tropics Fundraiser

Here is a link to to the fundraiser at the Tropics Bar in Janesville on October 11th, starting at 1 pm. Should be fun, karaoke and silent auction!

Kehoe Benefit Poster

We are so close to our fundraising goal now!  It would be amazing if we could reach our goal by the end of October!