Surprise Surprise

Our adoption adventure has been placed on hold… God apparently had other plans for us and decided to bless us with a pregnancy five days before we finished our home study and wrote a giant check :) You can read more here…

As for our adoption plans… we still feel very passionately about adoption and hope to pick back up in the process when the South Korean government will let us

In the meantime this website will probably be a ghosttown. Feel free to read my regular old blog to keep up with us at www.tiffanymead.wordpress.com

Initial Joint Meeting

Feels like we’ve officially begun the process now. Yesterday we met with our social worker for the first time. She gave us the “mound of paperwork” to complete, went through the details of the process, and got to know us a little!

Didn’t hear too much information that we didn’t know already, but can’t help being a little panicked hearing of the amount of money we’ll need officially.

Here’s a little of what we learned…

• Our “social worker” is actually the lady I’ve been working with at the agency. YAY! So it’s not a random stranger!
• The “mound of paperwork” is not near as thick as I thought it would be. I think they are giving it to us in manageable piles though… so I’m sure there’s more to come! haha
• Our future baby WILL be in a foster care situation and will be “SPOILED”! That makes my heart feel a little better knowing our baby will be living with a family for it’s first 6-9 months of life as opposed to an orphanage situation.

Our first step is for each of us to complete a 7 page self-examination. It’s basically an in depth psych evaluation. We have individual meetings scheduled with the social worker to go over the self-examinations for June 17th.

Then we will setup our home visit meeting (where the social worker will come to our house with her white glove and inspect)! Just kidding… she put our minds to rest and said we don’t have to do anything crazy… she just wants to make sure we have adequate space for a baby, have working fire extinguishers, carbon monoxide testers, etc. We will have to pay her $3,450 that day.

We complete all of the paperwork and 10 hours of online training. Then they will invoice us for about $5,000 which will be due about a month after we have our home visit.

Then I think we’ll be given the USCIS paperwork to complete and we’ll go on the wait list for a referral (match with a baby).

So we’re just taking it one step at a time! We’ll be working on our self-examinations over the next week in preparation for our individual meetings with the social worker. Hopefully neither of us are secretly crazy and just don’t know it! haha

Please keep both of us in your prayers! I’m studying for my certification exam next month and have a bachelorette party to plan for next weekend so things are just a little crazy right now! I’m gonna need a lot of caffeine! haha

I’ll keep everyone posted… Love you guys!!

HUGE SUCCESS!!

Drumroll please…

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We raised $1,350 at Mega Yard Sale 2010! Had a mild panic attack around 7:30 when NO ONE was stopping by. Couldn’t imagine how we would ever pack everything back up and have to do it all over again. Fortunately shortly after 8 the masses came! Jonesboro Road was almost shut down, two wrecks almost happened. It was PANDEMONIUM!! At one point there were over 50 people!!!

Check out some pics!

Our Warehouse

A Special treasure...

That wet suit made Brian's spidey-sense kick in

Just about the time I was having a panic attack!

Somebody buy me

Check out those sweat bands! haha

Had to try on the merchandise!

Thank you all so much for your support! We are within a couple hundred dollars of our first goal YAY!! Should be hearing from the agency any day to set up our first official meeting!!

THE YARD SALE IS ON!!

Yeap… looks like the weather just might cooperate for our yard sale tomorrow

Everyone keep their fingers crossed that there is NO RAIN!

If you’d like to come to an AMAZING yard sale, come on over! We’ve got a little bit of EVERYTHING. Washer, dryers, office desk, entertainment centers, kitchen table/chairs/hutch, waterbed, clothes for everyone, toys, sports equipment, kitchen appliances, home decoration, dvds, vhs tapes, books, etc. etc. etc.

—Henry Baptist Association, 2170 Jonesboro Rd, McDonough 30253; 7a to 12p—

See ya there!!

He’s Got This!!

I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted an update on our adoption! It’s been a wild ride already and we haven’t even started yet! haha

Here’s just a quick little update! We’ve completed our “formal application” and written out the first check! However… the same week I wrote out the check, God decided to pick up the tab and say “He’s got this”! Through some VERY generous friends, he provided $70 MORE than we needed! We didn’t even have to touch the money we personally had saved! How generous is our GOD?!?

What’s next?? Our yard sale! It took an army of three VERY DETERMINED women 5 hours to sort through, organize and somewhat price the oodles of items we’ve received. I’m completely amazed by the amount of stuff that’s been donated! I can’t wait to see how God’s going to use everyone’s stuff to help pay for our home study!!

We were supposed to have the yard sale Saturday, but considering we were under a severe weather warning all day, our yard sale got postponed. We are hoping to pull it off this Saturday, 5/1. (Although it’s already calling for rain! aaghhh) I’ll keep you posted!

We should be hearing from our agency soon to set up our first joint meeting We’ll hopefully get more details about what to expect next during that meeting.

I’m still blown away by the people who have taken an interest in our journey and want to help us! We feel so incredibly blessed! I know God will continue to provide what we need, when we need it!

We need your junk!

As you probably know, this lil adoption is going to cost us roughly the price of a brand new, tricked out 2010 Camaro… plus some. So with that said, we’re in full-blown fundraising mode!

We’re planning a huge yard sale for Saturday, April 24th. If you’ve got stuff you don’t want lying around your house just collecting dust, please consider giving it to us for our yard sale. As they say one man’s junk, another man’s treasure.

We have a truck and we’re more than willing to come pick up whatever you have. Also, if you overhear friends trying to get rid of stuff, please ask them to donate too!

Our first immediate goal is $7,500. This amount will pay for our formal application fee, home study, and agency fee. Once we have this amount and finish our home study, we can go on the officially “waiting for a baby” list. Then we’ll have about a year to raise the additional $22,000.

So bring on the junk…

We’re Officially Adopting from South Korea!!!

Received the call yesterday that we can officially begin the process.

As ya’ll know we’ve been on a waiting list for about 6 months. Hadn’t told everyone but about two weeks ago we were told that they only received 7 spots for the year (this means only 7 couples on the waiting list will be allowed to adopt from South Korea this year). We were number 16 on the list, however there were a lot of Korean couples below us on the list who are given preference and moved to the top (obviously they’d rather a Korean baby grow up with Korean parents). We were told the odds were VERY SLIM that we would be given a spot.

Over the last two weeks they went down through the list giving out the spots. AND amazingly they made it to our name on the list and we were given one of the spots!

This means we can officially start the process now (home study, mounds of paperwork, raising a bazillion dollars, etc.).

I can’t tell you how excited we are. We feel SOOO blessed to have such great prayer warriors who PRAYED US INTO A SPOT! THANK YOU!!!!!

Sometimes His plans are not ours…

Yeah not looking too good that we’ll be given the go ahead to adopt from South Korea this year. Can I just be honest? My heart hurts… we’ve thought and prayed about this adoption for almost a year now. We’ve been “on board” with South Korea for six months and to find out that it might not happen just makes me hurt.

Here’s the scoop… our agency sent out an email this week stating they had received their quota for the year (seven spots… we’re number 16 on the list). We knew this was going to happen so not too stressed yet. They basically wanted everyone who was still interested in adopting to reply to them before March 1st. I IMMEDIATELY (well right after calling Daniel) emailed them to let them know WE WANTED A SPOT!

Then came the depressing news… only seven spots and they have a lot of families of Korean heritage this year. Those couples are automatically moved to the top of the list despite where they were on the list. Obviously a Korean child would benefit from having Korean parents so I understand… but still…

So even though all bets aren’t off yet, we’ve been told our odds are not very good at all. We should know sometime after March 1st.

Please pray for us to have wisdom to make the right choices, the guts to go for whatever we think God wants for us, and the strength to deal with the already coming heartaches.

It’s official…

It’s “around February” now…

We should hear anytime whether we are one of the lucky couples given a spot and able to officially start the adoption process! I’m nervous… very nervous!

I wanna throw up!

I’m so nervous!! Back in August it seemed like February/March 2010 would take FOREVER to get here… but here we are! It’s mid-January and we could find out any time whether we’re given the go-ahead to adopt this year or not. I’m trying not to go down the “what if we don’t make the cut” road… and then there’s the whole “will we even have the money” road…

Believing that God will provide the money for us to adopt and actually waiting for it to play out is a beast. I’m so worried about so many different things and trying to convince my head to believe what my heart knows to be true… feel like I wrestle with this a lot.

I guess it’s the control freak in me that BEGS for some kind of proof that it will all work out. Because I handle our money and I KNOW, quite honestly, we ain’t got it!

It would just be nice to know that…

• We WILL be given one of the South Korean spots this year!
• We WON’T have any emergencies that will suck up our application fee that we’ve saved.
• Our application WILL be accepted by our agency.
• He WILL provide the $1,800 we’ll need for our home study.
• He WILL give us a GREAT social worker who won’t care that our carpet’s falling apart, our dogs like to put random holes in the walls of our laundry room and rip up the flooring, that our money situation never adds up on paper but that we have a GOD who always makes it okay, that we will be able to provide for a child despite it all, and that will “get” us and know that we desperately want this and feel it’s what God wants FOR us.
• He WILL give us the strength and clear mind that it’s going to take to complete the mounds of paperwork with accuracy and to their specifications.
• He WILL provide $5,150+ to pay our agency.
• South Korea WON’T have any problems with giving two “poor” people a child.
• That it WON’T take years to get a referral.
• That He WILL will provide $16,000+ to send South Korea once we accept a referral.
• That our local government WILL have grace on us and not require us to jump through even more hoops.
• That South Korea WILL complete all of the necessary paperwork and approve our baby’s VISA in a relatively short amount of time.
• He WILL provide $5,000+ we’ll need to travel to South Korea to pick up our baby.
• That our post adoption reports back here in the States will go well… we’ll find the additional $1,000 to cover the costs.
• That our marriage will remain GREAT and strong enough to handle all of the stress that’s going to come along with this adoption.
• That we will have strength and wisdom to deal with any problems that come from adopting a baby from a foreign country, taking them from the only life they’ve ever known and forcing them to live with two white people!

There’s just so many things weighing on my shoulders right now. Sometimes it can get a little overwhelming to think about all of the obstacles we are facing and quite honestly I need your prayers!

“Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be the glory…” Eph. 3:20