Tomorrow!

In 24 hours we will officially be on our way to Ukraine!  We will arrive very early Friday morning and have a few days to adjust before our appointment with the Department of Families and Children at 10:00 Tuesday morning (that's midnight Tuesday Pacific time for anyone who might be up that late and want to pray for us at that time!)  We will keep our blog updated as we can, but in the meantime here are a few specific things we would love prayer for:
-Smooth travels on Wednesday and Thursday.
-Our appointment on July 11th- that we will find our child(ren) in the profiles they present to us and also for wisdom and discernment.
-Last week's cyber attack caused delays for many families in country.  We are hopeful that will be taken care of by the time we start our process next week.
-Peace and patience through the entire process!

Preparing for this trip has felt strange in many ways.  It's not really a vacation (though we intend to make at least part of it feel that way), we're not moving there (like we did when we left for Korea), we don't know exactly when we're coming home, but the goal is to come home with more people than we're leaving with.  So many unknowns are ahead and it's going to be so important that we take it one day at a time.  Tomorrow another part of the adventure begins!

1 Week

We leave for Ukraine in ONE week!! We still have our last fundraiser going on for two more days.  All purchases from Ragini Project (https://raginiproject.com/) fund a grant to support our final adoption expenses through June 30th.  Thank you so much to all who have purchased from them this month.  We greatly appreciate all of the support we have been receiving through our fundraisers and YouCaring page.  If you haven't checked out Ragini Project's website yet, be sure to do so.  They have beautiful merchandise for sale from all over the world!

Please continue to pray for smooth travel next week and a successful SDA appointment on July 11th!

Preparing to Travel

In only 17 days we will be on a plane headed to Ukraine!!  Yesterday we finished our third and final garage sale fundraiser and raised $954.30!  This will be a huge help with our travel and living expenses while we stay in Ukraine for upwards of two months or so.  We have just one more fundraiser left that runs through the end of June.  We are the featured family for the online store Ragini Project.  We would absolutely love your support through that final fundraiser this month!  You will not only be supporting us, but also the artisans all over the world who have created the beautiful pieces.  They even have some newly arrived jewelry from India that was just added to their site yesterday!

We did find out that our SDA appointment has been pushed back one day to July 11th so we will have a few days to explore Kiev before being matched with our child. 17 days is going to come faster than we know and we couldn't be more excited!  In the meantime we are staying plenty busy finishing up the school year, writing packing lists and to-do lists, and trying to finish getting a bedroom mostly set up for our little one to come home to.  Please continue to pray for smooth travel plans, one more very successful fundraiser, peace about all the unknowns that lie ahead, and for a successful SDA appointment on July 10th when we will, hopefully, be matched with our child.

WE'RE GOING TO UKRAINE!!

On Friday we got our SDA appointment date for July 10th!! We could not be more excited to finally know when we get to travel and the timing with summer works out perfectly with our work schedules.  Our one way plane tickets are officially booked and we will be leaving late on July 5th, arriving early in Ukraine on July 7th, have a couple days to adjust and then attend our SDA appointment (where we will hopefully be matched with our child!) on July 10th. At this point in time we plan on staying through the entire process, likely 2 months or more, but will have to see just how long the trip really is when it gets to be time for the new school year to start. We are going into it with a flexible mindset knowing that we may need to end up making two trips if it looks like we will be missing too much work before coming home as a family.  I'm not sure it's all sunk in yet that it's actually happening, but we know the next month will be an exciting whirlwind for sure!

Now that we have a date, finances are about to become an important issue for us.  We have two more fundraisers this month: we are the featured family at www.raginiproject.com so all purchases will fund a grant for our family, and we have a big garage sale coming up on the 16th and 17th.  Please pray that these two fundraisers will be successful for us! We still have thousands of dollars to raise to be completely funded for adoption AND travel expenses.  Please consider checking out the Ragini Project website or our YouCaring page to make a donation directly to us.  Every dollar gets us closer to bringing home our little one!

Other things to pray for during this next month as we prepare to travel:
-For all travel details to come together smoothly (including things that will need to be taken care of at our home while we are gone for that long)
-For peace and not anxiety as we prepare for traveling (13 hours on planes isn't our favorite thing to do) and for SO many unknowns that are ahead
-That we will officially find our child (or children) on July 10th!

Ragini Project

As we anxiously await a travel date, we are so excited to share that we are the featured family for the month of June with the Ragini Project!  This is an online business started by an adoptive family and proceeds from all purchases help to fund a monthly grant awarded to a family in the process of international adoption.  Also, all of their products are directly purchased from the artisan in another country, helping the artisan receive fair market value for their goods and better support their own family.  Make sure you check out their website, here, to see all of the beautiful items they have for sale!  You can also see our family's story on their website during the month of June by clicking here.  Every purchase you make helps us bring our little one home!

APPROVED!

Friday morning we got the email from our program director we had been anxiously waiting for and praying for, for 6 weeks and 1 day: Out dossier is officially approved and registered by Ukraine!  This is such a huge answer to prayer to be approved the first time and another big step completed in our journey.  We are now waiting to receive our appointment date in country and will be able to make plans to travel a couple days prior to that. Please pray with us that we would receive this date very soon! Also that once we have a date we will be able to make travel plans smoothly.  And, as usual, for continued finances as our trip draws nearer.

Still Waiting...

It's been 40 days since we submitted our dossier and we still have no news.  We have been hoping every day since we hit the four week mark we might hear of our official approval any day.  The waiting is complicated by knowing there is still a chance that something in our dossier could be rejected, which means we would need to make changes, resubmit, and wait all over again.  Some families have needed to submit multiple times before receiving approval.  Oh how we are praying we will get approval the first time!  Fortunately we have been busy with work and other things so the wait has not yet felt excruciating (though I may be checking my email more than a few times a day!).  We are desperate to get word of approval though, knowing that would be one more step conquered, so would greatly appreciate prayers that it would come this week!

In other news we held a successful garage sale fundraiser earlier this month and raised over $560 for our adoption expenses!  We are planning to have one more in June so would appreciate prayers for that to be successful as well. 

Hopefully we will be writing again soon to share good news about our approval! In the meantime please pray with us!