Here we go!!!!

This is it!!!! Tonight I checked off the last item on our "to do" list!!! Tomorrow morning we will get up early to make the drive down to Indy to which we catch a flight to Chicago and then fly from Chicago to Beijing!! Tonight we had or last dinner at the table as a family of 5!! Next time we eat a meal together it will be as a family of six and every seat at our table will be filled!!! That is so exciting and at the moment hard to wrap my head around! It's here!!!!

It's crazy to think that this is finally happening! Everything we have imagined is about to become a reality! Our emotions are all over the place! December 30th will not only celebrate our marriage, but now will hold a special place in our hearts as the day that we began this last leg of the journey to bring home our final piece to our family puzzle!!

We are so excited to get on a plane!!! I will try my best to send daily updates on here! So please check in if you would like to see all our adventures. You can also subscribe to our blog to receive updates by email:) I'm not sure if we will be able to get on Facebook but will link my blog if possible.

After we get Myla on Jan.4th she will be with us the rest of the trip. She will be legally adopted that day according to China. She will be legally adopted by the US and a US citizen on January 11th. And just as a note the time difference is 13 hours!! A rough outline of our travels is listed below! We love you and are so thankful for all of you!!! We couldn't not have done this without you!! We can't wait to introduce you to her when we get home!!

12/30 flights to China

12/31 arrive in Beijing

1/1 sight seeing day

1/2 sight seeing day

1/3 flight to guiyang province where Myla is

1/4 1:30p travel to civil affairs office to get Myla

1/5 return to civil affairs office to finish paperwork

1/6 possibly a visit to her orphanage

1/7 flight to Guangzhou for US consulate appointment

1/8 Myla's medical appointment and visa paperwork

1/9 rest day

1/10 sight seeing day

1/11 consulate appointment @8:30a

1/12 pick up Myla's visa

1/13 fly home from Hong Kong!!!!!!!

A special Christmas

I will keep this short and sweet!

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas!

Happy Anniversary!

Happy New Years! 

to us! We found out yesterday that we will be boarding a plane to China December 30th to bring home Myla!!!!!!!!

I love the holidays but am so anxious now to get them over with!!! We have A LOT to do now to prepare the last minute details before we leave! 

And it will be super special to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary on a plane! Next year is our 10 year so that will be hard to top after this trip!:)

Anyways! Wanted to let everyone know our wonderful Christmas news!!!! We will keep you updated with information as we get it! 

Thank you for your prayers and support!! Love you all!!!

Quick update!

Things have been moving quickly once again these last few weeks! I guess when you are obedient to what God calls you to; he will make it all happen and fall into perfect place! We filled out Myla's visa paperwork last week and sent it in. Then we also had our paperwork sent to Guangzhou for our article 5 approval. For us,  this was the last set of paperwork that was to be filled out. This morning we found out that our article 5 has been sent on for approval and we are just awaiting our travel approval from China giving us permission to enter the country. Once we have our travel approval in the next (1-3 weeks) we will pick our US consulate appointment at the US embassy and get our flights arranged!!!! With the expedite letter that we have written that could help speeds up the travel approval. We could definitely be leaving the end of the month if all works out!!! The earliest they thought we could leave would be the 30th which would be super special! That is Our 9th wedding anniversary!!! So ready or not, we are getting on a plane SOON to bring Myla home!!! We are so excited, nervous, anxious, and so many more emotions! Can't wait to begin 2016 as a family of 6!!:)

a little hiccup

Hi friends!! Alot has been going on this last month! Yes it's been a little over a month already that we have been matched with Myla and we are just so anxious to get on a plane and bring her home! We love starring at her pictures and wondering how she is doing or what she has done that day.

We have been busy filling out all kinds of papers from I-800 immigration papers, to visa applications, article 5 papers and so on. (I'm sure none of you know what those are, but just thought I'd put them on here in case you were curious about adoption and for my records too;) We also consulted a few doctors/specialists about Myla's medical condition. (Not sure if you remember, but in China when adopting a child, it is MUCH faster to adopt a child with "special needs" than it is to adopt a "perfect child". And a special need could be something simple like needing glasses/asthma to the more severe special needs like heart defects/cerebral palsy/downs syndrome.) She has been diagnosed with mild a thalassemia which is a genetic blood disorder. It deals with iron levels, anemia, and low red blood cell counts. If severe, you would need routine blood transfusions medication, and more. In consulting a pediatric hematologist at Riley, after looking over her medical file, they believe that she doesn't "have" thalassemia but is a "carrier" for it. Since it is a genetic disorder, she has it in her DNA, but doesn't suffer from the symptoms.  Once we get her home we plan to have some more tests done to determine the degree of her condition, but we are happy to hear that she is a healthy and thriving little girl! Because of the condition we were able to get one of our doctors to write an expedite letter for Myla to try and speed up these last few steps so we can travel a little sooner. That way the doctors can do further testing here rather than in China.

A few weeks ago we overnighted a bunch of papers to the USCIS Immigration to get our approval. And we ran into a little hiccup. They say typical turnaround is about 3 weeks. We may have been counting the days but approaching our 3 week period, we received a letter from them that stated that one of the forms we filled out had expired (as in the document format) and that we needed to fill out a new one. They didn't tell us or our social worker that that change had taken effect. So we quickly filled that paper out with some help and overnighted it back to our officer. In the meantime, we filled out our personal visa applications and sent those to Chicago to the Chinese consulate to get those ready for our passports. Early this week we received our passports in the mail and then today we finally received our I-800 approval letter!! We weren't expecting to get the approval letter until next week. HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO US! So that is  now checked off the list and we just have a few things left to do.

Our next steps are to send our papers to China to the US embassy in Guangzhou and get our article 5 approval which takes about 2-3 weeks. Once we have that, we apply for Myla's visa and wait for travel approval which can take about 2-3 weeks. Once we have travel approval we will make our flight arrangements and BOARD A PLANE TO CHINA a few weeks later!!!!! We were hoping to travel sometime in late December. That is still a slight slight possibility, but it is looking more like January possibly February. (with Christmas and the Chinese New Year we may run into another little hiccup), but she will most likely be home before her 3rd birthday in March!!

Thank you so much for all of your sweet wishes and congratulations about our new daughter! We are so excited to get things moving again and bring our sweet girl home. I can't wait to introduce you all to her and for her to see how many people love and care for her! It's because of you that we are making it through these little hiccups! There have been so many of you who have been praying for us from the very beginning, have wrote us notes of encouragement, have helped us fundraise, and have just been there for us through those hard times. We are so GRATEFUL for you and couldn't have done this without you!

Please continue to pray for our adoption, that our paperwork would keep moving, and that things would fall into place in God's perfect timing. You could also pray for her safety and the big transitions ahead for all of us.

Hopefully the next update will be about our travel arrangements to China to pick up and bring home our little girl!!!

He is

Shout it, go on and scream it from the mountains, go on and tell it to the masses, that HE IS GOD!!

That song has been in my head all week. He is God and he is such a good God!! It is with great JOY that we announce to you we have been matched!!!!! 

Meet Yun Xuan (we are naming her Myla Jayne and using part of her Chinese name as a second middle name) a beautiful two and a half year old little girl!! We are just over the moon excited and can't believe that this has happened:) We received notification this past week about her and we hardly looked over her file before we fell in love with her cute little cheeks and adorable little lips and really felt in our hearts that this was our little girl. And as a little added touch to how God works is that her birthday is March 26th which is the same day that our dossier was registered in China!!

Our emotions have been all over the place! We trusted, we were patient (with his help), and waited on God's timing and have we ever been blessed. When I told Leah after school, she screamed and was so excited! The boys were super excited to show off her picture to Leah and Aaron. They kept saying "Mom, she's so cute! She's so adorable!" And they are so right! She's adorable! She's perfect! And she's OURS!!!!!

We don't have a timeline yet of when we will travel to get her, but hopefully we will have that soon. We have received our letter of acceptance from China (LOA) basically stating that after looking at our paperwork, they approve us to be her parents!!!!!

We want to thank all of you who have been going through this with us each step of the way! You mean more to us than we could ever say. Thank you for your continued prayers. Please continue to pray for us. Pray that our next stages of paperwork go smoothly and quickly so that we can bring sweet Myla Jayne to her forever home!!!

An update for you...

Well, it's been a bit since our last update on the adoption so I thought I would fill you all in a little. Unfortunately not much has changed. We are still waiting to be matched with our sweet little girl. We have gone through a few more list releases, but there have been no matches. We did review another file from one of our partnerships through our adoption agency. After prayer and lots of research on her medical condition we decided to say no. So we are just waiting and praying that it will be very soon!!!

This waiting is really getting the best of me. I can't wait to finally know who she is and have a picture to her. I'm not very patient so this stage in the adoption has been super hard for me. I think I would be fine if I just knew a date. I can wait until that date. It's the complete unknown that drives me nuts. That's the control that I have to let go of and just go along for the ride. I know while I'm in it, it seems so long but looking back it will be short lived and well worth it. His plan is better than mine. So I just need to wait and be patient.

Since we have just been waiting, I decided it was time to get the girls room decorated. (I figured maybe if I get the room done, it will help get us matched:) " Room's done now she can come." HA! We will see. At least that's a couple things off my to do list and I had fun doing it. Here are a few pictures.

And yes, her name is a secret until we get a picture of her:) Her first name is decided, but the rest is a little up in the air. We are waiting to see her picture. She will also have 2 middle names which will use some part of her chinese name. So if you want to know what her name is, PRAY hard that we get matched soon!! ;)

What's happening!!

My how things have gotten busy! I was chatting with a friend today and was talking about what was happening right now with our adoption and she mentioned that she follows the blog and it had me thinking... I probably should update everyone a bit. It's been awhile:) So I apologize for not giving an update. Things have been super busy lately with organizing and having our garage sale.

What a huge successful garage sale we had over the last couple of weekends. We raised over $7,000 for our adoption!!! We were completely blown away by God's faithfulness. We had NO idea that we would make that much money in a garage sale. We did have ALOT of stuff but I just never thought that we would make that amount. So THANK YOU to those of you who came and shopped our garage sale and to those who donated items to our sale. We had 24 families donate items for us to sell along with our things. I also had a handful of help getting things organized and priced for the sale. Without everyone's help, we would not have been able to pull off the sale. I was a complete mess leading up to the sale because I was just so overwhelmed with peoples generosity and with all the items that were donated, that I had no idea where to begin! I am definitely glad that it is over but it was very well worth it.

In other news, this past Tuesday we underwent another round of the list release. Every three weeks or so China will release a list of possible children up for adoption. Our agency closely monitors that list and will give us a child's file if it matches our specifications. Unfortunately there wasn't a match this time around. This is the 3rd round that we have gone through since having our papers in China. We were disappointed that their wasn't a match, but we are hopeful and trust that the Lord has it in control and we will meet her when we he wants us to. It's hard to wait, but we have hope that he's taking good care of her and knows who she is. That moment when we meet her on paper for the first time will be so special and we can't wait for that!

We did have the opportunity to look through a child's file during the garage sale madness but through a lot of prayer and research, we just didn't feel like that was "the one" for our family. Every adoption agency has partnerships with orphanages in China. When they have these connections, they are able to get adoptive families for the children without having to go on the "list". So that is how we received her file. She was an adorable little girl and I just wanted to snatch her up based off of her picture. But we just didn't have a peace about it. We hope the absolute best for her and pray that the right family will come along for her. It was super hard to say no. It weighed heavy on our hearts and was a very tough decision. We didn't want to base it on how cute she was though. So here we are waiting. The waiting part is always hard. The unknown. The dreaming and thinking of when that day will come. So while we wait another 3 weeks, we will be caught up in the end of the year school activities and get decorating on a sweet little girls room.

My favorite song right now is I Am Not Alone by Kari Jobe. It is so perfect for right now in the midst of this waiting period. That we will not fear and are not alone. That he will go before us. He will never leave us. He will fight for us. That he amazes us, is faithful, and calls us his own!

"I Am Not Alone"

When I walk through deep waters

I know that you will be with me

When i'm standing in the fire

I will not be overcome

Through the valley of the shadow

I will not fear

I am not alone

I am not alone

You will go before me

You will never leave me

I am not alone

I am not alone

You will go before me

You will never leave me

In the midst of deep sorrow

I see your light is breaking through

The dark of night will not overtake me

I am pressing into you

Lord, you fight my every battle

And I will not fear

You amaze me

Redeem me

You call me as your own

You're my strength

You're my defender

You're my refuge in the storm

Through these trials

You've always been faithful

You bring healing to my soul