A Quick Update

Just wanted to give a quick update on our status. We are still waiting on our FBI clearance. Hopefully, just a couple more weeks. Things have been busy around our house so that has helped the time go by.

Once we get that letter from the FBI, our homestudy will be complete and we will be well on our way to sending in our dossier and applying for our USCIS. Which, will be another wait for that piece of paper.

We appreciate your continued prayers!! We are gearing up for the holiday season in hopes that next year we will be celebrating with another little girl in our household!!!

Blessings!

Christmas Ornaments

David and I are handmaking ornaments for the Christmas Season. We got the idea from a friend of ours and we loved it. David is drawing the Africa on the ornaments and my job is to paint them and put the heart over Ethiopia. Our friend Lindsey is personalizing them on the back if you would like. We are selling the ornaments for $5.00 each. If you are interested, just leave me a comment with the number you would like and what you want it to say on the back. Make sure I have a way to get in touch with you. If you had rather email me - you can do that too millsap.rachel@gmail.com.

Thanks for helping us bring our daughter home from Ethiopia!!

Garage Sale

As David and I talked about what fundraisers we would do when we set out on this journey, one of the obvious ones was a yard sale. I knew we had stuff that could be sold, but to be honest I knew we didn't have enough to make it worth it. AND, I have only done one yard sale in my entire life and that was before we moved into our current house. Then came the help. Friends started donating items and their neighbors donated items and friends offered tables and help. Before long we had a small store in our garage. To say I was overwhelmed by the donations is a understatement. I enlisted the help of my sweet aunt and uncle from Kentucky and last Thursday I sat out to organize all the stuff. My amazing friend Lindsey came over and helped me on Thursday and my aunt and uncle got into town around lunchtime. The sale started on Friday and my mom and aunt were there to help me along with my friend Lindsey. I could not have done it without them!! I could not believe the amount of people coming. All day long there was a steady steam of people. By the end of Friday we had made about $650. Already WAY MORE than what I expected.

Here is the sign that was at the entrance to our subdivision. I knew the sign was important, so I spent a lot of time on this thing...

On Saturday Hannah wanted to set up a lemonade stand. So, she and David made lemonade on Saturday morning and here she is at her table.

Here is a glimpse of what my front yard looked like. This picture was taken on Saturday morning, so $650 had already been taken.

By the end of Saturday we had made $1400. CAN.YOU.EVEN.BELIEVE.THAT???? God totally showed up and I can tell you multiple stories of people just stopping by and not even buying anything, but giving money. Or the young lady who bought a few items and then realized it was an adoption yardsale and turned around and gave me all the change she had in her purse. It was a lot of hard work, but the blessing (and I'm not even talking about money) that came from it was more than worth it.

Thank you to all our friends who donated something, stopped by, helped and prayed for our weekend. We could not have done it without you!!!

Here is me and Hannah in our Africa shirts. I ordered these from Dolka Pots which is a local boutique that sponsors adoptive families every quarter. They were fabulous and I will for sure be getting more stuff from them.

For an update: We just had our last homestudy visit on Tuesday night and all the paperwork for that has been turned in. So, we will wait for our social worker to write that up and send it to us for review. Once we are OK with it, she will send it to our agency for approval. So, hopefully that part is close to being done. David and I have some online training we need to complete, so this weekend is going to spent doing a lot of that. We are still gathering documents for our dossier, but are close.

Our next fundraiser is going to be cookbooks, so if you have any recipes you would like to share, please send them our way. We would love it!!

Thanks for your continued prayers!! We are for sure feeling them!!

Spirit Night and Update

David and I were so blown away and blessed by the friends and family that came out to our first fundraiser at Chick-Fil-A. From 5-8 there were a steady stream of people that had come to support us and our adoption. It was very humbling. Here are a couple of pictures from that night...

This rainbow was directly over the resturant. The first thing I thought of was my friend, Tonya and how God used a rainbow during their adoption as a reminder of His promises. Now, I was getting that same reminder of His promises. I love that!!

We ended up raising about $350.00 that night. Success!! Thank you friends!!

We are still in the paperwork madness of the adoption. We have had two visits with our HomeStudy agency and will have our final visit at our home in a couple of weeks. The process can at times be extremely overwhelming and the tasks seems nearly impossible. Thankfully we have great friends who have walked this journey ahead of us and they are our encouragement and reminder that what is waiting at the end of this journey is more than worth it. We still have no idea what the timeframe will be and won't know until we submit all our paperwork. It will probably be a couple more months.

We will be having two more fundraisers in the near future. If you can help out in anyway, please let me know.

1. Garage Sale: We are having a garage sale on October 8-9. That is a Friday and Saturday. If you have anything you would like to donate, please let me know. We will be happy to come and pick it up. Or, if you want to come and hang out with me on those days, you know I would love that too :).

2. Cookbook: I am working on putting together a cookbook to have printed close to the end of the year. My first need is receipes. If you have a favorite receipe that you would like to share, please email it to me at millsap.rachel@gmail.com. Also, be thinking of people you can sell these cookbooks to. They will make GREAT christmas gifts :).

The financial obligation of this process is daunting sometimes. Thank you for your support!!!

Please continue to say a prayer for the little girl in Ethiopia right now that God has chosen for our family. Pray for her health and her safety and please pray for a peace to be with her.

We are thankful and super excited for this journey. Thank you for being with us.

A Journey of a Lifetime

Thank you so much for visiting our blog dedicated to our journey of bringing our little girl home from Ethiopia. We are so excited!!! We plan to keep our friends and family updated through this blog on our process and journey. Thank you for your support.