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Our Family

Our family began the day we were married June 21, 1997! Since then it has grown a little here, and a little there. We now have five beautiful children. Mason who is 11, Cassidy who is 8, Preston who is 6, Birtukan who is 6, and Tseganesh who is 3. Three of our children grew in my belly, and two grew many miles away in my heart. God chose for us two precious girls in Ethiopia, who were to be our children. They arrived in our family on the joyous day of Aug. 22, 2010. This blog will be a way for us to share our experiences as a new family of 7! I hope you enjoy reading it, as much as we are enjoying living it!

Sunday, June 13, 2010

continued.......

So On May 18th at 12:21 p.m. we received the phone call with the referral of our two sweet precious girls! I cannot share pictures yet, but trust me when I say they are gorgeous!!! We now wait for our court date, and the first time we will finally get to meet our little ones!

Ok like I said I am really bad at this......

So like I mentioned before, I am really bad at this whole Blog thing. I thought it would be a great way for me to keep track of a time line, but finding time to get on here and actually type about it is REALLY hard for me! So where we left off is that our Dossier was being mailed to Ethiopia right?? Well yes it did get there, quite awhile ago actually, May 11th to be precise. On May 13th ( yes, just two days later ) we received a phone call from our family coordinator at America World. As I stared at the phone while it was ringing, thinking to myself I don't know anyone in that area code... it hit me! Wait a minute that is America World calling me!! I nervously answered the phone. It was Nicole. As I am shaking thinking I must have missed something in our Dossier, she surprised me. The reason for the phone call was actually to see if we would be willing to reconsider our request for one child to two children!They had two little girls in the orphanage that fell in our age request, that joined the orphanage around the same time and were unrelated but VERY attached to each other. Needless to say I could not breathe, could not talk, and just sat there staring. Nicole asked if I had any questions and I said I really could not think of any at the moment but I am sure I would be calling her right back. Sure enough as soon as I hung up I called right back asked a few questions and then proceeded to make the phone call to tell my husband. Of course I told Nicole we would need to talk about it though the weekend and get back to her. She said of course that would be fine, and she would be praying for us. My husbands reaction was the same as mine, shock,excited, nervous and many more emotions. So the weekend came and went. We spent much of it praying, talking with our kids, speaking with our parents and pastor, and just working through the details. What it basically came down to was this. There is no way on earth this would have happened had it not been in God's plan for us. It is almost unheard of to receive a referral that quickly after your Dossier arrives in country. We had always had a calm feeling about who our child (and now children )was. We knew God had chosen them for us before we even knew who they were. Monday morning came and we made the phone call to Nicole to say that yes we were willing to accept both girls into our home! There was more paperwork to fill out, we had to change our home study, and I submitted more paperwork to USCIS to change our approval of one child to two children.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

DTE!!!!!

SOOO I am really bad about this blog thing I decided. We received an official email last Friday that said our official DTE ( Dossier to Ethiopia date ) is 4/30/10! This means we are on the official waiting list for a referral! Our paperwork will not physically be flying to Ethiopia until this Friday, but they said our date is the 4/30/10 date. The other thing we found out is that on the unofficial list that one of the girls in our Yahoo group keeps track of we are #2 in line for a referral! Hopefully that means we will get our referral really quickly! We are just thrilled, and excited that it may move quickly for us. Now we are just concentrating on fundraising, which included a garage sale that raised $2000.00! We are also making some really cool t-shirts, and will have a website up soon that people can order from. When it is ready I will post the web address. A lot of really cool things happening right now! Cannot wait to see what the next thing will be :-)!

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Our paperwork is mailed!!!!!

I can't believe I am typing this right now!! We mailed our paperwork!!! Our Dossier is on it's way right now to America World!It will be there in the morning. Our family coordinator said that if we got it to them by Monday, then we could be DTE ( Dossier to Ethiopia ) by next Friday!!!!!!! We are so thrilled to be waiting for a referral. Seven months of paperchasing is finally done. We cannot wait to see who God has chosen for us!

Friday, March 26, 2010

We are approved ( again:))!!!!!

I am SO far behind in posting, BUT we have great news!!! We received our I-171 approval in the mail March 18th!! We had a pretty big bump in the process with our homestudy, but got it all worked out and was approved! So our next step is to finish our Hague online training course, put together our family photo pages, and get everything certified at the state level. Then our Dossier will be finished, and mailed off to America World for them to review and approve! We are getting REALLY close which is exciting, and nerve racking all at the same time. Exciting because we will hopefully be able to meet our daughter really soon, and nerve racking because now I REALLY need to focus on some fundraising efforts to raise some money so we CAN get her home! I will keep everyone up to date on what we have going on as far as fundraising goes!

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Addie our cousin's art project :)!

We are so VERY blessed to have the joy to be going through this adoption with our cousins Jon and Caycee Coffield, and their two adorable children Addie and Porter. They too are requesting a girl. Sweet little Addie came to her mom one day with an idea on how to help get her sister to them. I wanted to post her blog, so you all could read what an outstanding, thoughtful sweet little girl she truly is! If you can help her out it would be greatly appreciated, because as you all know adoption is not cheap, but worth every penny! her blog is familyofcoffields.blogspot.com! Cassidy and I were also brainstorming the other night, and have a pretty good idea on what she wants to start making. Keep checking in to find out :)!!

Monday, January 25, 2010

Preston's basketball game!

Now unfortunately when you have more than one child in sports one parent gets to go one place and the other another, so i did not get to actually see Preston's game. I did hear from a very proud Daddy that he did AMAZING! He shot 5 baskets and made 4 of them!!!! He LOVES playing, and is really enjoying being on the same team as his cousin Porter!