Random Thoughts

First, please continue to pray for Daniel. He is still a pretty sick little boy. He needs to gain weight and the doctors need wisdom to know every little thing that is making him sick.

Next, my ticker now says 14 months! How can this be???? And I still have absolutely no idea when our agency might get their lisence renewed. I've given up all hopes of having Yosef and Mihret with us this Christmas and am now just praying that the agency will have received a lisence by Christmas. As much as my heart is broken for myself, it's also so broken for my kids. They've now lived in an orphanage for 18 months, which will obviously have an affect on them and how they develop emotionally, not to mention physically. But all I can do is trust God to hold them in the palm of His hand. I'm completely helpless to help my children. My job is to love them and to point them to Jesus so that they'll know where to go to get their broken hearts healed. But they need to get here first!

We were fingerprinted earlier this week, so at least that's taken care of. We had to drive 4 1/2 hours one way. Once we got there, we waited for 3 hours. Then had a 4 1/2 hour drive home! Let's just say that we're still exhausted! But it was a really nice day too though. It was nice to have so much time just to talk with Avery about something other than our miserably depressing adoption saga! We also got to see one of Avery's cousins who attends college just down the road from the fingerprinting facility. It was a good day.

We will be picking up our van within the next day or two! It's a 95 Dodge Grand Caravan SE with 192,000 miles, but it's free! And they just did $900 worth of work, so hopefully it will last us until we can replace it with something better. This is God's provision for us though, so I'm not so worried about it. Now, we can take the money we've been saving up for a van and use it to replace the roof on our house! We're going to wait until we have a courtdate though because the fostercare for our kids is pretty expensive and we don't want to spend our van/roof money if we're going to end up needing it. Also, we need to keep it set aside in case we end up having to redo our CIS approval for the adoption as well. That doesn't expire until May, but at this point, who knows?!?!?!

So, I've been doing pretty good with staying so busy that I can't have time to be sad about our adoption. Until last night when I was in the car with Kaitlyn and she wanted to hear some Christmas music. So I turned on the radio just in time to hear Steven Curtis Chapman singing "Al I want for Christmas is a family". That was it. I started to cry. It is a really cool song though, so please do check it out. The Chapmans are very near to our hearts anyway because the Shaohannah's Hope Grant we received was just enough to finish paying for our adoption. And it was very timely.

Okay. That's my random thoughts for the day. Oh yea, I also wanted to write that I am truly overwhelmed by the prayers that are being prayed for our family. I can feel them in my heart. People were praying for us before we even realized our adoption was going to have so many problems. That's amazing to me. Prayers were being offered up for this very thing before we even had any idea that we needed to be praying along these lines. God is hearing your prayers and holding us in His hand during this very sad holiday season. He's making it not so sad. He's helping me to find comfort in the two amazing kids I already have. Please continue to pray for Yosef and Mihret so that they will maybe be with us for next Christmas. Maybe for Mihret's birthday on January 15. Maybe before Yosef turns 10 in May. Soon...