Congrats Sunshine and Lindsey

Sunshine and Lindsey made it to state in the IMTA (Iowa Music Teacher's Association) piano contest held recently at Morningside college. Way to go girls! They'll head to Waverly, IA on March 13th. Take State!

Click here for the write-up in today's Sioux City Journal.

Summary of the week

Items over the last week:

Monday I got my HIV testing done - required for our adoption - add it to the list of medical items including TB testing and a full physical.

On Tuesday we went to see Nancy at the bank to get a bunch of documents notarized. I don't have a picture of Nancy, but I need one. She's been very kind to patiently and flawlessly notarize many documents.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we completed a 3+ hour DVD about adoption (depressing summary of all that can go wrong with adoption). The DVD allowed us to reach rock bottom and wonder why we were doing this! It's a good summary of the potential problems of adoption, but very little of the positives are shared. Overall, it's dark. Here's the DVD:


We had to finish watching the DVD so that we were ready for our final homestudy visit by our social worker from Nebraska Christian Services. Our social worker is Cindy. She'll be delighted to know that she's in our blog - you rock Cindy:The homestudy visit went well. Cindy was great to work with. We are done with the interviews and will wait on Cindy to finish our homestudy write-up.

Thursday night was a basketball game for Ryan and Tyler. Grandma and Grandpa came for that and spent the night with us.

After the busy week of a lot coming together and the dark DVD, we needed some encouragement. Layne and Tanya were there for us and we went to Texas Roadhouse. It was there that they encouraged us and talked us into blogging. So for everything that results from this, I blame them. It was a great night as we all shared our thoughts on adoption. It was reassuring to be reminded that God is in control of all of the many, many details. You can see their thought bubble saying, "maybe they are too old to blog."
We spent the day today at Katie's show choir contest at Heelan High School, going to Levi Henn's 7th b-day party, and learning to blog. It's been a full week.

Here we go.....

Certain that we were too old to blog, we were convinced by friends to give it a try. We're not sure why we're doing this other than to preserve our adoption journey and to share the info with friends.

Our adoption journey started in early November and has been moving sometimes slow and sometimes fast ever since. We are thankful for God's leading us along the way.

We are currently planning on adopting a 2-5 yr old girl from Ethiopia through All God's Children International (ACGI). This will add one more life to our already lively 5 child house. We're very excited about meeting her someday.

We've completed most of our dossier documents, all of our required training, our homestudy is in the process of being written, and we are nearly at a stage of waiting again - digesting all that's happened in the last few months.