Ma Fang Zhou

Hello!

There is a little boy in the Sichuan Province of China who we hope to add to our family in less than a year. His name is Ma Fang Zhou and he is 5 years old and will be 6 on April 27th. He is alittle older than we previously thought we would adopt but he will fit nicely into our family. I wish I could share pictures with you now but until we receive Pre-Approval from China we are not allowed. That of course only makes sense. He has a minor heart defect and a couple of other issues but is generally healthy. Ma means horse and is his surname because he was enrolled in the orphanage in 2002. Fang Zhou as far as I can tell means 2 ships.

So we are busy collecting documents and writing our Letter of Intent so we can move forward with the rest of the paperwork. Our Yard Sale is Saturday October 7th and we have been overwhelmed with generous donations of stuff to sell at it.

Wayne's pen business is taking off as well. He is so creative and is making about a pen a day and selling them just as fast. Oh and our coffee, we will be selling whole bean French Roast coffee by the 1/2 lb and lb. at the yardsale and will be taking orders for more if anyone is interested.

So we're off...I can't wait till we get the paperwork done, I really don't prefer it at all but will suffer through it because our little guy is sooo worth it.

God Bless,
M

Here We Go Again!

I guess I should rename the blog? We found Ruth, although sometimes she still needs finding as she likes to explore and more than once in the blink of an eye she was gone. After about 2 minutes of frantic searching during one disappearance I found her in the garage with the dog. Other times she hides in "her cabinet" in the kitchen, or behind the big chair in the family room.

But I'm getting off topic or am I? We are in search of another child to add to our family. Yes it is true we are adopting again from China again... Are we crazy? Maybe, but we believe that this is from the Lord. He put the idea in our head and the desire in our heart.

Just this week we filed our application with AWAA and received, after a few days of touch and go, their approval. If you were with us for our first adoption you may remember we had a little difficulty with our(mostly Wayne's) past criminal record. Well China is getting stricter with past criminal records so our agency was a little hesitant but did decide to adovcate on our behalf. We are however only approved for a special needs child. But that is the avenue we were headed anyway. We hope to find Ruthie a big brother 1-3 yrs older than she is, so that would make him 3-5 yrs old.

With a special needs child the process is a little different. We don't proceed until we have found the child we would like to adopt from AWAA's special needs referrals. After that things are somewhat expedited. A letter of intent(LOI) is sent with our medical forms and references to China, we then begin collecting the rest of the documents for our dossier. In the meantime we hope we will receive pre approval(PA) for our son. Then, once our dossier is logged in in China we wait for travel approval(TA) which would be 2-3 months after our dossier is sent to China. Then we go!!

So our time line could look like this. As we haven't yet begun to pursue the adoption of a specific child we may have to wait until AWAA receives more special needs referrals, this could be November. So Nov. send LOI wait for PA and begin paperchase. Receive PA finish gathering dossier documents and hopefully be DTC(dossier to China) by early February.
Receive TA by May, travel by early June.

Much quicker than our adoption of Ruth which took 16 months from start to finish. If the following timeline works as I laid it out that will be 9 months total from start to finish.

We are hoping to fund this adoption debt free and are coming up with various ideas for fundraisers. Our first fundraiser is a yard sale selling lots of our own stuff along with donations from the community. We will also be selling Wayne's hand crafted woodpens. I'll post pictures of those soon. We have a few other ideas up our sleeves as well so stay tuned.

Once we have our homestudy complete we can apply for lots of grants. There are so many organizations out there I'm sure at least a couple will be able tot help us out. We are trusting that God will provide in miraculous ways so that no one will doubt that HE is an ever ready help and abundant provider of all you could ask or conceive.

That's all for now, I'll post some pictures soon of our trip to the beach.

~M