In gratitude

We received a very generous grant for Amanda's fees and we can now breath a sigh of relief, we have faith we can raise the remainder.

This is the message from God we prayed for and we are very grateful to the family who stepped forward to help us realize our dream to adopt our newest angel. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts.

PTL we may have good news!

Our Agency called today and they have been working hard on helping us get grants for our adoption of Amanda. Fingers crossed and prayers please, this would make a huge difference for us.

Today they sent us our court application, and we will be sending that to Estonia in a couple of days! It looks like we will be in Estonia adopting Amanda in 3-4 months if all goes well. I look at Amanda's picture daily and tell her she will be a Levario this year!

We are not unrealistic; adding once more little girl to our household is going to take some adjustment for all of us, Kara included. We are looking at our minivan and wondering how well we will all fit in there! It seats 7, but 3 car seats take up a lot of room. Having two 3 year olds will be like having twins as well, though the girls do not look alike at all!

Though we have room for all of the girls, our house is smallish, and we are going to need to make more room for another crib and clothes for one more girl, but moving seems unrealistic in today’s housing market. Besides, I have spent 21 years planting trees and plants in our yard to make it home! As an avid gardener and a lover of nature, all those rose bushes and trees are like children to me, leaving them would be very difficult. :o) I keep watching Extreme Home Makeover and dreaming that they would redo our home! LOL, talk about a pipe dream!

Meghan in our garden

I do have to share that today is the first day in a long time that I feel a weight has lifted off my shoulders, raising our adoption fees is no easy task after adopting from Ukraine just 2 months ago. Besides our tax refund (and possibly refinancing our house AGAIN) funds are hard to come by. I really get discouraged when I see that political figures raise millions of dollars in a week and I can’t seem to raise a few hundred, and I thought (to be truthful) that if raising money was as hard as it has been for us, perhaps God was trying to tell us something. I have been praying along with my close friends and family for God's will to be shown to us in our Estonian adoption. The phone call we received today comes to all of us as a message that Amanda truly is the child God wants in our family. Please continue to pray for Amanda and our successful adoption.

Waiting and waiting

Amanda wants to know what is taking so long

I wish we had news to share about how Amanda is doing or how we are progressing, but we have not heard anything from our agency nor have we spoken to them. I think I am afraid they will tell us any day that we will lose Amanda because we do not have all of our adoption funding yet.

We will continue to believe that no news is good news and keep raising money. DH Tom is working hard at getting a second job and I am going to begin to sell Gold Canyon candles myself. I can put up a webpage then and sell directly from there. We have to do everything we can here to get Amanda home.

We have three fundraising pages and people have given us great suggestions about how to raise money, many people offered their support and good luck wishes, we thank them for taking the time to do this. We did most of what they suggested to adopt from Ukraine, doing this twice is harder than we thought, we have to believe that we will have what we need when we need it.

Praise the Lord!

We have been stressed about our fundraising for Amanda's adoption, but in the last two days we have received two donations. Thank you so much to those two people who sent them!