Moving Right Along!

Ahhh!!! We're getting close to the end of this crazy paper chase! Yesterday evening our home study report was sent to AGCI to be reviewed! AGCI has 5-7 business to respond back to "B", our social worker, with any changes that need to be made. I've heard that it's normal for the agency and home study worker to go back and forth a couple times before it's finalized and approved, so this may take a little bit of time... or it may not!?! We'll just have to wait and see! Once this report is "good to go" and finalized that means we can start applying for grants! 

We have three organizations picked out that we are going to apply with for grants.  Most of you have probably heard of Show Hope , an amazing organization started by Steven Curtis Chapman, to help start a movement to care for the orphans! They graciously give adoption grants to adopting families in need, in hopes of uniting more orphans with their forever families. We'll have to fill out and submit an extensive online application and then... wait and see. There are far more requests for assistance each month that outweigh their resources, so even if we do meet all the requirements- they're not always able to provide assistance to every family. This is another reason why we're applying to three different organizations, hoping that at least one grant will be approved! 

Another grant we are applying for is through Lifesong for Orphans . They have a particular grant that both Joshua and I LOVE called Both Hands. We will be responsible for identifying 10 local families that would be willing to come along side of us and work one day on a widow's home. Each family will send out sponsorship letters to friends and family, asking for sponsorships for their day of work. The awesome thing about this particular program is that while 100% of the sponsorship money raised will go towards our adoption... we also get to help out a local widow in need!  Along with the Both Hands project we plan on applying for, we are also able to apply for Lifesong's matching grant, where whatever money that that is raised from the 10 families sponsorship's, may be matched up to 4k! Again, we'll have to send in an extensive application and then wait and see if we get approved. 

And the last grant that we'll be applying for is through Room for One More Child (thank you Laurale for letting us know of this amazing organization!), where just like Show Hope, they give grants to adopting families to help assist in the cost of the adoption process and hopefully unite more orphans with forever families! And again, we'll fill out the extensive application and then wait to see if we get approved or not. All three of these grants have been prayed over since before we turned in our official application with AGCI and even if we don't get approved for any of them, we LOVE what they stand for and how Christ's heart is clearly the center of what they're all about! May God bless these organizations! 

We're still waiting on our, oh so important, passports to come in the mail, but they should be here any day now, and once they're here, our dossier will be complete! Wahoo! As far as that 5k check that needs to be sent in to the agency with it... we have stuff in the works that we're hopeful will bring us to that amount! Our Adoption Yard Sale is coming up on Saturday October 23rd, our Photo Shoot Raffle is going on until November 1st, and the last week in October and first week of November we're teaming up with a club that Joshua heads up at McKinney HS, called 2412 (I'll tell you more about this cool club and what they're planning to do with Project 61 another time!) to sell another round of An Inexhaustible Love shirts! So I'm hopeful that it'll all come together in just His perfect timing and before too long we'll be on that wait list with our number!