Officially Logged In!

Our documents are officially logged in to the Chinese system!! Our LID (Log in Date) is 5/27/14!!

Friends of ours are currently in China picking up their daughter and just seeing the pics and following their journey makes me anxious for our own journey! There are still so many unknowns and we are just going forward in faith. Our daughter still does not know her family is working towards her. We plan to send her a cake and a gift for her birthday in June, but we are unsure yet if we will let her know about us. We want to wait until we get our letter of approval from China before letting her know that, Yes!!, for sure she will be ours and that China has given their approval! I just don't want to stress her out and have to sit in nervous anticipation to see if finally she will get her forever family! 

Please pray for us as we make this decision. We know she wants to be adopted, but does she know what adoption entails? We pray for her foster family and other kids that may be in the home that she has grown up with. We pray that she will be ok in her transition and know that we want her to keep in touch with her loved ones in China even while making a home here. Pray that we would be able to make the necessary changes as we stretch to a family of 5. There is so much still to prepare for, yet so little information we have to know what it will look like!! 

Our Journey so far:

Letter of Intent (LOI)- 12/26/13
Pre Approval (PA) - 12/29/13
Home Study Approved - 3/14/14
I-800a Apprival - 4/23/14
Dossier to China (DTC) - 5/20/14
Log in Date (LID) - 5/27/14

Next we are waiting for Out of Translation (OOT), then Out of Review (OOR), and Letter of Approval (LOA) which will enable us to submit our i-800 to request immigration approval for Joy. 

Once we get our letter of Approval and Immigration and travel approvals, we can set up our consulate appointment and our travel dates! At that time the $6,000 orphanage donation will be required and travel costs will be spent! We are trusting God to provide what is needed and will go when He sends us! 

Thank you for all your prayers!! We appreciate them and know that God is continuing to open doors to bring Joy home!

Psalm 47

¹ Clap your hands, all you nations;
    shout to God with cries of joy.

² For the Lord Most High is awesome,
    the great King over all the earth.
³ He subdued nations under us,
    peoples under our feet.
⁴ He chose our inheritance for us,
    the pride of Jacob, whom he loved.

⁵ God has ascended amid shouts of joy,
    the Lord amid the sounding of trumpets.
⁶ Sing praises to God, sing praises;
    sing praises to our King, sing praises.
⁷ For God is the King of all the earth;
    sing to him a psalm of praise.

⁸ God reigns over the nations;
    God is seated on his holy throne.
⁹ The nobles of the nations assemble
    as the people of the God of Abraham,
for the kings of the earth belong to God;
    he is greatly exalted.

One Step Closer!

We are finally DTC!! (Dossier to China!) Official date of DTC is 5/20/14.

We are one step closer in our process. Now we wait for our LID (log in date) which is when our documents are officially in the hands of the CCCWA and in line for translation and review. The process from DTC to LOA (Letter of Approval) has been about 60 days for others who are a bit further along in the process. Praying that all goes through without issue! 

Timeline - 
DTC - LOA ~60 days
I-800 and visa approvals - 4 to 5 weeks
DS260 approval and NVC (national visa center) letter sent to China - 1 week
TA (Travel Approval) 5-6 weeks
Travel! 

So, if you can follow all that, it looks like we will travel in late October!! As soon as we get our visa's approved and we have Travel Approval we will need to have ready the $6,000 Orphanage Donation Fee. God has been blessing us so much and we are grateful for everyone who has been supporting us so far! 

In the works:

We are planning a fundraising event scheduled for late July or early August. We are still in the planning stage, but would greatly appreciate your prayers for this!! More info soon!!

We are just so encouraged by you! If I sit down and think of all that needs to be done between now and our travel I would start to really freak out! This is not a journey in which one should look at the mountain at the end before focusing on the foothills and path in front. I keep looking behind and seeing all the obstacles that God has helped us through and made a way. I am amazed and thankful for His provision every step of the way so far! 

I think of this song when I ponder God's work in our family and home over the last 5 months!

Jehovah Jirah, My Provider

God truly does supply all of our needs!! 

Exhausted for a good cause...

The last few days have been down right wonderful and exhausting all at the same time. Our church hosted MARKINC Ministries Annual Gala featuring Point of Grace, an Art Auction and wonderful dessert spread. It was a fabulous night and was so much fun to be a part of. Then, Saturday I helped my friends with their FUN Day featuring Miss Patty Cake live show, a silent auction and tons of play for the kids in the gym. It was another fun day and so happy to help a wonderful family raise money to help offset their travel costs as they leave to get their little girl in just 9 days!!!! 
Needless to say, this Mother's Day I am just ready to sleep! :) Thankfully, I was able to get a pretty good nap in and then spend a quiet afternoon with Joel and the kids. 

 Looking forward to our Mother's day family photo next year when Joy is home!

Update on where we are in our process:
The last three of our 13 documents are making their way through the Chinese Embassy in DC and hopefully will be done and sent to our Agency by Monday or Tuesday of next week. I am praying to be DTC by May15!!! I just want to get logged in and start that wait time to LOA! 

Now that our friends are so close to travel to bring home their daughter, it is giving me the same sense of need to go get my daughter! Why does it have to take so long? According to others I have talked to, our process is speeding through at lightning pace. To me it seems so long! 
Waiting on God's timing as His timing is perfect. There is still much to do as we wait. 

We want to thank everyone who participated in our Thirty-One fundraiser! We raised $60 towards adoption costs. Also, thank you so much for those who have given money donations and also bought t-shirts! My online Origami Owl Fundraiser is still going on now until May 30th. So far you have raised $260! So if you want to buy some beautiful custom jewelry and help us bring Joy home, click here to order from my site!  Every little bit is helping defray some of the costs that we have. God has been so good and we are continuing to walk through the doors as he opens them. 

The God who cares about the littlest details is whom we trust as we continue this journey.

Psalm 65

¹ Praise awaits^[b] you, our God, in Zion;
    to you our vows will be fulfilled.
² You who answer prayer,
    to you all people will come.
³ When we were overwhelmed by sins,
    you forgave^[c] our transgressions.
⁴ Blessed are those you choose
    and bring near to live in your courts!
We are filled with the good things of your house,
    of your holy temple.

⁵ You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds,
    God our Savior,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
    and of the farthest seas,
⁶ who formed the mountains by your power,
    having armed yourself with strength,
⁷ who stilled the roaring of the seas,
    the roaring of their waves,
    and the turmoil of the nations.
⁸ The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
    where morning dawns, where evening fades,
    you call forth songs of joy.

⁹ You care for the land and water it;
    you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
    to provide the people with grain,
    for so you have ordained it.^[d]
10 You drench its furrows and level its ridges;
    you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
¹¹ You crown the year with your bounty,
    and your carts overflow with abundance.
¹² The grasslands of the wilderness overflow;
    the hills are clothed with gladness.
¹³ The meadows are covered with flocks
    and the valleys are mantled with grain;
    they shout for joy and sing.

God's doing, not ours!!

Wow, what a week!! Last Friday we finally got our documents back from NJ and the receipt said they were apostilled and the certification wasn't all that clear. After talking to three different people who could not tell us if NJ has generic certifications or if we needed to have them redone, we decided to mail them back with specific instruction to Authenticate them so they will be accepted! 
I got a call on Tuesday from NJ and the nice lady was a bit confused as to why we sent the documents back because they were the generic NJ certification!! I nicely told her that three different people we talked to didn't know if NJ Authentication and Apostille were the same paper!! She understands China requirements and the papers we had had some staple holes and that is not acceptable. So for no charge she re printed the certifications for us to be neat and clean copies!! We just received them back in the mail today and they look wonderful! On top of that, we didn't have to pay the extra charge for having them "done right" because they already were what we needed.
Praising God that this all happened the way it did, because the nice lady was pretty sure the certifications might be rejected on the grounds of the extra staple holes! In thinking it was done wrong, it just saved us having to get it redone anyhow and taking more time on account of a few holes in the paper! God is so good!! 

Another wonderful thing that happened this week was the completion of our T-shirt fund raiser!! Thank you to everyone who bought a shirt!! They will be arriving soon and you can wear them and continue to pray for those children who do not have a family and those families who are desiring to have children and their journeys to find each other.

I know there are some people who are uncomfortable with the idea of raising funds for an adoption and asking people to donate towards it. I have been doing some research on it and found that the average birth of a child in a hospital without complications of any kind can easily run to $22,000 and if you have insurance coverage you thankfully only have to pay $8,000 of that cost. If the birth is complicated or a c-section it is easily an additional $10,000! I wish there was some type of insurance to help us out with adoption costs. As you can see from our spending chart to the right, most of our costs are in three parts. The first part is to our Agency who guides us through this complicated process, the second part is all the government fees to make sure we are who we say we are and that we are meeting the requirements set by the Country we want to adopt from, and lastly our travel costs. We are not "buying a child" as some people think of Adoption. We are compiling our portfolio and assuring the Country that we are able to care for one of their orphans and traveling to go get her! The costs of birthing a child in a hospital and adopting a child domestically or from another country are pretty similar! In our case, we want a child who is already born and in need of parents. Why should that be any different or looked down upon?

There are also 3 types of support: Prayer warriors, Financial helpers, and People of action. Not everyone can adopt, but everyone can pray, some can help financially and others can do things that help the adopting family (meals when the child first comes home, help with fix-it jobs, run errands, be a helping hand in any way needed). Every part of the body of Christ has significance and meaning. We appreciate ALL of you!

We have been continuing to do a lot of research on adopting the older child. These older children are often overlooked because they are older and many people just don't want to have to deal with the trauma and issues that come from dealing with their past. We have been praying that Joy will look forward to having a family and will understand that we want to be her family. We are praying that we will be prepared to meet her needs as she heals from any trauma she may have. There are so many unknowns, yet there are some things that we are learning are common for all children who are adopted. We are trusting that God will equip us for every need and if we can't handle something, he will show us those who can!

Please, continue to pray for us. God has truly been with us these past 4 months as we journey through the process. We still have a long way to go, but our part of paper collecting is almost done. Hopefully by mid May all of our documents will be on their way to China. Then the long waiting begins! 

Psalm 134

¹ Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord
    who minister by night in the house of the Lord.
² Lift up your hands in the sanctuary
    and praise the Lord.

³ May the Lord bless you from Zion,
    he who is the Maker of heaven and earth.

Bumps in the road

It seems like the very moment everything is going smoothly, something happens to interrupt my timing. But it never interrupts God's timing. We did receive our documents back from NJ. BUT, they were done wrong and so the long weeks of waiting to save a few dollars has become spending more money to expedite them to have them done correctly. I thought it was clear that documents for China have to be authenticated and not Apostille because even though China is a Hague country, they do not accept the Apostille on documents. SOOOOO.... back the documents go via FedEx this time and with the expedite fee. 
It was not a nice feeling to finally get the documents back only to find out they were not done right! I just have to keep breathing and know that it is all in God's timing. We still need to send our I-800a approval letter to Dover to be Authenticated, so it will only delay us a few days getting the documents to DC and the Chinese Embassy. 
In some ways I wish there was a master list detailed as to what documents need what stamps of approval and where to send and when.... but as different as each state, country and even adoption agency are there are as many lists and requirements to make anyone just a little nutty. 
We are so thankful for our comrades on Facebook where there is a wealth of encouragement, ideas, info, and quick answers to questions every day! This is a journey that is only beginning. The "birthing" pains and stresses are leading us to our knees to continually seek out God's will and help. We are still finding blessings every day! 

We are so thankful for each and every one of you who is holding us up in prayer. We need it!! We are hoping to have our documents to China by mid May. Then it is about a 4 month time frame to travel from that date!!!! This summer is going to go by so fast and so slow at the same time.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite songs. :)

"Give me your eyes" by Brandon Heath

One wait done.... another to come!

We got our I-800a approval!!!! Basically, this is the approval that states that we are able to adopt from a foreign country!! We are now able to proceed with getting our documents together and sending them to China!!! 

Right now, we are still waiting for our marriage license and Jolene's Birth Certificate to be authenticated and sent to us from NJ. The wait time has been a staggering 4 weeks and possibly 2 more!! We got our documents from DE and PA in less than 4 days total. I have no idea why it takes so long in NJ! Well, I do have a hint, if we paid $20 per document plus the expedite fee of $15 and the cost of sending them FedEx to and from, we could have had them in a week or two... Ridiculous is what I say! So, $12 for regular post and a wait time of 4-6 weeks, or $70 and a return time of 2 weeks.... Yeah, crazy! We still have to pay that much and more to get the Chinese Embassy stamp of approval.

We didn't have to do any of that or pay anywhere near those costs for our other documents with PA or DE. 

We have already sent 10 of our documents to DC for the US and Chinese Embassy stamps and they will be sent to our agency to be logged into the system and once all the components are together, the whole package will be sent to China!!

While we were waiting for our immigrations approval we went as a family on a backpacking trip to PA with some friends! We hiked 11 miles along the Mason Dixon Trail by the Susquehanna River and enjoyed some great views of the river and the Dam. We had beautiful weather over the weekend and enjoyed getting out into nature. 

We even got to see a bald eagle and it's nest with eaglets in it! So beautiful!! 


This whole process has so many ups and downs emotionally, but God has really been opening doors left and right down to each detail of what is needed each and every day. We are amazed.


We are so blessed by the outpouring of prayer and support. It is amazing! Thank you to everyone who has bought a shirt and or donated funds and Prayed!! Our shirt fund raiser is just about over! If you were considering buying a shirt there are only 5 days left!! So get your t-shirt now!


 We will continue to update as we journey through this huge change to our family. Each day we are reminded that we are God's children and he has everything in His control. Please continue to pray that we would continually rely on Him for every need. It is very easy to fall into doing it on our own and stressing out!

This song has been going through my mind all week and I feel it is so relevant!

1. Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! 
 O what a foretaste of glory divine! 
 Heir of salvation, purchase of God, 
 born of his Spirit, washed in his blood. 
Refrain:
 This is my story, this is my song, 
 praising my Savior all the day long; 
 this is my story, this is my song, 
 praising my Savior all the day long. 

2. Perfect submission, perfect delight, 
 visions of rapture now burst on my sight; 
 angels descending bring from above 
 echoes of mercy, whispers of love. 
 (Refrain) 

3. Perfect submission, all is at rest; 
 I in my Savior am happy and blessed, 
 watching and waiting, looking above, 
 filled with his goodness, lost in his love. 
 (Refrain) 

You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtbN5N8I8Hk

God is Good all the time and all the time God is Good!

We have received almost all of our documents back with their Authentications except the marriage license and my Birth Certificate (sent them to NJ!!). Praying that they are returned soon with the necessary authentications!!
We are still waiting on our I-800a approval. We have our biometrics (finger printing) on Friday and hopefully everything will match up and we can get our approval letter by the end of April! 

As soon as we have all our documents we can send them off to DC for the US and Chinese Consulate stamps of approval. Then we can send our Dossier to China (DTC)! We are praying for  DTC by mid May Lord willing! 
We are continuing to fund raise. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who have already bought t-shirts and/or given us money! We only have 19 days left to reach and exceed our goal of 150 shirts! We can sell 500 if we wanted! Share with your friends and family and neighbors. It really is a message of family. https://www.booster.com/joy-adoption-journey

Along the fundraising topic, we just got approved by connected hearts ministry to run a two week fund raising event. We will be listed on their web site in late summer just before we travel. So we will let you all know when you can donate towards our travel costs. The great thing about this ministry is that ALL Donations are tax deductible and we receive 100% of all donations! Check out the web site and share. We will let you know when our story is on the site! 

 In prayer group today I was blessed with this Psalm and want to share with you today.

Psalm 28

¹ To you, Lord, I call;
    you are my Rock,
    do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
    I will be like those who go down to the pit.
² Hear my cry for mercy
    as I call to you for help,
as I lift up my hands
    toward your Most Holy Place.

³ Do not drag me away with the wicked,
    with those who do evil,
who speak cordially with their neighbors
    but harbor malice in their hearts.
⁴ Repay them for their deeds
    and for their evil work;
repay them for what their hands have done
    and bring back on them what they deserve.

⁵ Because they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord
    and what his hands have done,
he will tear them down
    and never build them up again.

⁶ Praise be to the Lord,
    for he has heard my cry for mercy.
⁷ The Lord is my strength and my shield;
    my heart trusts in him, and he helps me.
My heart leaps for joy,
    and with my song I praise him.

⁸ The Lord is the strength of his people,
    a fortress of salvation for his anointed one.
⁹ Save your people and bless your inheritance;
    be their shepherd and carry them forever.

God hears us when we cry out to him. He is our Shepherd forever. How blessed we are to be his Children. Praying God's blessings on you today.