What is keeping us busy

Finances.

Not my favorite subject.

However, we have been asked a lot lately what the financial implications will be for us now that we are adopting three children. We have delayed posting anything about the cost for a little while as we pray about what to do. We want to be very clear about a couple of things. One, we fully trust that our God knows our needs and has already provided above and beyond our expectations. Second, we want to be real with people and be transparent in what we are doing.

The increase in costs for us will be about $15,000. We have about two months.

The increase in costs is primarily due to the increased international fees, and two more one way airfare tickets. Adopting multiple children at one time is considerably cheaper than doing it again in the future. We are likely to have a court date around the end of the year, giving us just about two months until we travel, (which is going very fast.)

Here are some of the ways that we plan on fundraising. I will just list them as there is more information to come out about each of them in the future.

• We are setting up an Eternal Family Program. This is a program in which people can donate money directly to our adoption agency on our behalf. This should be tax deductible but we are still doing our research on it.
• We are going to have another garage sale in 2-3 weeks. We would appreciate any donations for this as it has been very successful for us in the past.
• We are going to put on a Holiday dinner for about 20-30 people, topped off with Ethiopian coffee.
• We (Heather) are going to be doing a cookie dough sale.
• We are going to have a babysitting night for those parents in our Sunday school class that want to go out Christmas shopping.
• We (Adam) are working as much overtime as possible. We are skipping grocery store trips, reducing our driving to save on gas, putting every bit of extra money aside to bring our children home:)

A couple of days ago we received some new pictures of our children. They look so excited and wonderful. We can't wait to go and meet them. We really wish that we could post pictures of them online but we can't. My favorite picture is of our oldest girl holding up the picture book of our family. That was the first time that she was able to see who her new family will be:)

We ask that you continue to pray with us as we finish up this journey to Ethiopia.