Itineray. Got it!

Well, we have our itinerary now and Daron is headed out next Friday to go and meet our children! I am so excited and also a bit jealous that it isn't me! I know my time will come soon, so I am more just thrilled for our family that Daron gets to be with them and they get to start to know their dad. He is going to be over there for about four weeks filing paperwork with the US Embassy, waiting for it to be completed, and then filing for their visas. During that time, he is going to be working on finding a possible non-profit or organization that Alive can team up with in the future. We will definitely keep you up to speed on his trip-maybe he will even be a guest blogger! ;)

The kids and I will head over to meet him at the end of the month. We are all super excited! We weighed the pros and cons of bringing the kids, but just see this as such an experience that is once in a lifetime! They get to go and meet their brother and sister and really get a sense of where they are coming from and what their culture is like. We are so thrilled and it is a huge leap of faith! Our three oldest always impress me with their huge hearts and I can't wait to see them share their love with their siblings and the other kids in the adoption center. How special. I am also so excited to see how this trip impresses upon their lives and what they learn from it. I think this will be huge for them! I know I will come back changed.

So.....needless to say, the last couple of days have been full of excitement and stress at the same time. Just trying to figure out the logistics of everything from one ticket to seven tickets became stressful. We also seem to be having a bunch of things breakdown right now and could just use some prayer to not get discouraged. Within the last two months, this is what has happened......broken faucet(water literally squirting everywhere), broken lock on front door(okay, so it broke a while ago, but it got really bad and we had to get a new one), new brakes for our van, new transmission (covered luckily), broken refrigerator, 11 out of 13 heating vents needed to be replaced b/c they were recalled a decade ago and our inspector didn't catch it, dead video camera, broken digital camera, and then this week Daron's computer crashed and it isn't looking pretty last I heard. Am I done yet, you ask? Hopefully! I am to the point that I start laughing when things stop working, but it is a scary laugh, not funny ha-ha. Daron and I are either on the same team or butting heads the last couple of days. Prayer would be great. Just when we think we have things worked out for our adoption costs, our savings dwindles because of these unforeseen emergencies. I realize a camera isn't an emergency, but when you are headed over to Ghana to meet your children for the first time, it has become an emergency to me. Thankfully, if I can't get a new one in time, my mom has offered Daron hers to take with him, so I am SO appreciative of that. Our 'emergencies' are not all that big individually and I know it is relative, but I think since they happened back to back to back, we have let ourselves get a bit more down than we would wish for. Along the same lines, we are still waiting on hearing from some grants we applied for, for the adoption, that we could really use- so hopefully we will hear something positive soon!

No matter what though, we are just so thrilled that our time has come to go and meet our little ones!