Happy New Year

We had such a wonderful Christmas with family. I'm pretty sure Carson got everything he could have ever wanted from his grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We then had a relaxing family night on New Years getting our master shower finished (we had some floor issues and we had to tear it out and redo it). It looks awesome and I love the pebble floor look we have now.

As we begin this new year we were thinking about all those failed resolutions of years past. We decided that we need to have a goal that we could do together. We have decided our resolution will be "Not stressing out about the adoption process". Hopefully this is a resolution we can finally keep!

We know this year will be trying with a lot of "waiting" waiting for us. But, we know we need to just remember that this will all happen in Gods timing. We are so excited to finally get our referral number (although it doesn't really mean a whole lot in regards to a time line) it will give us something to keep track of.

We have our digital fingerprints this week and then will hopefully get all of our paperwork together and notarized by early next week. Then our dossier will be complete and ready to send off to the agency to be reviewed and then it's off to the DRC. Woohoo!

Thank you to all our family and friends. We love you all and can't wait to see what this New Year brings.

Just some updates....

Happy week(ish) before Christmas!

We are very excited for Christmas here at the Marvin house. Carson absolutely loves having the tree in the house and constantly takes ornaments on and off of it. Luckily we were smart and got a ton of soft ornaments on after Christmas clearances the past two years, so our entire lower half of the tree is kid proof! We've only had one glass ornament casualty so far; hopefully that's it for this year, although we still have a little over a week to go.

We have held two different fundraisers in the past few months and I got the final numbers in and wanted to share with everyone.

The "Getting Ready for Christmas" party was so much fun and hopefully very helpful for many people. We made about $250 just from the sales percentages from Scentsy and Mary Kay. Then we made about $150 from the stuff that my sister Amy and I made. Total we made just under $400. Woohoo!  Over all it was a great night, and it was so wonderful to share our journey with so many of you.

We then got a booth at the "Snowflakes Bazaar" in Sellwood. It was a long weekend, but we had a ton of fun. Aaron manned the booth with me on Saturday and my sister Amy manned it with me on Sunday. Between my sister, myself and Aaron's grandma we had a very full table with an array of items to sell. In the end we made about $75 after the cost of the booth (every penny counts!). We met so many wonderful people working their own booths and we were able to share our story with everyone who would listen during our two days there. Thanks to everyone who bought from us and to our wonderful family who helped make this weekend possible.

We are so thankful for all the opportunities we have had to make some extra money for our adoption fund. With me (April) tutoring two days a week and some other fundraisers planned for the spring we're hoping we can meet our next fundraising goal by summer. This is the big one! We will need to have all the money raised to accept a referral (meaning we will get to see a picture of our child and say we want to bring him/her home). We know this will be quite a challenge, but we feel so at-peace with our decision to adopt and we know we need to trust God and just take it one day at a time.


We want to give THANKS to everyone and to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Here's a quick picture of Carson at the Oregon Zoo that Aaron took on their Daddy Day, while I was at the bazaar.

With Love, The Marvin's

Snowflakes Bazaar

Here we are at the Snowflakes bazaar. It's been pretty slow today. Hopefully it will pick up since church services should be finished and lunch should be done. We have such a mod-podge of stuff available. Tons of Infinity Scarves, toddler hair clips, and quilted table runners/placemats. Thanks to Aaron's grandma Dorthy for all her quilting.

Time to check one thing off the list....

Our official home-study is complete!! Woohoo!!!

Today in mail came our official home-study! Which means we are ready to send our I600a paperwork off to the US government. I have no idea how long that will take to process (hopefully less time than the original fingerprints) but I do know that we are excited to be moving on to a next step in this adoption process. The funny thing is once this paperwork is processed we are given a date to get digital fingerprints done and then those have to be approved. I understand that the government wants to check us out, but come on were not criminals!

Anyhow, this is another expensive time in our process so we are so grateful to have had such a wonderful fundraiser this month. We continually want to thank all of our friends and family that have supported us in this journey. We appreciate all the money, prayers, and kind words everyday and know that we couldn't do this without you.

We love you all,
April

Getting Ready for Christmas Fundraiser

We had a wonderful fundraising event this weekend at my Moms (newly remodeled) house. One of my great friends Christina sells Mary Kay and offered to donate her proceeds from a party. So we came up with a plan to have a big "Getting Ready for Christmas Party" where we had Christina with Mary Kay and Denise with Scentsy. The plan was to help people start thinking about Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers while also helping out with our adoption fund. My sister has also made a ton of random gift items like stuffed animals, purses, scarfs, ornaments and flower pens. I'm pretty sure she pretty much sold out of her items and even has a few orders to fill!

We had a ton of food and just let everyone hang out and casually go over to the different tables where things were available. It was very low key and just felt right for a party like this. In the end the party was a huge success and we are so thankful for everyone that participated in making this fundraiser happen. Also, a thank you to everyone who came to support us and bought items towards our adoption fund.

Finally some adoption news...

Today we got some great news, as small as it is, we finally got our fingerprints back. Our home study can now be completed. It will have to be approved by our agency and then we can send off our I600a paperwork to the US government. I'm not really sure how long all this will take but hopefully not 11 weeks like the fingerprints. Once all of that is complete we will be able to send our paperwork to DRC and then we wait for our referral! Woohoo! We are so happy to be moving along again. It's so hard to be waiting all the time. I know that is how the whole process works, but it's nice to have little spurts of time where we actually have something to do.

Halloween and Soccer

Halloween didn't quite go as expected but it turned out to be a wonderful night. My youngest sister is a senior in high school (wow I'm feeling old) and had her senior night soccer game changed to Halloween night. It was a great game and they clinched their league title with a big win. Woohoo!  Ashley will always be the baby of the family, but I'm so proud of what she has become. I know there are great things to come from her in the future. I can't wait to see her play soccer in the state playoffs this year and in college in years to come!!

 Carson (such a funny face, haha) and Auntie Ashley

Carson and Mommy

Carson was able to quickly Trick-or-Treat at two neighbors houses before we left and then his Auntie Alyssa took our little Tow Mater (thanks for the costume Auntie Lyssa) around to the neighbors of the soccer field. He had a wonderful time and even scored a king size candy bar. He was pretty excited about it and tried to give it to everyone in the bleachers.

On the adoption front there isn't really any new information. We are still waiting for our fingerprints (I  think it has been about 10 weeks already) and hope to have them back sooner than later. Once those are  completed our home study will be complete and we can send off our paperwork to the government.

With Love, April