Pictures are worth a 1000 words!

We were able to get some pictures and a short video of our Son this week! We are still unable to share anything on the web, but just know we think our Son is amazing! We can't wait for him and Carson to be together at home playing the day away! All of this waiting is hard. I keep myself busy by learning as much as I can about the adoption process, reading about attachment and bonding, and fundraising. 


Bringing a toddler home around the same age as Carson seems a little crazy, but we're so excited for them to be close in age. We talk with Carson constantly about his brother and he wants him home now! He talks about playing cars, trains and playing soccer with him. I know Carson is going to be an awesome big brother and I can't wait to share memories about what the two of them do together with all of our family and friends! 


 It was so great to get pictures, but it still makes me sad to see him and not be able to hold him and tell him everything will be okay. I know that attaching isn't easy but I can't wait to have the opportunity to show him our love and that we will be there for him for the rest of his life. 


We have a few more months before we will travel, but that's okay because we still need to continue fundraising and saving money for our trip. We are currently selling puzzle pieces (see the picture below for a sneak peak of how it's coming along.  I don't have all the names on there yet, but there are plenty of spaces left) and we are preparing for another garage sale at the end of August. 


Please contact us personally if you have any questions about our adoption or our current fundraisers. We are currently accepting donations for our next garage sale, let us know if you would like us to come by and pick up your stuff!


Love, April




 **We were also able to make another change to our thermometer. Take a look at the left side of our blog! 

A Small Change in our Thermometer!!!!

We just wanted to let everyone know we have been able to update our thermometer again! Woohoo!!!! Thanks to everyone who have donated to our puzzle fundraiser so far. ***We are still selling puzzle pieces to help fund our adoption fees.**** Please let us know if you have any questions. We're hoping to get a little more information soon about our little guy, this part of the process we're in, and more about our possible departure month. Thank you for your continued prayers and support! We can't wait to bring our little guy home and share him with you all! Love, April & Aaron

Another Successful Garage Sale

Here we are at the end of day 4 of our second Adoption Fundraiser Garage Sale this summer. We had an amazing turnout again and couldn't be happier with the results. A big thanks to my sister for letting us use her house for our sale, storage, and for her help this week. She lives in the perfect location; we don't even have to put signs up or advertise and people will just show up as we're taking off the tarps!

Also, a big thanks to our family for helping us put the sale on. Lastly, we are so thankful for all of our friends and family who donated to our sale. We couldn't of done this without you!

Our grand total for this garage sale is........ $3521.00. We still have a few bigger items posted online, so hopefully the total will even go up. We can't wait to bring our son home!

It was a very hot weekend (we don't often get to complain about the heat where we live, haha), but my sunburn is so worth it! (And yes, I put on sunblock multiple times a day. But I probably should have done more.)

Before we began this garage sale we said, this will be our last one. The prep time, the time away from work, and the 4 days we're out there make them exhausting. But after having another amazing sale, we're thinking we must do it again. We have had multiple friends and family members come to us this week and say they have stuff for another sale. So we're planning our next one for the end of August.

Please let us know if you have any items you would like to donate to our garage sale. All proceeds go straight to our savings account for our adoption. We can pick up anything you would like to donate. Just message us or give us a call. We really, really, really appreciate all your support!

Love, April & Aaron

We have BIG news!!!!

So with the last post I kind of hinted to that fact that some big things were happening with our adoption.
So here it is...................................

-We've decided to leave our agency and have signed on with another agency. We are absolutely thrilled to be with this new agency. It was one we tried to sign up with in the beginning, but I guess God only knew the best timing and it is now! A lot of people have questioned our decision to leave our agency after about 10 months, but we want everyone to know that we didn't come to this decision lightly. We have been praying, talking, (more) praying, and investigating for months. There are many reasons behind our decision, but I'm not going to share them here.  If you have any questions or are just curious please call or email us and we will be able to share some more details with you. Just know this was the right move for our family.

- We are so excited for these changes. The new agency we are with has more of a humanitarian focus for the children of Africa. We are thrilled for the opportunity to partner with them and for the ability to stay connected long after our child comes home.

- And the biggest news of all is.........................


WE HAVE A REFERRAL!!! He is beautiful. We cannot share his picture, but believe us it's true! We actually don't know his age, but think he is about 2 years old. We are completely overjoyed with our new little guy, and can't wait to meet him in person.  We want to bring him home as soon as possible!!!!

What happens next...........

1. Finish getting our dossier ready for our new agency. Were currently waiting on one piece of paper!
2. Our agency will get everything together and sent to the lawyer.
3. WAITING.... Lots of stuff with happen once our paperwork gets in country, and then we will have a few things to do, and then our lawyer will have some more things to do. (I really don't have a clear picture of whats going to happen, but we'll figure it out as it goes!)
4. After we pass court and wait out all that entails, we will hopefully be on a plane to bring him home. This whole process will take 4-6 months.

With everything happening so quickly, we are going into extreme fundraising mode!

 The fee schedule is a little different with the agency and actually worked out in our favor. The majority of the fees we will need to pay are closer to the end of this journey. This is great news for us because it will give us the time to continue to save and fundraise over the next few months.

At the moment we are selling puzzle pieces and getting ready for another garage sale. Were hoping to have the sale in a few weeks, but it will really depend on the weather. We are still looking for donations, so if you have some items you'd like to get rid of we can pick them up!

Thank you for all your prayers, love, and support. If you have any questions please talk with us individually or through email.

Love, April & Aaron

It's Time to Put Together That Puzzle!!!

So we began talking about this months ago, but were finally ready to have this be the Fundraiser we focus on this summer. There are a lot of new things happening with our adoption, but I'm not really at liberty to talk about them right now (sorry for the teaser, but no referral yet!).  I will let everyone know as soon I can!

What I can talk about is that we are really needing to focus on saving money and fundraising in order to make things happen when the time is right. We are sending out postcards (you can see a copy on the bottom right of the blog) to all of our family and friends in hopes to raise enough money to cover our referral costs. We actually got this idea from another adopting family and just loved it.

We are selling puzzle pieces for $20 each. Once a piece is purchased we will write your name (or family name) on the back of a piece. Once all the pieces are purchased we will put the puzzle in a double sided glass frame and hang it in our home.  This framed puzzle will be a reminder of everyone who has helped us on our journey to bring our family together. We have already written a few names of donors, but we still have nearly the whole puzzle to put together! Can you help???

I've place a list of FAQ's at the bottom of this post. I will add more if I start getting other questions. Also, please email me your address if you'd like to get anything that we mail out (Postcards, letters, Christmas cards, etc). My email is dawn bey 15 @ ya hoo . c o m.

Thank you so much for all your support and prayers. We definitely know that we couldn't do this without all of you!

Love, April



FAQ's

If I send more money, can I have more than one piece???
*Yes, you can buy more than one piece! (I'll write your name really big across multiple pieces or I'll write each family members name, if you prefer.)

I just don't have $20 to spare,  can I still participate?
*If $20's to much, any donation will do! (We appreciate all the help we can get!)

Where do I send the money?
*Please send the checks directly to us.

Can you accept credit cards??
* I do have a pay-pal account. Please look to the right of the blog.

Garage Sale = Success

Man are we so glad this weekend is over!!!!! Don't get me wrong it was amazing, but we are completely exhausted!We finally got some great weather this week and weekend. We knew we had to jump on the opportunity because you never know how the weather is going to change from day to day.

 We decided to begin setting up our Garage Sale on Wednesday afternoon. We just started to bring box after box out in to my sisters driveway. As we were bringing boxes out people just started stopping and asked if they could go through the boxes (my sisters house is the best garage sale location for sure). We made a few hundred dollars that night while just setting up! We had received so many amazing donations, it took until Saturday before I finally pulled the last 15 boxes out of her garage. We ended up having our sale from Wednesday night until Sunday afternoon. For most of those days nothing was priced and we just let people look through boxes, bins and bags. It was so unorganized and trashy looking. But there were so many moments where there were 15-20 people there at one time; we just couldn't keep up! Even with our complete lack of organization and pricing we were able to meet our goal of $3000.

 We are so grateful for all of the people who helped at our sale and for all of the donations we received. We wanted to give a special thanks to Carson's swim teacher and her family for donating the majority of the items we sold this week. They are moving and we are so sad to see them go, but we are eternally grateful for their generosity and kindness. We also are so thankful for my parents, Ed and Kathy, who took time off work to help with our sale. My sisters Alyssa, Amy and Ashley also took time off work and time out of their weekends to work our sale and hangout with Carson. Aaron's mom, Terree, also took a day off work and kept Carson for two days so he didn't have to sit at the garage sale the entire time. My grandma Sharon and Phil, also spent many hours taking money and just hanging out with me so I didn't have to be alone all day. We never could have done this sale without the help of all these people. Thank you so much for everything you have done (and I'm sure will do) to bring our new addition home.

 Another thing that made this past week so special, was that we were able to share our story with hundreds of people. Between the many people who were just looking for a bargain, there were a few people who really touched our hearts. We had a lady who found out we were adopting and gave us $40 for just a few small items. A young man came up to our sale asking of we would buy his 200 vinyl records from him for $20. We told him no and what we were fundraising for. He then came back with all of his records and about 30 matchbox cars still in their packaging. He said he wanted us to have it because he wants a little kid to be able to have a better life than he did. We were so touched we did give him the $20 and told him what a blessing he was to us. There are many stories of people who gave a little more along with stories of people who were actually quite disrespectful. But we are choosing to reminisce on the positives of this experience and hope to be able to share our story with more people when we do ths again in a few months!

 With our 1st garage sale of the year behind us, I was finally able to make a change to our thermometer on the left side of our blog. I'm so excited that we were able to finally do something towards our fundraising goals. I did change the total to $12,000 (from 8,000) to more closely reflect the cost if we do become blessed with a sibling pair.

 We have some more fundraising events coming up this summer and will let you know as we begin planning those. We are also planning another garage sale for August. Please let me know if you have anything you would like to donate and one of us can pick it up from you.

We are sure we still have many months (6-9) before we will get our referral, but our goal is to have the money raised so that as soon as we say YES, we can make our payment. We will then have to figure out the monthly fees and the next set of fees that come with this process, but we know that God will provide. Again, a big thank you to everyone that has donated. I don't like to put names on here that aren't family or that I don't have permission for. But you know who you are and we are so grateful for your generosity. Hope everyone is having a wonderful day (and as always leave a comment we'd love to say hi back)!

 ~April & Aaron

Rain, rain, go away......

The weather has really not been cooperating with my schedule. It's actually been pretty nice the past few weekends here in the Pacific Northwest, but the days leading up to weekends are not so good.

 We cannot wait to have our Adoption Fundraiser Garage Sale! We have a ton of great stuff to get out of my sisters garage, but we need to have at least 4 nice days in a row to really make it worth it. We have gone through our house mutiple times and have received lots of donations from our friends and family. We feel so blessed with everything we have received so far, we just can't wait to begin selling all of these items. With that said, WE ARE STILL ACCEPTING DONATIONS. If you have anything you would like to donate let me know and we can come pick it up. Our goal is to have at least 2 garage sales this summer to help raise the money for our referral fee ($8000+). So if your not ready to tackle your house or a garage yet, don't worry, we will take your stuff all summer long.

 Even though somedays it seems like our adoption process is moving at a snails pace (although I think all adoptions do at some point or another). We have been so blessed by the other families who are using our same agency. Monthly we are hearing about the next family that is traveling to pick up their little one(s). We have also been able to see so many great pictures of the city, orphanage, and the kids. It's been so wonderful to get to share in their joy and to share in the excitement of seeing the kiddos who are just waiting to come home to their forever families. We know we still have a long time before we get our referral, but it sure is nice to feel a little connection to the kids in the orphanage.

 International adoption is a long hard journey. We did not come to this decision lightly and knew this was going to be a difficult process. There have already been multiple delays in the paperwork and the timeline has changed significantly since we started this process about 9 months ago. Imagine, if this had been a pregnancy we would be home with our new addition by now. The thing we hold on to is that God is in control. We know this is his plan for our family and we are going to trust in his timing. It doesn't mean we won't have those "bad" days, where we feel sad and mourn the amount of time lost without having our kid(s) home. But most days we are really just focused on Carson and our family unit. We know we need to continue having a strong marriage, developing our family rules, and making family traditions.

Soon enough we will receive our referral and we will be back in that stressful paperwork chasing game. So I guess this is a nice calm before the storm. I can only imagine the "bad" days will be much harder once there is a name/face added to our prayers. We will work so hard to get our child(ren) home as soon as possible, but like most things, it's really out of our hands. Paperwork (mostly the waiting for paperwork) will become our nemesis once again, but in the end it will be all worth it. Thanks for taking a few minutes to get caught up on our adoption adventure. We are so grateful to all the people in our lives that are supporting us during this journey.

Thank you and we love you!!!!
 *** April & Aaron

 P.S. If you have a minute leave us a comment. We'd love to hear from you!!!!!