Hello, everyone!
Sorry it has taken so
long to provide an update; there has been so much happening and not
enough time in the day to write about it all!
So, there will be a
lot of information in this post, but keep reading because you'll want
to know it all!
First off, The Beautiful Offerings
tour was a huge success! Not only was it a night filled with awesome
songs and times of worship, but the people themselves were a huge
blessing to our family. Big Daddy Weave even prayed over our family
and offered words encouragement on their personal tour bus after the
show.
Without the sacrificial help of our
friends, family, and complete strangers, however, this concert would
have never happened. We'd like to thank them, once again, for
everything they did to make the night such an unforgettable one.
Thank you to Kim Mangels (and Muse
Productions) for the huge task of booking and organizing the concert
and ironing out all the details we would have never even thought
about.
Thank you to Matt and Amy Mangels for your help, support,
and all the food you provided.
Thank you to the Cross, Ron Ball.
Rowans, Mays, Highs, Kevin Arnold, Hugh Shiveley, and Joyce Foutz for
adopting the hotel rooms for the artists.
Thank you The Sweet
Tooth for providing your cupcake truck during the show.
Thank you
Blue Springs Hy-Vee for the donations of food and water used before
the show and at intermission.
Thank you Drury Inn for the
discounted room rates.
Thank you Chipotle for the catered dinner
for the artists.
Thank you The Metro Voice for the written
article and support before the concert.
Thank you Life 88.5 for
advertising for the show and for the loving support throughout the
process.
Thank you New Life Assembly for hosting the concert.
Thank you Duncan Road Church for being our church family and
loving us so well during this time.
Secondly, the garage sale we hosted at
our house the day before the concert was also a bigger success than
we could have imagined!
Thank you to everyone who donated items
to be sold. We had so much stuff that it took us hours to unload it
all and we didn't even know everything that we had.
Thank you
Tyra Lefholz for helping us collect money and negotiate prices with
people. It was so helpful to have another saleswoman!
Now, for some financial information from
the weekend.
The total that we took away from the
garage sale and the concert (minus the expenses) was just over
$9,000! That is about one-fourth of the total of what we need to
bring JiaJia home!
We are so grateful to have made so much over
the weekend, however, we still have a long way to go until we are
completely funded.
We made $9,000 that weekend, but we have
already spent $9,000 in the process on the fees associated with the
forms, paperwork, and organizations. So, while that money covered
everything we have done so far, we don't have a reserve to pull money
from moving forward.
And the fees associated with the next
step are probably the biggest ones we'll have.
With that lead-in, now it's time for an
update on where we stand in the legal paperwork process.
Our homestudy is officially finished!
Praise the Lord! That is a huge step in the adoption process. All of
the immigration papers are completed and submitted and we are just
waiting on the dates to get fingerprinted.
For those of you who like pictures and flowcharts, we just finished step 4 and are waiting for approval (step 5):
With the completion of
the homestudy, a new door opens for us: grants! We are now at a point
in the process where we can now begin applying for all the different
grants out there for adoptive parents. There are a lot of grants
available and we are planning to apply for as many of the ones we
qualify for as possible.
However, each grant requires different
things. Some require essays, some require a completed application
specific to that grant, some require pictures, some require reference
letters, some require financial statements, some require fees, and
some have no requirements- they leave it to you to decide what you
think is necessary to “win” their grant.
Please join us in praying that we
not only chose those to apply for that would be beneficial to us-
some of them require application fees and lots of time spent on
paperwork, but seldom chose a recipient- but also that we would not
be emotionally and physically drained by the process. As we have
already discovered, it can be exhausting filling out form after form,
and there are a lot of forms to fill out for grants!
While we
wait for our fingerprint approval, we will be applying for grants to fill our
time. Then, as soon as we receive the approval, we will submit our
dossier to China. So far, all the legal paperwork we have done has
been through the U.S. Government and our adoption agency. This will
be the first of the legal information we will submit to the Chinese
government.
For those of you not familiar with adoption speak,
our dossier is basically a huge packet of every piece of our past,
present, and future. It contains medical records, background checks,
marriage and birth certificates, letters of intent and references,
forms, proof of home ownership, insurance, and employment, our
homestudy, passports, financial statements, and photos. It's
basically our entire lives in a giant folder. We will submit all of
that to the Chinese government to review and (hopefully) approve.
Submitting our dossier is the big fee
we referred to earlier.
It will cost us $6,000 to submit our
dossier to the Chinese government.
So,
that can only mean one thing, right? That's right; another fundraiser
is in the works!
JiaJia's
birthday is July 24 and since we cannot celebrate with him this year,
we would love to celebrate him with friends and family and host an
event to help bring him home so we can celebrate with him next year!
Saturday, July 25, we will be hosting an all-day kickball
tournament in the Kansas City area. A lot of the details are still to
be confirmed, but start organizing teams and mark the date on your
calendars.
We
also still have t-shirts available! You can order them in person
through any of the family members or online through our Etsy shop at
https://www.etsy.com/shop/MamaAndBabaForJiaJia?ref=hdr_shop_menu
Use code “KCPRIDE” if you're in the KC area and the shipping
costs will be taken off and we'll deliver them to you in person.
Use
code “WILSON6” to buy five and get the sixth free, since we have
a new appreciation for families of six! ;-)
If
you aren't a wearer of t-shirts or are not in the KC area to
participate in our fundraisers but would still like to help us
financially, we have a link to our personal PayPal account in the
sidebar on the right-hand side or by clicking
here. Donations made to this account go
directly to offset the costs associated with the adoption process.
As
always, we would appreciate your prayers!
Please pray for speedy
response times and ease in dealing with the governments.
Please
pray for JiaJia as he is ready to come home and is telling people at
his orphanage that he is leaving next month. As much as we would love
this to be true, it is not true at the moment. Pray for understanding
and peace in the process as this little man doesn't fully understand
why we can't come get him now.
Please pray for financial
provision as we come to the point in the process where each step will
begin costing larger and larger amounts of money, leading up to the
eventual huge purchase of two round-trip and one one-way
international plane tickets.
So much has happened that we almost forgot a huge moment we finally had!
The pictures aren't great, but we had the chance to Skype with JiaJia! ?
For those of you following our journey, we didn't think this was going to be a possibility because our homestudy didn't look like it would be completed before Min Ju, the lady at the home doing the social media, left Alenah's Home.
God reminded us, once again, that His plans are bigger than we can imagine and an exception was made very last minute and we had our first real interaction with JiaJia!
Thanks for taking the time to read all the exciting things that are happening!
Hopefully, there will not be as long between this one and our next blog post!