Stressful But Productive......

Wow!! It's been a crazy week already and we're only halfway through it. There are so many things to take care of before the homestudy and before we leave for vacation next week. On top of all of that, we are getting audited by the IRS for the 2nd year in a row (I didn't even think that was possible). Perhaps others with large families have had the same experience. Our appointment with the IRS is this Friday. I guess Jesus met with the tax collectors, so why shouldn't we do the same.... just not every year. Everything is in order and they really just need to verify that all 7 of our kids are truly our dependents. A simple inspection of our grocery bill should prove our case......


On a positive note, we are really enjoying the Hague training that our HS agency required us to take. Since we don't have a laptop, we moved our desktop computer into our room so that we could watch the online training videos without being disturbed by the kiddos. Of course, most of them still ended up in our room. But the training has been great! We thought we would just go through the motions to get credit, but some of the topics (particularly attachment disorders) have been very enlightening. We've been able to better understand some of the challenges our adopted kiddos have. This training is so much better than what the state required when we adopted domestically. 3 courses down and 7 more to go..... by Sunday.


Soooo here's what we have left..... We're still waiting for final shot records for a few of our kiddos. We have a few forms that need to be filled out by our doctor and a final appointment with him next Tuesday. We have an appointment to get our passports next Tuesday. We're getting passports for the two of us, as well as Faith and Emma. The current plan is to take Emma with us on our first trip to the Ukraine and have Tony and Faith return to pick up Elisa and Vanessa on the second trip. The cost for 4 passports is nearly $500 (ouch). We're going to Austin to get certified copies of our marriage license on Friday. We're hand delivering the forms to our personal references today so that they can fill them out in advance of our HS appointment. The forms for criminal background checks were e-mailed today so that ball should be rolling......

In talking about how/ if to do a fundraiser event for the adoption we were approached by a local restaurant owner about doing a fundraiser dinner at his restaurant. It is a very prominent restaurant only a mile away from our church (La Hacienda for those of you who live in SA). What a blessing!!! Doing a fundraiser dinner really appealed to us as it's more of a celebration than a request for donation. We really weren't comfortable asking people to donate money to help us with the adoption even though we will clearly need some help at some point. We will simply sell tickets to the dinner and part of the proceeds will go to help bring Elisa and Vanessa home.

We are so excited that things are moving forward! Thanks so much for all of your prayers and for your support!