We're in our new home!

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your prayers as we have made it through our move (barely) and are now in our new home! Yea God! This has been one of the roughest weeks for us yet so we greatly appreciate all of your prayers on our behalf! I'll try to post pics soon of our new place. We "e-vited" a number of friends to come help us move on Memorial Day but only 3 friends from church and our retired neighbors showed up. We were extremely happy to have those awesome people show up but heartbroken because our entire small group blew us off. All but 1 didn't even respond. Thank so much to Kim, Don, Erin, Jack & Phyllis! You guys rock! We muddled through the day and ended up having to additionally rent a moving truck on top of the 2 pods! (And we had sold and donated a lot of items prior to our move!) Yikes - it's amazing how much stuff we accumulated in our last 7 1/2 years! We were packing that truck w/our 2 incredible neighbors until 2:30 on the day of closing but praise be to God, we finished before closing on Wednesday, with the house nice and clean to boot! Closing went really well and we were able to chat w/the new owners who were very nice this time! Thanks again to God for that! :-)

Yesterday, we moved into our new place and this time decided to hire 2 movers to help us as most people work during the week and that turned out to be a great move! Between my sister, brother-in-law and the 2 movers and us, we were able to get everything moved in by 1:30 yesterday! In the midst of all of this, one of our cars broke down and Jim got in a minor accident in the moving truck. Holy cow - what a week! But we are all safe and sound in our new place and thanking God for His hand in every single detail. We are additionally thankful to all of you for your prayers and your support. We will try and update you soon with something more than moving stuff!

3 days and counting!!!

Wow - I forgot how much I hate moving! Hi everyone! We are in the midst of getting packed up and getting ready for Monday's move into our pods. I'd be totally overwhelmed if I didn't make a list of which rooms we're packing on which days! Completely anal, I know but it's really helping us take things one step at a time. I'm just so incredibly thankful for God's hand in this whole process and for His strength right now as we could not do this without Him! Everything is going much more smoothly w/our buyer since our realtor let their realtor have it for trying to change things around last minute. He advised them of our back up offer and that has kept them extremely quiet since the inspection! :-) Yea God for back up offers! Even though we weren't able to take it, it's really helped to keep this buyer in line so we're extremely thankful!

In the meantime, Lily finished her last day of preschool at Chipeta yesterday with a picnic in the rain...sort of. It was raining but fortunately the park had a pavilion so we were fine. I've been so impressed w/this preschool and I am sad that we won't be able to attend next year because we'll be in a different district. God has really used them in Lily's life and as a result between the preschool and her therapies, Lily is completely CAUGHT UP!!!!! Last week, she graduated from P.T. and a week from Monday, she'll be graduating from Speech! I'm so excited for her and yet a little sad as these wonderful people have been a part of our lives for the last 3 years! Wow - yet another thing we are thankful to God for!

Well - this may be my last post until after we move so in the meantime, I just wanted to thank you all for your prayers for us. We are exhausted but excited about our mini "vacation" (ok - we're not going anywhere but we'll be staying in a hotel while we wait for our closing - still, it'll be a break.) and are looking forward to finally unwinding and unpacking in our new home! We'll post pics soon! Feel free to email me @ racewalkn@juno.com if you want our new address. Our phone #'s will all stay the same. Luv you all and we'll talk to you soon!

6 days & counting!

Hi everyone! It feels like forever since I've last posted but I guess it's only been a few days. We are about 6 days away from completely moving out of our house and into our pods! We decided to go the pods route instead of a moving truck because we didn't know if we would have enough help. This gives us the flexibility of moving stuff into the pods over a week or so and as a result, the pressure is off for having volunteers. Our closing is now the evening of the 27th (1 week from tomorrow!) and we've been trying to kick it into high gear. Because of the flaky-ness of this buyer, we've literally had to wait until the last minute before packing & changing addresses for the new house. I can't tell you how much we are all longing to just get packed up and settled in the new place! We are both so incredibly tired - please continue to pray for us as we both feel so overwhelmed w/all that needs to be done.

I don't have any news regarding our former foster daughter. She had told me she would call me back last Thursday after school and I did not hear from her. Please continue to pray for her and especially for the DHS caseworkers who are supposedly investigating. Unfortunately for the children here, our county is seriously one of the worst in the state as far as the services go. I've spoken w/the caseworker who is investigating and am trying to follow up, w/out being too annoying, to let her know that I take our foster daughter's charges very seriously and am concerned for her. Please pray that they will take her seriously and for her safety!

No news yet on our China adoption. We just completed updating our fingerprints for our 1-I7I and continue to wait. We're still thinking we'll hear something the middle of June but it really could be any day. I was listening to some worship music yesterday while walking and was brought to tears when I started to imagine what it will feel like to get "the call." I wonder all the time if Jasmine is being loved and cared for or if she's just one of many in the orphanage. I pray that God or His angels are whispering to her to hang on 'cause she has a mommy & daddy & sister who love her very much...almost as much as Jesus loves her. We pray for her every night and every night Lily prays for Jasmine to "know much how I love her." I imagine what it will be like to hold her for the first time and what it will be like to have 2 precious girls playing together at last. It will be so hard but we can't wait!

Thanks again - all 2 or 3 of you that read this blog (ha!) for all of your prayers and encouragement! We love you and we'll keep you posted!

Please pray....

Hi everyone! Please say a prayer for our former foster child who called tonight. We haven't spoken w/her in about 2 years and it looks like she's being abused again by her parents. We've reported this to the appropriate authorities and have given her our #'s in case things escalate but please pray for her safety! We are hoping that DHS will intervene quickly and get her to safety. Depending on how things work out, we may become her foster parents again so please pray for wisdom and direction for us as well. Thank you and we will keep you all posted!

Latest and greatest...

Hi everyone! Well, we're still waiting to see if our 1st buyer is going to stick w/us. They had a contractor come out today to give them a bid and they're now aware that these are pretty minor fixes but apparently the guy is still balking. We have until Friday to strike a deal and if there's no deal by the close of business, we are done with buyer #1! And get this! We had a request for a showing today that we turned down because we're wiped out. Turns out they were going to make an offer as well! That God, what a kidder! So, our realtor will keep them posted just in case something happens w/our first 2 buyers! I LOVE it. When God opens the floodgates, He really opens the floodgates, doesn't He?!

So, in the meantime, we wait. Story of our lives right now. ;-) No new news on the adoption front. We still could hear any day but we're hoping we'll be settled in the new place before that happens.

I do have a new prayer request regarding Lily - well 2 actually. The first is please pray for peace for her as we begin to pack up and get ready to move. Yesterday, she had a really bad day at school in terms of acting out and being very whiny. I sat her down and began asking her why and come to find out that she was afraid that "mommy and daddy would leave her." It BROKE my heart that my precious girl was worried about us ditching her somewhere! We have been talking w/her about this move for almost 9 months now but she saw 4 file boxes yesterday when she woke up and was afraid we were leaving her. I reassured her that we are a forever family and that we are not leaving her. She's been doing better since then and we're keeping an eye on things but we'd greatly appreciate your prayers for her as we get ready to move. The second is that we can find a quality preschool program for her after we move. She's on a waiting list for the district but it's not likely that she'll get in this year and we desperately need to keep her progressing. She's close to being discharged from her last 2 therapies and we want to make sure that she keeps moving forward in her development.

Well...the saga continues at the Young house but we sure do appreciate all of your prayers and are thankful that God continues to be our protector. We love you all and we'll keep you posted!

House updates....

Hi everyone! We got all of our signatures back from the sellers we're trying to buy from so it looks like everything is lined up on that end! Now we wait to see what happens with these 2 buyers of ours. We did get the inspection report and the items that our buyer wants fixed. The inspection was actually really good - mostly very minor items as we thought. Regardless of that fact, we will not be fixing anything for this first buyer because of the incredibly low price that they got our home for. We'll be signing the paperwork to that fact and hopefully we'll learn very quickly if they're going to stick with us or go elsewhere. We're having a contractor come tonight and take a look at the list to give us a bid for the items requested by our buyer. In the event that they bow out, we'll be able to quickly get those items fixed for our back up buyer. Either way, we are trusting God to work things out to completion with one of these buyers and feel incredibly grateful for His presence and leading during this process. We are continually thankful for all of your prayers as well! We have all managed to fight off whatever we were coming down with so we're extremely grateful for God keeping us healthy during this time.

We will keep you all posted and please continue to pray for God's will for the selling of our house and the details that need to come together.

Happy Mother's Day!

Hi everyone! Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there! I was thinking about how awesome it is that God came up with this whole plan of adoption! Once again, it's only because God loved us first that we even know what real LOVE is. He showed us what adoption is really like by giving us the opportunity to become His kids forever! He knew before He even created us that there would be precious children who needed forever families and knew that there would be mommies and daddies who couldn't have kids the traditional way. And He put us together before the beginning of time. I absolutely LOVE how God is in the tiniest of details and I have to say that after going through what we've just been through and seeing His amazing provision, I'll never again believe that God doesn't care about the smallest details of our lives. How amazing that the God of the universe cares about the tiny things in our lives as well as the big ones! I think that our house is a tiny detail compared to Jasmine & Lily and yet God is continuing to work things out for us to buy this house that will make a huge difference in our budget and possibly help us in our adoption. I LOVE that God cares enough about us to affect these tiny areas as well as the big ones. I can't wait to see how He brings Jasmine home to us! I also can't wait to see what He does in our family as a result of taking a high maintenance home out of the equation so that we can have quality time with each other and Him together!

As a mom, today I've just been reminded of the importance of my calling to love my kids and raise them to love Jesus. And to not just teach with my words but with my life just as Jesus taught through His life. I feel so incredibly thankful that God has allowed me to be a mom through the amazing journey called "Adoption."

We have a house?

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your continued prayers for us! It looks like we may have a house! We're trying to buy a short sale in Meridian Ranch and they've accepted our counter-offer. The best part is that we will be able to move in after closing on our house here and live there until the short sale is approved. Yea God! This means we won't have to look for temporary housing plus moving twice which is HUGE for us! We're so wiped out from this whole thing so we're extremely grateful that God was able to work out an option that won't uproot us multiple times.

In the meantime, we're continuing to pray and trust God for our adoption costs as we won't have any money from the sale of our home to go towards our adoption. We know, without any doubt, that God led us to sell our house at the time we were led so we are trusting Him that He has other plans to provide for our adoption. In the meantime, we continue to wait until the day that we get "the call." We've just finished the process of extending our immigration "stuff" and just got our application to get our 2nd set of fingerprints done.

We can't thank you all enough for all of your prayers and support! This has been one of the most draining, exhausting and discouraging times we've ever gone through but we're grateful that God has walked this with us despite how things felt from time to time. We are completely dependent on Him to be our protector & strength and to restore us back to health physically, emotionally, mentally & spiritually. We'll continue to keep you updated as we get ready to move to our new house and new location as well as updates on Jasmine.

The latest and greatest...

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for all of your prayers! We have been extremely grateful to feel God's hand guiding us thru every step of this current process! The latest is that our 2nd buyer signed the agreement to be our back up buyer so that is a big "Yea God!" This will not only strengthen our position with the first buyer AND give us another option should the 1st buyer fall out but additionally it gives us strength as we go to place an offer on another house. Thank you God!

In the meantime, we have been looking furiously for options for our family to move into. The cool thing is that God has allowed many of these options to NOT be viable so we have been clearly led in the direction we're headed. We are going to be placing an offer today on a house in Meridian Ranch area (N.East part of town in Falcon). The only problem is that this is a short sale. For those of you who don't know, a short sale is when a buyer gets the bank to take less than what is owed on their house in order to avoid foreclosure. In this particular case, the owner is trying to pay the bank back for the difference in what the house sells for (very unusual - most just walk and take the ding on their credit) and what is owed. In any case, the bank has to approve the short sale and that can take 60-90 days. This means that we'll need to find temporary housing for that time frame. The house is currently vacant and we are praying that the owner will allow us to rent the house from him until the short sale is complete. Either way, we're praying that if this is the house God has for us, we'll be able to come to an affordable agreement and that God will provide affordable temporary housing for us in the interim (pref. the house itself).

Tomorrow is our inspection so please be praying for that! Hopefully everything should go smoothly but it'll be good to have that over with and see what the inspector comes up with that we might have missed. We're both curious to see how the 1st buyer handles this particular part of the sale but are trusting God to have His buyer (whomever that is) see this thru to completion.

Wow - what an adventure this has been! Ups and downs, crying and throwing up, exhilaration and fear. Our journey with God has NEVER been boring! In all of this, we are incredibly thankful that despite how we've felt from time to time, God has never left us and never forsaken us. Thanks to all of you for your prayers and encouragement and we will keep you posted on this next part of our journey!

And the winner is...

1st buyer. Hi everyone! Well, we met w/our realtor, Dan, yesterday and apparently ReMax had already deposited their earnest check which implies contract. So we're kinda stuck dealing w/the 1st buyer. But the 2nd buyer is going to become our 1st back up offer, should the original buyer back out for any reason. We're also going to not tell the 1st buyer that we have a back up offer on the table. Should he try to get us to pay for anything come inspection time, it'll give us some leverage to say "no" which could also make him walk, in which case we can accept the back up offer. So, the initial outcome was disappointing, but we also feel that this will enable us to not have to worry about what this guy might try to pull come inspection time. That part is great!

In the meantime, we've begun the mad search for a house! Thanks to my sister keeping Lily, we were able to go to about 6-8 houses yesterday and Lily was able to play with her cousin. We've narrowed down our search to 3 houses. I'm going to look at the last 2 tomorrow and hopefully, if we continue to feel peace, we'll place an offer sometime in the next few days! Please continue to pray for God's wisdom for us in this search and His leading to where He wants us as well His hand on getting the best possible price we can. Praise for His making things clearer to us and for some MUCH needed rest last night! Thanks, as always, for your prayers and we'll keep you all posted!

WOW...

Hi everyone! Ok...WOW! We need your prayers today as we just got a little twist on everything. Last night our realtor called us and apparently we have a 2nd offer! Someone came earlier this week, who hadn't given feedback on the house, wants to buy the house AND it's for $7K more than this first couple. We are absolutely dumbfounded and need your prayers for wisdom and discernment as we try and figure out how to procede. The kicker is that we have not yet signed the docs for the counter offer but we did give a verbal "ok." We want to make sure that our integrity and character are not in question as well as check the legal aspects of either going with the other offer or going back to our 1st buyer and asking them to match this one. The problem for both of us is $7K is 3/4 of our remaining adoption costs. This really would be SOOOOO huge for us so please pray that God would make HIS path crystal clear to us today. Our realtor is going to be meeting w/his managing broker this a.m. to discuss all of the aspects of this because there do seem to be a number of gray areas here and we all want to make sure we are above reproach on how we handle things or IF we handle things differently. That God...what a kidder! Here's the other fun part - we have someone coming today for a 2nd showing so there's a possibility of maybe even getting a 3rd offer!

Besides the monetary issue, the main reason we're praying about this is because once the 1st buyer started playing games/hardball/whatever you want to call it, I started to have a lack of peace but I attributed that to panic. Now, I'm not sure if maybe God was trying to tell us to let them walk. So needless to say, we desperately need God's wisdom here and are absolutely DEPENDING on Him to be our defender and protector and that He will make His path clear in all of this. Our hope is in Him and we feel incredibly humbled and thankful to have His presence in our lives.

Thanks, everyone, for all of your prayers and stay tuned!!!