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!!!

We might be under contract??

Hi everyone! Thank you for your prayers. Today has been a TOUGH day. Our potential buyers have been totally balking and nit picking but earlier this evening, they've given their verbal "ok" to our counter offer. (That after what felt like 500 phone calls back and forth to nail this down.) We feel like we've given the house away but we're trusting that since God led us to do this IN this specific way, He's got a plan for us on the other side. The buyers supposed to be signing docs tonight so we'll hopefully have everything tied up tonight or tomorrow. Praise God as this all goes thru!

Please continue to pray for our health and especially pray for a miracle for us being able to find something in our new price range. Scary! But our God is a big God! We'll keep you all posted!