Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Dear Baby Sanborn #3

Today was your sweet Pappy's birthday. He would have been 61 today, but it wasn't God's plan for him to be here for this birthday. I grieve over the fact that you will never get to know him the way I do, or your daddy does. You will not reap the benefit of his sweet patience with you as Andrew and Annabelle have. You will never have his hands to hold or his neck to squeeze. Your laughter will never come as a result of his antics. He won't hold you or rock you, sing to you or pray for you. At least not here. We are so sad about all of these things. But you know what little one? We know that Pappy sees and knows all about you. Someday he will hold you and rock you and steady you with his hands. Someday you will know this wonderful man who helped shape your life without ever meeting you. Someday, a long time from now, you will look into his bright eyes and see what we have all missed so terribly. We love you baby and cannot wait to tell you all about your sweet Pappy.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

The Paperwork has begun!

We got our packet in the mail from our agency, so we could get started on our home study. I finished all the paperwork in just a few hours, and here it is! Do you think we are a little excited?


The pink post-its are for Bill's signatures! Thank you for bearing with me as the process is sometimes super slow and tedious. This is why I get so excited about the little victories. As an adoptive family, we don't get to read a pregnancy test, or see ultra sounds, or hear the heartbeat. These are the things we get to celebrate. Tomorrow I will be at the bank to open an account for Baby Sanborn #3 and on Sat. we will be getting our fingerprints taken. Stay tuned for more boring pics of that as well! Tee Hee!
Please continue to pray for this journey and for Baby Sanborn #3 wherever he or she is!

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

No new news...

I assume there will be several of these in our journey! I just wanted to share something that has been on my heart. As you know from previous posts, bringing Andrew and Annabelle home was not exactly a financial strain on our resources. We had very little debt then (only my measly student loan, which we still have by the way). Technically we did have one other debt, our home. Well, actually, even though our home was a debt, it enabled us to bring the babies home. We took out a home equity loan and started charging!!! Can you say cha-ching??!! Well, 4 years later, the world is a different place-as we all know! Our adoption this time around is going to be much harder to fund. After our initial "money drop" from God, we were able to start our home study. After this, God will need to provide another $3000 for a dossier fee, which of course He is working out. After that another $6500 when we accept referral. We think with the addition of my second job we will be able to save some of it. But the point is, it's expensive and we know our God will provide. More importantly, Bill and I have had to let go of some of our pride and talk to other people about it. This has been a terrifying and sometimes embarrassing experience. Most of our family doesn't even know how much our last adoption cost because we were guarded about money. With this adoption we are letting God work and not holding on so tightly to the whole process. Because of the prompting of our hearts, and the process he is bringing us through we know that He is in control of financing this adoption, not us. I plan to work my bootie off to get grants and loans once our homestudy is final, as I mentioned before a second job, and that will help. But the bottom line is we have to trust our God to be faithful. Our God who brought us through some terrible struggles and amazing triumphs to bring Andrew and Annabelle home, will be faithful. He wants to change our hearts and add to our family. But we have to trust Him to be faithful.
Isn't He always?

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Welcome to our Adoption Blog

Welcome! We are a family of four becoming a family of five (even typing this seems weird). We have 4 year old Andrew and Annabelle who are adopted from Ethiopia (they came home at 4 mos. old) and we are traveling the adoption road again, not sure where it will take us. We are open to any way God wants to bring a baby into our family and are currently getting paperwork together to send a dossier to Ethiopia.

When we set up our original family blog "Team Sanborn", I specifically liked the fact that we could add to our family and not change our blog title. Well that, and at the time I didn't know how to change our blog title!! HA!! I wanted to start this blog to address our adoption because even though my heart and mind are over run with all the details and preparations, my children are still as crazy as ever and deserve their own posts as well. So now we have two blogs. If you know us, you know we really are not that interesting (interesting enough to have 2 blogs) but this is a great place to keep adoption updates because sometimes they are coming a mile a minute and sometimes it's a long time before any news. Adoption is truly "hurry up and wait"!! We are keeping an adoption journal for the new baby's eyes only, but sometimes, we may post some of that here too.
So with that said... Here is the story (short version):
We have been planning on adopting another baby since the week after we got home from Ethiopia with Andrew and Annabelle (4 years ago). It made sense to wait a little longer... So two years ago we decided to really lay this at the feet of our Savior. In the meantime, we lost my sweet Daddy which changed our perspective on everything. We even thought of not adding to our family because the new baby would not have known my dad. It still breaks my heart to know our next child will not know his precious wide smile, and his tight meaningful squeezes this side of heaven. But after much prayer (shout out to all of you that have joined us in prayer), we decided to move on with another adoption. I quit my teaching job to stay home with the "A Team" (which I am loving by the way). This is a plus, because me being at home was always a prerequisite for another adoption. But it is also a minus because with only one income, it seemed impossible to scrape together the funds to do it. AAAHHH!!! Two weeks ago my prayer group started praying that God would just drop the money from the sky (to see the "discussion" Bill and I had about this see www.teamsanborn.blogspot.com). OUR GOD IS GOOD!!!! He has provided the money for our home study- so here we go!!!! Our home study appointment is on Wednesday, September 15- AHHHH!!!! As you can see we are a little excited about this (that would explain all the exclamation points). Like I said earlier, adoption is filled with ups and downs and everything in between. We would love for you to buckle your seat belts and join us. It promises to be an unbelievable ride!