Whew!

It has been an overwhelming couple of weeks. Things are moving along, literally. We moved into our new house on the 11th and have been unpacking and decorating for Christmas. We are finally ready for Christmsas after doing ALL of our shopping on the 18th. We really love our new house and things are finally feeling settled.

In the meantime, we have diligently been working on our dossier and homestudy paperwork. We had 15 pages notarized and are sending them off to be apostilled in Sacramento. Basically, an apostille is a state certification that the seals on our forms are valid (like birth certificates, marriage certificate, notary stamps, etc.) It costs $20/page in California!! The dossier is the big stack of paperwork that eventually gets translated and sent to Micah's country.

The homestudy is almost complete. We have gathered most of the paperwork, and have done our first meeting with our social worker, Heidi. She is really nice and we had a great visit yesterday. She is doing homestudies for three Reece's Rainbow families! I think that is so amazing :) She is really focused on getting the report done quickly, so after our home visit next week, I'm thinking we'll be able to send off for the I600a (to USCIS - immigration) by the 10-1th of January! If all goes well, I would LOVE to be able to send our completed dossier to Eastern Europe at the end of February. It would be SOOOOO awesome if we could go get Micah in March or April! Oh, how I hope.

Of course, the other part of our plans is the fundraising. We have raised $7,000 to date and have about $18,000 more to raise. We are planning to do a pancake breakfast/silent auction on March 12th. And we are PRAYING daily for miraculous giving :) We were so surprised and blessed to hear about a friend of a friend sending in a $500 check to our FSP (grant at RR).

If you feel led to give, especially during this holiday season and before the tax cutoff, please visit our FSP at reecesrainbow.org/sponsorray, or you can click on the button to the right with Micah's picture and it will take you directly there. Also, our chip-in is still available if you'd like to donate funds for us to use immediately for things like the $20/page apostilles :)

Don't forget about our puzzle funraiser for only $5/piece (see posts below). We sold two more pieces today! (Thanks Mom and Dad!)

Merry Christmas!
~Shelly