The Planning is Underway.

After a very productive meeting on Saturday, we are preparing for our next two fundraisers. God has blessed Matt and I with a "team" of people that are passionate about adoption and bringing our child (ren) home.  The next fundraiser will be a garage sale on April 3rd and 4th. In a few weeks we will be asking for people to donate their unwanted items. More details coming soon. One man's junk is another man's treasure, right? Two weeks after that, on April 18th will be a 5K in Union. The Strickland Family has organized a 5K Walk/Run for the past five years to benefit local Franklin County residents who are adopting. We are honored that they have chosen us to receive the proceeds of the race this year. The title of the race is:

For now save the date of the race and expect the registration forms to come out shortly. We are currently seeking corporate sponsors for this race, if interested contact me. This is a great way for a business to promote and expose their product/services to the Franklin County area. 

Feeling Blessed

Today I am closing out the first order of our fundraising shirts.  My initial goal was to sell 50, well God had other plans. We sold 82 adult shirts and 10 children's shirts. Wow!!! To God be the glory! If there seems to be more interest in purchasing additional shirts we will place another order in the future. We have also received several generous donations over the past couple weeks. We are humbled by everyones giving and loving hearts. THANK YOU!!!
We completed our home study last week. It wasn't to bad. Glad to have another step done.  We are now waiting for the social worker to formulate that interview into a document. We expect to wait a couple weeks before this is completed. Once completed,our adoption agency will submit that and some other vital documents to Tanzania. Hopefully once reviewed we will get a referral for a child to adopt. Fingers crossed!

FIRST FUNDRAISER

Here's our first fundraiser. Designer Threads in Washington was so kind to help bring our vision to life.  Love doing business with local companies!  I think this displays our mission for this adoption process very well. Selling shirts for $15.00. Collecting orders over the next week, then will place our group order.  I expect to do another order, but wanted to get these out so we had them for upcoming fundraisers.
We also set up an account with Citizens Bank to accept donations.  The account is For Benefit of "Bliss Family Adoption". Donations can be accepted through all locations:  New Haven, Gerald, Washington, and Pacific.

The news is out!!

So it's Facebook official. We are adopting!! Yes, I questioned God so many times, but its something we are being lead to do. Just as soon as I made that facebook post my phone rang. Guess who it was? The social worker to schedule two homestudy visits.... Yahoo!!! Both visits are scheduled for next week. We feel really blessed by all the friends and family members who have been our cheerleaders over the past month.

Big Changes Are Coming....

About a month and a half ago, the Lord was knocking hard at my heart.  I tried to ignore this intense feeling and it only became more intense.  After much prayer and thought, Matt and I will be expanding our family through adoption. We feel that we are called to adopt in an orphanage in Tanzania, Africa.  We understand that there are lots of kids in the United States that need homes, but for some reason we are lead to this particular orphanage.  We are going to step out on faith and follow his lead.

Adoption is a long and expensive process but we are confident God goes before us and is with us in all of it. Over the past couple months, we have been drowning in paperwork and will hopefully will get our homestudy completed this month.  We are pursuing one child or a two person sibling group. We will listen to the Lords calling on what direction to go. Somehow he will provide what we need. After all, he already knows our child or children by name.

Tanzania's Flag