Sorry for the *ahem* long hiatus. We've been busy around here. Let's get you caught up on the last 6 weeks in the Mnch household (yes, that's how I write our name in my head).
It took us a while to get underway with our homestudy. We were going to go with an agency based out of Austin, but they required us to pay for all of our post-placement visits at the time we paid for our homestudy, and that was going to be hard on us. [I totally totally understand why they do that. Of course people are more likely to actually complete those visits if they've already paid for them. It's really important that families complete their post-placement visits in order to keep the adoption process open between countries. Uganda doesn't want kids coming to the States and never being heard of again, obvs.] They also required an application fee, which I can also understand, because processing documents takes time, but gosh, the money really adds up!
So we checked with another agency and just got such great vibes from them. We were considering using Generations Adoptions as our agency for the whole sha-bang, but we fell in love with Nightlight's Baby's Home. In my interactions with Generations so far, they're a pretty great organization. So we completed their application (with no application fee, yay!) and started gathering the mountain of documents we needed for our homestudy packet.
In the meanwhile, we had our first real fundraiser: a bake sale. Our church graciously let us serve sweets during our biennial Dating and All That Stuff event. For such a small group, we still took home $237 in donations! Crazy, right?!? I was definitely not expecting that much, but so many college students gave generously to us. And the presence of cake balls didn't hurt either. ;)
As soon as that was over, it was time to really get down to business on a big fundraiser: our garage sale. So many of our friends donated (seriously, there was so much stuff). After a couple of locations fell through, the owners of the office building our church rents allowed us to use the parking lot. After 5 days of non-stop work (and an amazing amount of help), we brought in over $1,000! Seriously, one thousand dollars! And I got some Christmas lights to put on our tree. Oddly enough (to me, at least), no one was feeling the Christmas love. I think things like that a great to buy cheaply in the off-season if you have a place to store it. The lights were still in the boxes and LED and cute. Totally a score.
I should've taken pictures of the mayhem in our house, but I don't think Stephen would have allowed them to be seen by others. Our front bedroom was completely full, our couches were covered, and our dining room had a little walkway to the trash can. There were even things I left on the porch because I couldn't find a place to put them. It was nuts.
Oh, did I mention? The garage sale was on Ezra's first birthday. More to come on that tomorrow!
I think those lights came from my sister. We had so much fun going through her stuff. Every time we were tempted to keep something, we just reminded ourselves of where it was going and why and the box got fuller. I'm so glad the sale as successful!
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