Nesting...

I feel as though I am pregnant and nesting for a 9 year old boy ! ha :)

Some of you have asked about his name...we cannot release his full name online, however we plan on keeping his fist and middle U**anian names and then ofcourse he will take the last name of Risse!

FYI: Little boy "A" has a brother who is 11 months older than him and was adopted out to America when they were younger..they look like twins. Because of confidentiality do not know where his brother lives in the states. Pray when we get to "A's" country, we will be able to get all our questions answered regarding his history. We are sure the answers would be limited but this will be our only chance to find out about his parents, their work, medical history......oneday if "A" would like, we 100% want to be prepared in helping him find his birth parents and birth brother.

They got it :)

I just saw that our packet to immigrations has been delivered and signed for...yay...pray they assign us an officer and get to working quickly on our case :)!

A good day...

Mike and I meet with our notary today to notarize about 25 documents. Once we gather all the information needed for a document, we notarize it, send it via scan email to our facilitator in the Ukra**e and he begins translating the docuemnt, we then send it to the Sec. of State office to be apostiled (basically to certify the certified :)...then we mail all our documents to the Ukra*** where our facilator carries it to the State Department of Adoption there. We only have one more document to notarize!!

Here we are signing our papers....today we also signed our Petition to Adopt little boy "A"

the Lord brought it to pass...

as many of you know, Mike and I have been absolutely torn between the two boys. We have very peacefully come to a decision to adopt the 9 year old, little boy A (granted he is still available when we get there and granted once we meet him, we still feel he is our son). Nothing is official with the U*rain* until we have meet the child. We, for the past few months have cried, prayed and poured our hearts out to the Lord over this. We felt like we were just not getting an answer so we decided a couple weeks back that we would try to adopt them both, however the uk**aine is not longer allowing adoptions for 2 unrelated children on one visit...thus was the Lord closing the door for us to get both. We finally surrendered to the Lord, choose a child and will trust Him. The Lord started this process and the Lord will faithfully fulfill His purpose and we will come home with the child he has for us. If we get to our appt in the U***ine and this little boy "A" is not available or we decide he is not our child...then we go back for another appt and ask to see other children. We are seeking a boy, between the ages of 6-10 who are blind. The Lord has given us that specific burden for blind children. The U*rain* will not allow for adoptions anymore for children 5 and under unless they have a more severe need and "just" being blind is not severe enough for the *krain*, thus the 6-10 age range. We are excited that the Lord has finally brought to pass His will...and His will was and will continue to be, to trust Him. HE is sovereign and we finally find peace in that....we are excited to see who the Lord will have for us...we believe "A" to be our son...but if God closes that door...He will open another one.

In God's perfect timing...

With much excitement and thanksgiving I can say last week we got our long awaited FBI clearance!

We are now only waiting on one tiny (actually big) piece of paper before we can submit to the Ukraine and wait on a date to travel. We are waiting on U.S. immigrations approval to travel for an adoption. Some people get approval within a couple weeks, other people wait months for their approval. We submitted to immigrations last week, we are waiting on  them to issue us a fingerprinting appointment and then the clock will start ticking! (yes our 4th time for finger prints :)! )

Once we get immigrations approval we submit our dossier (fancy name for a bunch of paperwork) to the Ukraine and wait on them to give us a travel date. We were told last week from our facilitator that there is no waiting line for our age range so that is exciting. We are thinking we will travel the middle to end of November. So much to do before then in preperation for getting a new son and in preperation to travel. Pray our van sells, pray the final stages of this process run smoothly and quickly, pray for our children as we prepare their hears for us leaving and pray for our soon to be son,  Lord willing. Pray the Lord would really tenderize his heart and that he would be open to receiving us.

Outside of the adoption, yes...we might just have a life outside of this adoption :)  Anna and Naomi will start school here at the home next week. Anna will be in 2nd and Naomi in K5. Luke just celebrated his 4th birthday and Beth is doing great as well.

Thank you for your prayers, Blogger has been down for a week so I was so excited to finally be able to post.

a sweet thought....

This morning our Pastor's wife who is also Luke's Sunday school teacher, shared this with me. Today in Sunday school she was talking with Luke and asking him to name everyone in his family...Luke was having a hard time so she decided to help him ...she said, you have Momma, Daddy, Anna, Naomi and Beth....Luke then said "And we are getting ONE MORE, A BROTHER". I thought that was so sweet to hear this from my 3 year old son, almost brought me to tears. We are so excited about the adoption yet also curious as to how things will work out. We trust the Lord and believe we are in His will. We will come home with the child the Lord has just for us and if God has called us to be his parents, He has called our children to be his siblings.

While we are waiting we are getting some nesting done in preperation of our newest addition :)

We are also planning to put our van up for sale in the next week or two. Please pray it sells, as we need those funds to go 100% towards our adoption. God has been so faithful!

YAY

Today we mail, for the first time...documents to the U*rain*......to us, they are the most beautiful pieces of paper we have ever seen :) lol

We have hit a stand still....

We have to have our homestudy finalized before we can submit to USCIS (immigrations). The immigrations part can take anywhere from weeks to months to complete. In order to get our home study finalized we are only waiting on ONE thing....our FBI clearance. Well our social worker sent out info in 8 weeks ago. She called FBI yesterday...they said they started processing them 4 weeks ago...so considering FBI takes a while...we may be at a stand still for a while and we are OK with that. We know that the Lord is behind the timing of all this paperwork. There are 3 reasons to why we need/desire to move quicky and get the FBI clearance fast...

1. Our son needs to have a home asap!
2. some of our paperwork will expire if we have to wait too long...thus we will have to spend more money and time to do things over.
3. Our country is still at this time open for adoptions...we are not promised tomorrow :)

Please pray for the Lord's will. Thank you for praying!

Thankful today...

When we started this process we prayed alot and did alot of research on finding the right social worker/agency and facilitator in the Uk*a*ne. I am thankful and humbled to say, the Lord gave us the best! We have a wonderful Christian social worker here in the states and a Godly man in the U*rain* working hard on our behalf..so thankful!