Our USCIS approval- Yeah!

We mailed our dossier off after this came . We are hoping to travel soon after it is registered... maybe in July. Bulgaria requires 2 trips which is fine with us... the first one is to meet the children and then we return home until our lawyer goes to court and then we return for the children and the final paperwork at the embassy. We are thinking maybe in Oct. or Nov.. 2 short trips compared to one very long one like we did in Ukraine is easier for us to plan for leaving the kids at home.

Keith came over with his Sumo Wrestler costume

Mya tried it on... as you can tell the kids loved it.

Fun on the slip and slide one day

Paul took the teenagers to DC by subway to visit the museums

Paul, Joseph, Ben,Jacob, Cate, Naty, Leah, Olivia, Rachel, and our friend Harmony in Washington,DC for the day

An evening of summer fun...

I had the wonderful priviledge to speak at our Mother Daughter Banquet

I am late posting all of these because of my dad's illness and death but I wanted to share what has been happening the last month other than that....

Jenn came up to hear me speak and I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at a Mother Daughter Banquet - 250 ladies and their daughters attended. I loved sharing my testimony and pray that my words and heart planted seeds.

I had all my daughters but Molly and Laura Jeane with me.... when I think that the adopted daughters now call me momma and I them daughter just melts my heart... I love them all and thank the Lord for the priviledge of being a mom.

Mothers Day Pictures

When Jenn and Jeremiah come up we always have a flag football game... Ezra wants to play too... Ella and Ezra with Mya love the jeep and the gator....Molly,Mike and Leyla after we ate :)

We go from some very sad news to some rejoicing

I wanted to share that we got word that our I 800A was done and our agency has gotten our approval.... which means we will be getting it as well..... We can now send it off to get appostilled and overnite our dossier to Bulgaria..... Gracey Jane and Andrew here we come ! I have so much other posts to share from Mothers Day to this news.....but I did not want to wait to share this absoulutely, great news.

Some sad news....

I just wanted to share that we have had a rough week.. and yesterday my dad went to be with the Lord. As you can imagine it has been a very hard time for all of us. He was taken to the ER last Wed... and died Tuesday afternoon. He is the reason that I have so much love in my heart for children.. children loved him and he them. He was always surrounded by the neighborhood children and later was very involved in the lives of the boys on his high school football teams for which he was the coach. Because all of our children have experienced so much loss already in their short lives it has been especially hard watching them process the loss of their beloved "grandad". You can also imagine what it feels like for me to lose the person who has influenced me the most in my life... I really did not think it was going to be as hard as it has been. So we would covet your prayers and thoughts as we grieve...

I will share more about my daddy later....

Homeschool Companion Radio Show

What do you do when you are doing a live radio show from your house with 19 kids... you let them watch a movie :) Paul and I once again were on a live radio show about home schooling... Here is the link but you may have to wait until they post it.... http://www.lifetalk.net/rssfeed/Homeschool_Companion.xml

Now we were on April 1 and this is the link you can listen to... We are on about 10 minutes into it
http://www.lifetalk.net/media/HSCompanion/mp3/HS090401.mp3

Did I share I love to garden- actually new life in our home is always welcome-- plants, animals and of course a child

A friend asked for an update on our adoption- we have submitted all of our documents to USCIS... acutally the NBC in Missouri. They are the US gov't entity who approves our homestudy and gives us a document we need to adopt our children. We need just the one document and then we send the rest of our dossier over to Bulgaria. It then is translated and submitted. We will then be given our dates to travel....It is an easier process than our adoptions from Ukraine and Russia so far. Especially since we already have requested or are registered for our 2 kids. We were fingerprinted April 17 and we were told it can take up to 3 months or as little as a month to get this. We have a peace about the timing as we continue to see the Lord's hand in our lives and His provision. Someone has consistently given us at least 100 dollars every week and as much as 130... thank you for helping us to bring Gracie Jane and Andrew home....

Mya in our Peace Garden

We always have enough for team sports

This is only half of them too.....If you count there are 11 . I love watching them play soccer. We bought our own official size soccer goals 2 yrs ago and it is so much fun watching them.

Isaac is our Engineer- this is what he did today

More pics of my "Joy Time" with the grand kids

Jenn turned 28 !

Our daughter, Jenn turned 28 in April and I went down to help her celebrate.... Of course I also got to see Jeremiah and the "grand" children, Ella and Ezra. I loved being with them and really I am so happy to be her momma and very proud of her life and walk with the Lord. Every time she calls and I hear," Hi Momma!" it just makes my heart feel warm.. thank you Lord for the gift of this daughter.

Time to take the pool cover off

Last week was so warm in the 90's the older kids decided it was time to remove our pool cover... here they are .. it took them a good hour but they All did it.

This is something we do lots of

Here is a picture of the 2 vacumes I just bought today... We go thru vacume cleaners like candy here... honestly unless I want to do all the sweeping ... which I do not we will keep replacing our vacume cleaners every 2 yrs or less. The kids are very rough on things like this. I have bought more expensive ones but it does not matter. I am not sure I like the yellow one so I may return it... we will see. At least they were both on sale.