Thank you...

THANK YOU - THANK YOU! 

Within one week, we have met our goal to receive our matching gift!

Within one week, you rallied around us and donated over $500 toward our puzzle, toward our matching gift - and toward bringing T home. Bless you and thank you!

With our matching gift, we now have 335 of our 500 puzzle pieces sponsored. Please take a minute to check out all the wonderful puzzle sponsors listed at the bottom of the blog.

We still have work to do. We are still selling puzzle pieces ($10 a piece). We want to finish that puzzle!

We are still selling yummy coffee - Just Love Coffee - lots of yummy free-trade choices. They would make wonderful office/teacher gifts for Christmas!

We are close to choosing a t-shirt design that we will be selling soon here on the blog.

In a couple of weeks, we will have info for our local friends, inviting you to our open-house Holiday Market. We'll have an afternoon of Christmas shopping here at our house with lots of vendors, door-prizes, and holiday cheer!

In the meantime, we are applying for adoption grants and filling out more paperwork!

Yes, more paperwork - OUR REFERRAL PAPERS!! Yes, T's actual referral arrived yesterday along with tons of other papers, immigration applications, etc. So we are sending those all back to the agency in a day along with the final agency fee! The other cool news we got this past week is that our dossier is now listed (on the China Affairs adoption website) as being "in process." Apparently our agency said this was very quick for them to already have it translated and to be working on. It seems like things are currently moving a bit faster than usual. YAY!

You may have noticed that we are now referring to our new daughter as "T." Last week we received a new form from our homestudy agency, stating that we are not allowed to put info or pictures on the internet until our adoption is final (soooo bummed about this as our placement agency had said we could post pictures as soon as we received our next China approval). This is apparently a new Virginia policy but we will be investigating it as the wording it vague and it contradicts what we were told by our placement agency. So for now, I will be going back through the blog to change any reference to our new daughter to "T."

I am so sad if it is actually true that all photos of waiting children will ultimately not be allowed on the internet. I am particularly sad for adoption advocacy sites that post info about children who are waiting or are in the process of being adopted. What a shame if waiting children can no longer be shown in pictures on the web. This is how we found T and our Ethiopian daughters. More to come on this new development.

My pictures didn't download in time right now, but be looking for a photo-full post coming soon, of our Fall fun weekend with the cousins!