Keith

Here are a couple pictures we have of our tiny Keith.

Keith is 4 years old, so he is the youngest of the five we are bringing home.  Keith is in an orphanage where all of the children are tiny and malnourished.  Though he is 4 years old, he weighs only 11 pounds.  We are praying that God helps us get all of them home quickly, but we feel even more urgency with tiny Keith.  We are so thankful that God put him in our path and worked our Christmas miracle to get us our verbal referral.

I was so frustrated along the way at some of the delays.  Once I saw Keith and realized what God had planned, I realized that each delay kept us from getting too far ahead. If we had been further along, then we wouldn't have been able to add Keith to our adoption.  God is amazing!

Please pray for Keith and for our process to begin to move quickly.  We should have a travel date for trip #1 soon, so check back.  Now that things are moving along, I'm going to try to do better about updating the blog.  :)

Update on Where Things are and WHO is coming home

Well, I've been kind of quiet for a while.  Our 13th child, Cody, got home at the end of July.  We have been busy doing lots of things since he arrived and keeping up with all the adoption paperwork. 

Right about the time that we were ready to submit our dossier, we realized that God wanted us to add a 5th child to our adoption.  We prayed about "who" that should be.  It made sense for it to be a girl because of rooming situations, but we knew He wanted it to be a certain tiny boy.  We figured out the rooming and added Keith to our adoption.  The USCIS approval was easy to switch because our homestudy had approved us for more than 4. 

We submitted the dossier and were so excited to get a verbal approval.  The problem is that we were told in order to have a chance of getting it for Keith too we would have to do MORE paperwork.  We had our social worker write up a specific approval for Keith and his needs as well as something stating that our two oldest daughters (adult ages, but with special needs that will mean they live with us forever and in Eastern Europe they would be in a mental institution) do NOT take care of the children.  We got that all done easily, apostilled, and someone travelling hand delivered it for us. 

This past Friday (more than a month after we had originally expected our verbal referral) we did get the verbal referral for all FIVE children.  We are so relieved and are PRAISING GOD for working it all out for us.  Here are our FIVE.  :)  I'll tell you a little more about Keith in the next post.  :)