Adoption Update 4
I am aware that it has been almost 2 months, and I accept full responsibility on that. You may punish me how you see fit. But I am here now! So no need to worry.
I’ll start with my puzzle piece fundraiser. Since I last updated, we have sold 10 more pieces!! Which leaves 445 pieces left for sale at $20 apiece. If you wish to purchase a puzzle piece to help fund out adoption expenses please see our crowdfunding page.
I also had started a T-shirt fundraiser to help raise additional support. That was a huge success in my book. We ended up meeting our goal of 20 shirts! Which is amazing to me. I know that we don’t necessarily make that much money off of the shirts, but because we launched the campaign, more people gave money and were offering encouragement. We were blown away by the response!
Something else that is a big success is our garden. It has grown quite dramatically. We started off with a few carrots and cucumber plants, and now it has grown into quite a few carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers, and strawberries. I think we are finished for the time being. We might add some flowers later to encourage bees to pollinate our plants but right now, we just have lots of green things. Our cucumbers have been giving us a bit of a problem because the leaves started to turn a bit yellow and a couple plants died from fungus. We pulled those out and gave it some plan medicine and Epsom salts and so far, the remaining 2 plants are looking alive. We shall see how they grown.
If you have been following our YouTube channel or crowdfunding page, you will know that in April, be changes happened. In April, the adoption law in Japan radically changed. Which in turn affected Americans adopting internationally in Japan. There is a family from Georgia, who was denied an orphan visa for their adopted Japanese baby due to this law change. Right now, the USCIS has halted all adoption applications until they have worked out a new treaty. What does this mean for us? Well, our US agency has advised us not to continue with adoption in Japan because of this. They will not continue our process. Which means, that we lose the $9000 that we have already paid. This was disheartening and hard to come to a decision, but after many phone calls and Skype meetings, we have decided to put everything on hold for 6 months, and just gather our information together for Japan in the meantime.
This really is a blessing in disguise because we were worried about how we were going to be able to afford the USCIS application fee, then this happened and now we don’t have to pay any application fee. All we have to save up for is the Japanese homestudy. Which is anywhere from $2500-$4000. We are doing quite well with our savings plan I think. Josh has been working 2 part-time jobs to help us gain extra income, we have cut back on spending, and our garden is growing healthily to be able to give us free food that we want to eat without spending so much money.
I will be honest with you and tell you that we have $2000 in savings. We are hoping to increase that amount by mid-June to $3000. I am confident that we can do this.
The donations we have received this month from supporters or from selling shirts will go directly towards paying off our psych evaluation. We put that charge on our credit card so we could make payments because it’s ridiculously expensive. We will just be paying that off for quite some time.
On a more less frustrating note, JD got his birth certificates in the mail. I haven’t gotten mine yet. They misspelled my name, which is stupid. They can clearly see that we sent our application together and they didn’t spell my husband’s name wrong. Why the heck would they spell mine wrong? Do they not have eyes? Mine are still not here and California has been very rude in “helping” us. My mother informed me that she just very recently got them in the mail at her house instead of mine. Again, this makes no sense because I put the return address as our Japanese address. The last application was sent back to us in Japan just fine, why couldn’t they do that again? So hopefully, it can make it safely to Japan and I don’t have to worry about this anymore. The only reason this is taking so long for us to move forward is because of these stupid documents. It is helpful financially but really, this is just plain dumb.
At this point, it doesn’t really matter because we have to start the process entirely over anyway. I suppose this is all part of the journey of hiking the PCT. We all sustain injuries from time to time and it sets us back quite a bit and ends up costing us money. That is all this is. Just an injury during our adoption process. But we are on the road to recovery and will be back on trail in no time.
We know that God is with us during this process and that if it were not for our supporters, we would not be able to say that we can move forward into our new journey. We know that this is risky for us to be doing a domestic adoption instead of an international one, but we are willing to accept such a risk. Please be praying for us and send us encouraging words.
Please consider a donation. We can’t do this without you.
