Big Announcement for Us!

So, this post is purely personal, no great teaching tips, products to share, or book reviews here...but I did want to let all of you know some big news for my little two-person family.

We are finally taking the plunge and have begun the journey to adopt our first (and very possibly only!) child. For the last seven years it's just been the two of us kickin' around in this house and we're hoping to grow our family by one as soon as possible. 

The process is a long, nerve-wracking, and expensive one. A domestic infant adoption can cost between 30-50,000 smackeroos. But every journey starts with a few small steps! And that's where many of you guys came in...

Whether you knew it or not, you guys have been helping us take steps for the last year and a half! Any time you have purchased one of my products, or even given me a good rating on a freebie, you've been helping our journey get started. Every cent of my Teacher pay Teachers earnings have been going into our adoption fund. In fact, that has been my motivation for all the work I've put in since day one! And now I'm proud to share that I recently hit the first TpT milestone! That's an amazing start (we're halfway there!) to the unfortunate high expense involved with this journey. 
So, THANK YOU!

We realized that we didn't have a single
working smoke detector! YIKES!
I'll be installing these new smoke and
CO detectors all over the house soon!

All of the flooding and set backs we've had with our house has been really discouraging. One of the adoption requirements is a home study, and with the state of our flooded house, we had to get that fixed. But last week, as many of you know, my dad and I put in 7 fourteen hour work days to put things back in order! We got most of it corrected, and luckily I only spent about a third of what it would have cost me to hire someone to help. 

It was still a financial setback...but we have decided that if we keep waiting for the "financially right time"...we could be waiting forever. So, we're trusting that God will provide, going into debt a bit, and we've taken the plunge and started the official process this past Saturday! 

We've started working with an agency, and have learned about all the things that we need to get in order to be matched with a birth mother. A lot of it is pretty standard stuff, like getting clearances, but there's also a doctor's appointment to prove we have normal life expectancies, a TON of paperwork to collect, the home visits (which means lots of cleaning and finishing the construction), the interviews by the caseworker, we have to write autobiographies, get letters of recommendation, make our profile(kind of like online-dating), and yada yada yada. It's a bit overwhelming...

This is the first piece of homework,
reading through this massive
information packet, and getting
all of our preliminary paperwork
together.

It's also a bit scary because the timeline is so unsure! We could get everything together, complete our home study, and find a match super quick...or it could take months to a year to find a match. I'm a little jealous of most people's pre-determined 9-month timelines.

But like I said...small steps!

I was wary about sharing my reasons for TpT'ing...but some of my BBBs out there convinced me to share the good news...and I really did want to thank all of you, whether you've bought something from me, or whether you've given a rating, pinned something from my blog, or even if you've just helped motivate me to keep writing this blog by commenting or reading my posts. It still amazes me how blessed we are that TpT is making something like this possible. With our salaries, it frankly wouldn't be possible otherwise. 

I'll be sure to include updates about our journey as we move along it! Thanks for reading!