My Heart is Breaking for Angela's family

The Noonan syndrome family and the Arthrogryposis family lost an amazing person this past weekend.  Angela had her fourth child a few years ago and they thought that she had Arthrogryposis.  It turned out that she had Noonan syndrome.  So I was able to learn about Angela and her family from both groups.  Angela died unexpectedly this weekend.  My heart is breaking for her family.  She was the most amazing mother and advocate for her daughter Aubrey.  Aubrey is medically complex and Angela was a rock star in dealing with doctors and therapists and keeping all of her facebook friends updated on how things were going.  It is just such a loss to everyone.  Please keep her amazing family in your thoughts and prayers.
Angela's passing really drove home to me how fragile life is.  You never know what is going to happen.  You just have to go for it and live life to the fullest.  I am so grateful for my amazing family and friends. 

THANK YOU!

Thank you sooooo much to whoever gave us some more donations.  We are so grateful.  International adoption is expensive......very expensive, but so worth it.  People go into debt to buy cars, go on vacations, buy furniture etc. We feel that our girl is totally worth it.  But we are amazingly grateful for the help we have received.  Our girl was aging out of her orphanage.  She didn't have time to wait while we saved more up to adopt her.  So we saved, had garage sales, and took out a loan.  It is all worth it!

That Was A Wild Ride

Well, we have had about 20 people visit our blog today.
 That is pretty normal for us.  However, last week after the article on yahoo shine came out about us, it spiked to over 4000 hits on the blog.  It was great having the article raise awareness about foster care and international adoption.  But I made the rookie mistake of reading the comments section....big mistake.  While most comments were very nice and positive, there were some down right creepy ones.  It really is sad what some people believe about foster care and international adoption.  One comment said that we were being paid 10,000 per month by the government to care for our children......anyone who does foster care knows that is soooo not true.  We actually don't have any foster kiddos any more now that Angie is ours.  So no money is coming in from anywhere.  Not to mention that where we live foster parents are given between 14-23$ per day for most kiddos.  So in other words you could work about 2 or 3 hours at a minimum wage job and make more then foster parents are given for a 24 hour day. So I don't think anyone is doing this for the money.  It was weird having strangers make comments about our family, but at least people were talking about adoption and fostering so that is the important thing!  We were grateful for the opportunity to talk about these topics!

On the international adoption front.....all our paper work is out of our hands now.  So now is just the waiting game.  it is really had to guess how long it will all take.  We are so hoping that everything goes quickly and we get back to our girl as fast as possible!

Thank You So Much

We are so grateful to you all for helping us meet our matching grant!  Fundraising is hard.  Having people donate money to our adoption journey is humbling. This whole journey has really pushed us out of our comfort zone......and it is a good thing.  We get a lot of questions about how much adoption costs.......and yes it costs a lot!  Our adoption is costing us about 28,000.  Yes, that is a ton of money, but we figure that people spend that much on a car.  We think  that our girl is worth more then a car. :-)  People have asked us where does the money go: well some goes to the local agency that did our home study, some goes to the placing agency in the USA, some goes to the country where are girl is currently living, some goes to pay the translator that stays with us during our two trips, some goes to the driver that takes us to and from the orphanage while we are there, some goes to pay for the visa for our daughter, some goes to the medical appointment for her before she can leave her country, some goes to our governments immigration department, and quite a bit goes to travel costs ie:flights, hotel and food while we are in country-twice.  So yes, adoption is expensive...but so worth it! We are so grateful for all of the donations we have received.  We can accept donations to our FSP account on the right of this page until we finish our second trip to pick her up. We have sent in our I 800 to immigration.  This was the next step in the process.  We have a few papers that we need to get notarized and appostilled this week and sent to Eastern Europe.  Then we wait and wait and wait for stuff to happen over there.  Eventually, we will get a court date and then once that is completed we will be invited to go pick up our girl.  It is a very long process....usually about 5-6 months between trips.  We can't wait to get her home!

Now on the home front

We are so amazingly happy to announce the adoption of our daughter Angelita Jane Mayr!  (formerly known as Baby A ;-)  It is so exciting to know that she is ours forever!  We had a wonderful day in court on Oct 9th.  All the kids sat in the jury box in court.  The judge had them all raise their right hands and swear to tell the truth. Paul and I just tried to not cry our eyes out.  It was an amazing day. She has been with us since March of 2012 but now it is forever! 

Woot Woot We have a matching grant!!

I'm so excited to announce that we have a $200 matching grant!!!!!  So,the way this works......for every dollar we raise....they will match a dollar up to 200$....... So we will get $400 !  That will cover 3 days of our hotel in Eastern Europe on our pick up trip!!!!!   We are so grateful! ( thanks to my amazing family!)
We have the donation button on the right of this blog, or checks can be sent to Reeces Rainbow for the Mayr family fsp.
I'll leave you with a picture of our sweet girl when she was 6 1/2
               
Thank you, thank you thank you!!!!

One More Picture

This was the last day of visits....she really started to love having her picture taken......she would ask us to take her picture in all different locations :-)

Woo Hoo I got the ok to post pictures...