We have BIG news!
Many of you followed our story of hosting this summer and from that amazing experience, we have decided to pursue the adoption of a teenager from Colombia. We are not allowed to go into further detail other than using this space to let our friends and family know about the process.
The adoption process can be quite costly but we are confident God will provide. We are going to use this website to keep everyone updated and let you know about the FUNdraising opportunities we are working with.
We hope that by inviting you into this process, you will see yourself as part of the community we hope to build around our new family member. We are hoping to travel this summer so we have time before school starts to get acclimated as a family of four.
Thank you for being part of our journey and be sure to follow our adventure.
Please continue to pray for this as there are a lot of moving factors with the state of the world.
God Bless!
What an adventure in Colombia. We are so grateful to everyone for your love and support.
Our daughter Yaritza, is adjusting to her new home and learning English. She started the 10th grade and is working so hard. We are very proud of her.
Madi is doing a great job with learning Spanish but also helping her new sister l earn a new language. She has been so sweet.
Brandon and I are learning and adjusting to having two teenagers in the house. We are doing our best to go with the flow and be patient as we navigate these new waters.
We will keep posting updates but wanted to reach out again and thank everyone for their love and support.
God Bless,
Jenn, Brandon, Madi and Yaritza
Hello!
We were informed that we have travel dates!
January 15th, we will leave for Colombia to be re-united with our daughter. Our official "Encuentro" (meeting day) is January 17th. We get to surprise her on a call just before that to let her know we are on the way! I can't wait!!
We couldn't have gotten this far without all of you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts! We will post more updates as the time gets closer.
Also, we have the t-shirts and hats to hand out to everyone from our initial fundraiser! We will get those to you ASAP.
We are so excited. The last major hurdle has been achieved. Today we received approval from the Dept. of Homeland Security that we can officially bring our daughter home. There are a few more steps before travel but this is such good news. We were told that we could be traveling the week of January 15th.
We have some other fun news. We were able to talk to her twice last month. She is doing so well and looking forward to starting her new life. She wrote the sweetest letters to all of us.
She is going to be attending a Christmas camp with the older kids that are in the orphanage waiting for their families. They know this is a hard season knowing that they have a family but they are not united yet. We can't wait to hear about everything they did. The staff loves the kids so much so we know she is in good hands.
She is also taking some English classes and is working hard. She ended her school year with high marks in all her classes. She promised to work hard in her classes.
More to come but wanted to keep you updated!
We got word that our Dossier has been approved. This is the giant mound of paperwork, medical exams, applications, etc. that we had to fill out to be approved to adopt. We know that God was in the works as it only took three weeks for translation and approval while other families have been waiting months. He is so good.
We now have to wait for our new family member to be transferred to Imagina where they prepare the kids for adoption. The kids do not know who is adopting them at this point as that will come when we send the care package to them after we accept the official referral. We are hopefully less a month away from that point but we don't know.
We are told that once we receive the referral, we are about 2-3 months out from travel depending on how quickly the next steps are processed.
Prayers for everything to move quickly and there are no more roadblocks along the way. Looking forward to the next update for you!
Thank you to all who have donated. It means the world to us to help complete our little family. We are now able to order the t-shirts and hats as our way to say thank you. If you haven't already, please let me know if you would like a hat or a T-shirt, and if so, what size.
We finally received approval on one of our immigration documents. We will be able to submit our Dossier to Colombia in 7-10 days as soon as the apostille (notary of the notary) comes in. We are still about a month out from our Dossier being reviewed but it is one step closer.
Our prayer request is for the paperwork to be processed and approved in record time. We are asking God for a miracle that we can still travel in the summer. We have seen Him do bigger miracles than getting paperwork processed so we are counting on seeing Him move mountains.
Thank you for taking this journey with us.
