Our family spent almost 6 months in Shanghai, China, in 2007-2008. The kids and I had the opportunity to volunteer at a residential center for children with disabilities. We quickly learned to look past the disability and at the heart of the child. Each one had our “favorites”; the ones we would seek out to love on and the ones that sought our attention when we arrived. It was an all-week event to plan for what “new” activity we would do with the children. We all left a huge part of our hearts back at the Center. At the same time, we saw what institutionalized life was like.And these were the “lucky” ones, the ones with parents and enough daily food.
All of that to give a bit of the background of our family, and the seeds that were planted in our not too distant past. Now we are all doing whatever we can do to make this adoption happen.Like I previously said, the anticipated costs went from under 10k to over 30k. In light of this, we have already sold some furniture, our hot tub, and hopefully by Tuesday, our boat. We have a car wash and bake sale planned this weekend. Our kids are going through all their toys and games, cleaning and packaging in preparation to selling them at a garage sale next month. In fact, people from our church are partnering with us to make a huge garage sale to benefit our adoption. We hope to have an adoption awareness dinner in October at our church, possibly with a raffle. Some local businesses in Hamilton agreed to donate a percentage of our profits to our adoption on special days. We also are talking about some other ways to have fundraising for the adoption with a family who has adopted two girls from Guatemala and who understand first-hand what it feels like to look at the looming bills that regularly come due. In fact, if it wasn’t for Marcia spear-heading the fundraising projects, most would still be in the planning stage! She has been a huge blessing!
