Travel Dates!

The day we have prayed for for a year now has finally come! 

We have travel dates!

We will meet our daughter for the first time on December 15th. This will be a day visiting the orphanage where she has lived all her life, meeting all the wonderful people there who saved our baby girl's life, and getting to know our precious girl.

On December 16th our Giving and Receiving Ceremony is scheduled. This is when Rori will officially become a Ford forever!

Another prayer was answered all in HIS perfect timing as well…We have prayed that we might be able to bring Rori HOME for Christmas, and we will be doing just that! Our process is being expedited while in Vietnam because the embassy will be closed for renovations from December 23rd-30th! All parties involved have agreed to push us through BEFORE this happens which means we will leave Vietnam on the 23rd and arrive HOME CHRISTMAS EVE!

What an awesome God we serve!

Thank you for all your prayers and support during this process. Please cover our family in prayer while we travel, and most importantly PLEASE lift up sweet Rori. We have waited for this day for a long time but she does not know us, and she will not understand. Please pray she will feel our love and know she is safe and home in our arms. This trip will be hard. Rori will be leaving the only home and family she has ever known. Pray for her little heart to be comforted in this time. She will no doubt be grieving hard during this transition. Please, please keep her in your prayers.

A day of incredible provision. ONLY GOD.

When we started out on this journey to adopt our daughter the cost was a bit daunting. We are a lower income family and $30,000 is quite a lot of money for us. However we knew our daughter was waiting and we knew our God was bigger than that number. God is not checking your bank account when he calls you to do something. He knows YOUR limitations. He has no limitations.

Today I have some truly incredible news. (For me its incredible and I'm awestruck by His provision and power, however I imagine my Heavenly Father is shaking His head a bit at my happy tears and saying "I told you so.") We stepped out in faith, believing that we would try our hardest to find a way and He would provide in our time of need.

We are FULLY FUNDED!

Yesterday our Pastor presented us with a check for $3500 that our church family gave to bring our baby home. I am in awe of the love they have shown for our sweet girl.

Our auction wrapped up last night and once everything is paid for will have raised just over $500!

Last week we were just over $5,700 away from having the funds we need to travel to Vietnam and adopt our daughter.

after this weekend we were just over $1700 short of our funds needed by December!

I was contacted by a wonderful family that has been an enormous blessing to us in this journey and they have donated the remaining funds for us to travel!

There is now no obstacle standing between us and our precious little one! As soon as we get the call we can buy plane tickets! We are READY TO GO!

PRAISE GOD! HE is ABLE to do ALL things! Stay tuned for travel dates! I cannot wait to hold my little girl and show her how much she is loved by her Heavenly Father and by so many who have helped so much to bring her home!

A whole different kind of Christmas shopping for us this year!

That "Its about to get real." feeling is starting to hit me, the same way it did in the last month or so before I met my first two children. That "nesting" feeling is definitely present and the current state of unfinished projects in the house, pending fundraisers, pending expenses, my daughter's unfinished room, and the holidays is honestly giving me a bit of a sense of being overwhelmed.

But despite that whirlwind feeling, I welcome what will surely be the most beautiful and chaotic Christmas celebration of our lives! Yesterday we received news that our Article 5 letter had been issued and we were given the green light to apply for our travel visas! It looks like early/mid December travel! 

Ford family of FIVE for Christmas!

So now I get to add a host of "To Do" items to my holiday prep list! Items like, packing suitcases, booking plane tickets, arranging everything for our absence, scheduling doctors appointments for after we get home, doing my best to have EVERYTHING in order at home so we can focus on bonding as a family when we get home, maybe even get a couple dozen freezer meals stocked up for after we get home, and shopping for gifts!

Yes shopping for gifts, but not for family or friends. This year we have put a major budget on Christmas shopping and I managed to get all three of the kids gifts second hand and very inexpensive! This year we will be gift shopping for our trip to Vietnam! It is considered customary  to bring a small gift to official meetings and ceremonies such as our Giving and Receiving Ceremony where we will officially become Rori's family forever.  We have been given a list of officials that will be present at our ceremonies and meetings and a list of the number of children and nannies at Rori's orphanage. So I will be busy finding gifts to take with us! I love shopping for gifts so I am excited to have a good excuse! (These don't need to be extravagant, just small gifts. They won't even be opened until after we leave, this is an observance of the customs of our daughters country.) I am most excited to look for gifts for the children and caretakers at Rori's orphanage! 

My excitement simply cannot be contained! I can't wait to hold my baby girl! Please continue to pray for our family and especially for our daughter. This day is one we have prayed for, for a year now, but she has little understanding of what is happening. Please pray for her little heart to be protected and that she will know she is safe and loved.

Adoption Fundraising Update.

So I think I finally have an accurate update on our funding!

At the start of September we needed to pay our $6,360.00 in agency fees to our agency. We had $3500 in our adopt together fund and we finished up our shoe drive. Both of these organizations pay our agency directly…

So I requested a grant from Adopttogether and yesterday they sent $3,400 to our agency. So that took our fees down to $2,940.00! Yay! 

Next I called the shoe drive company and got an update that they sent a total of  $1,029.00.

So our agency fees now sit at $1,911.00 and our travel cost are approximately $10,000. (Yes plane tickets and hotels for a 2-4 week trip to Vietnam are every bit this expensive or more.)

Right now our adoption fund account reads $4,100.47, and our Reece Rainbow account has $617.82

So we are $7,192.71 away from having all the funds we ned to go to Vietnam and bring our baby girl home!

$7,192.71 TO GO BEFORE DECEMBER!

On the home front, we are slowly piecing our house back together. We got all the mold out and are now working on replacing the floor downstairs and rebuilding the currently gutted bathroom, and we are looking into financing to replace the central AC unit so that we will have central heat before the weather gets cold. Ideally we want to get this all done before we travel. It will be quite enough coming half way around the world to live in a different climate with a new family she has never met. We do not want to also have construction projects going on while Rori is trying to acclimate to a new home.

Thank you to everyone that has helped so far! We are working on a few more fundraisers for October and at least one for November. Please keeps us in your prayers! God's got this!

Updates of the very best kind!

Monday was a day filled with happy news!

We received an update on our baby girl! These updates come every 4 months. Our last update honestly made my mommy heart worry and hurt. Our little one did not look healthy. I was concerned. This time she is glowing in her photo and she has gained a pound and grown by inches! 

Not only has she grown physically but she has leapt ahead in development! She is now SPEAKING in short, clear sentences. She recognizes people by their voices, and she is letting her nannies know when she needs to use the bathroom! She has also begun walking on her own, though they said she is fearful of this, and is eating some solid foods!

Also they noted that she has an amazing memory and can sing and memorize a song after just hearing it a few times! They are taking extra care to familiarize her with our voices on the audio books and toys we sent, and doing their best to prepare her to go home with her family!

I cried so much over this news. It makes me so happy to know she is growing and getting stronger, and at the same time it hurts so much not to be there to see her hit these milestones myself. I can't tell you how much harder this waiting gets every day.

We are waiting for our I800 approval. Praying it won't take more than two weeks. We still plan to be traveling in December and holding our little miracle on Christmas Day. Please keep us in your prayers as we need there to be absolutely no paperwork stalls in order for this to happen!

MATCH LETTER!

I have been waiting to type these words for what feels like an ETERNITY.

WE GOT OUR MATCH LETTER!

Today I received the best phone call ever! Vietnam has OFFICIALLY approved us to be Rori's parents! 

What does this mean?

It means in 3-4 months we will be on a plane to Vietnam to bring our baby girl home FOREVER!

We have prayed for this letter, our family has prayed for this letter, and all of our friends have prayed for this letter! I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF PRAYER! I believe you should pray specifically. God knows your needs but that doesn't mean He doesn't want to hear you voice them in His presence. 

Thank you all so much for taking our family to the Lord in your prayers! Can I ask you to once again storm the gates on our behalf? It has been my wish and fervent prayer that our little girl would not have to spend even one more Christmas or birthday apart from her family. Would you pray for us specifically, that everything would move along in such a way that we would be with our sweet Rori before Christmas? Its absolutely possible, but will require us to move quickly through the last few paperwork steps and find a way to quickly pull together the funding we still need. PLEASE PRAY!

Everyday Miracles...

Yesterday marked 11 weeks that we have been waiting for our match letter from Vietnam. I must confess I have not done a good job of waiting this time. Adoption involves so many steps and in between each step is a period of waiting. Waiting is not easy, especially when you are waiting to for a piece of paper to tell you that you can come and get your baby. Our match letter could come any day that our agencies offices are open. So every week day we wait for a phone call, and every day that 7:00 pm rolls around (the end of the business day for our agencies office) my heart breaks a little more. I know there are other families that have waited longer and some shorter, and each adoption is different. But even though I know that everything will happen in the Lord's timing, I can't help hoping and praying for it to happen now. Right now, ten minutes ago, I want to be on a plane today. So this period of waiting has been the hardest. But even when things seem more than you can bear, God is there to lift the weight. Yesterday He showed me that He is in control of EVERYTHING. And He is working miracles even in seemingly everyday routine.

Yesterday my sister in law and I had a rare treat. We got to leave the kids with our husbands and enjoy an afternoon out with just the two of us. Girl time. It was the first time I think I have been out for just me time in about 4 years…basically since I got pregnant with our first child. We decided to get our nails done and go thrift store shopping. (I know, we get crazy when we are kid free.) So we set out to the nail salon, only to find that they are closed for a long holiday weekend. We remember another salon we had seen and head there. They are closed as well. (Beginning to think that getting our nails done is not going to be part of our day out.) We try one more salon, and they are OPEN. So we are sitting in the salon, talking with this really sweet man that is doing both our nails, and he happens to mention that his family is returning to Vietnam on vaction in a couple weeks. This brings up the fact that we are adopting our daughter from Vietnam. We get talking about our little girl and his wife is there as well, we get to show them pictures of Rori and they tell us that we have to bring her in to hang out with them and their children when she comes home so they can help teach her Vietnamese! I could have CRIED right there! God knows exactly what he is doing. He made sure we went out for our girls day on THAT day. He knew those shops would be closed. He knew we would go to this salon. He knew we would get to meet this amazing family, right here in our town, who would want to be a part of our little girls life and could help her connect to her birth and her culture in a way we cannot. And He knew in this hard time of waiting that I needed just that kind of miracle, to see so clearly His hand and His will in my life. He showed me how much He loves our little girl and how He is in control with this seemingly ordinary, everyday miracle.

All in His timing. 

Eight Weeks of Waiting… 

Today is officially eight weeks waiting on our match letter. We have so much going on I don't know how I'm finding time to be impatient…

• Bathroom has been demolished, mold removed and will need to be put back together as the budget permits (hopefully before we travel to Vietnam)
• Both vehicles are mechanically acting up (literally running on prayers)
• We are in the home stretch of our shoe drive, and are still almost 3,000 shoes from our minimum!
• We relaunched our t-shirt fundraiser, now we have another color/font option more for the guys!
• We just attended a music festival our family put on for our adoption, and we will be going to a bluegrass benefit they are hosting in a few weeks!
• We are trying to find time to pull together another yard sale in September.
• We are planning a Fall Festival Fundraiser for October!

We are getting down to the wire! Another family adopting from Vietnam just got their match letter last week after waiting just SEVEN WEEKS! They had their Dossier logged in just one day before ours! This means we could literally get our match letter any day…or we could wait months. Please pray with us that we will get our letter before the end of August! If we do than we can still expect to travel before Christmas!

I can't put in to words how hard it is to wait and how it seems to get harder every day. When I'm holding one of my babies or playing with them on the floor in their room, I can't get away from the fact that someone is missing. I am loving this season in my little one's lives, but I'm always hurting inside for my baby girl that is not home yet. I can't wait to hold her in my arms, rock her to sleep, kiss boo-boo's, read her bedtime stories, find out what foods she likes and dislikes, what makes her laugh, comfort her when she cries. All these things I took for granted before that I have not been able to do for her these first three plus years of her life. With each day we get closer to Rori. We knew this process would include a lot of waiting, but you really cannot prepare for just how hard that waiting is.

Even though 3-4 months feels like an eternity when your waiting to go get your child, its not much time if you consider all that has to done both in travel preparation and fundraising. We are getting so close to our goal, we started out this process needing $30,000.00! We now are just $10,224.00 from being fully funded to bring Rori home!

This is the home stretch for our fundraising efforts! Raising over $10,000 in 3 months sounds a little crazy, but God's got this. He has provided in one way or another throughout this entire process, and I know He will get us there in the end. Would you please pray with us?

If you are willing and able to help here are some ways we need your help:

• We have a t-shirt fundraiser going now, through the end of August. Email alysenford@gmail.com if you would like to order shirts to help bring Rori home! 

• We are collecting shoes for our shoe drive till September 28th! (Extended our deadline) We still need to collect almost 3,000 pair!
  
• We are planning another Yard Sale fundraiser for the end of September, if you need to de clutter just let me know, I will take it all away!
  
• We are planning a Fall Festival Fundraiser for October 22nd. I'm so excited about this, its going to be so much fun! We will need lots of volunteers for this event to help man all the game booths!

• Also if you feel led to give, we have two ways you can donate to our adoption (both allow you to make a tax deductible donation) Our Adopt Together funding page: https://www.adopttogether.org/our-adoption-puzzle  and our Reece Rainbow account: http://reecesrainbow.org/105770/sponsorford

We are so grateful and humbled by everyone that has come alongside us on this journey so far. You all are part of Rori's story and are showing her the love of a family by helping to bring her home. Thank you!

32 days waiting.

32 days down… ??? days left to go.

Yesterday was the one month mark. We have been officially waiting for our match letter for 32 days. I'm not very good at the waiting. I will not pray for patience, I remember someone telling me once that patience is a dangerous thing to pray for. In order to teach patience, we have to made to wait.

Instead I am praying for guidance and strength. We may not be able to do anything to hurry our paperwork along at this point, but we do still have a significant amount of funds to raise. We have been so blessed in our fundraising efforts! This past month we hit some big finical roadblocks, but God has shown himself so faithful in our friends and family and even total strangers!

A month ago we still needed to raise $16,360. And we got hit with nearly $40,000 in home and vehicle repairs, and medical bills that should have been covered by our insurance. Today I am so in awe of His provision! We were so blessed by friends and strangers! Even though we continue to be pummeled with expenses we had not counted on, we have been so blessed with support and encouragement that I can do nothing but praise Him! 

A family donated $3,400 toward our adoption agency fees! $16,360 became $12,960.

A local family that owns an HVAC company donated an AC unit they had taken out of another home and installed it for free! $6,000 in unexpected home repairs gone!

We were put in touch with someone that can help us appeal our insurance decision not to pay for Bash's Life Flight, almost $32,000! Praying that we are able to settle this matter and that the insurance will cover this expense.

We have still not been able to fix our air conditioning in our van, and we have not had any good news about our other vehicle. So that will be something we have to address very soon. 

We also have discovered two water leaks, one in each bathroom upstairs. One of these leaks will require the bathroom be completely demolished. That will need to be done next weekend. Please pray with us that we are able to do this work ourselves. There is no way we can afford to have it done for us.

Just after finding out about our water leaks, we received another amazing blessing! A precious family at our church did a fundraiser for us. They made amazing pallet projects and sold them to raise funds for our adoption! They handed us $930.00 last sunday, along with a beautiful sign to hang in our home!

Adoption expense went from $12,960 to $12,030!

Our T-shirt fundraiser was more successful than I could have imagined! We sold over 100 shirts! We are going to be relaunching it this week! I have not yet shipped the shirts we just got in, but if I have done math correctly after shipping cost we should have raised almost $1000! 

If our T-shirt fundraiser total is accurate, we are $11,030.00 from being fully funded for our adoption! Even with all the financial hurdles we are facing at home, this is HUGE! Jeremiah is working every extra job he can to try and keep up with the home repairs and bills. It has not been easy, and I have been trying to get creative with ways to help us get back on our feet. But even in the middle of so much chaos at home, God has still shown himself faithful in providing for our little girl! I have been so preoccupied with the house and cars falling apart, that I have felt completely inadequate in everything, and yet that is when God has shown up for us! I continue to be humbled by the generosity of our friends and family! 

I attended a LuLaRoe fundraiser last night that a friend hosted for our adoption! We received 137 pairs of shoes yesterday for our shoe drive! We have a music festival being hosted by a family member for our adoption on August 6th! And we are working on planning a 5k run for October that we are hoping we can make an annual event to raise awareness for visual impairment and special needs adoption for years to come!

Our plate is full for sure! So yes, we are in the middle of the longest wait we have so far, but we are also more busy than we have been so far. In a way I think this is His way of getting me through the waiting, by giving more than I can handle without His help. And thats as it should be, I never want to be at a point in my life again were I do not feel I need to rely FULLY on God. If this last month has taught me nothing else it has taught me to always lean on Him!

Please continue to pray for us as we wait on our match letter, and work on our fundraising and our house! We appreciate all the support more than we can say! 

LID!

I have not posted an in depth update on where we are in our process to bring Rori home in quite a while. (never on our blog actually) So here it is! We are LID!

This stands for Logged In Dossier. At this point our Dossier has been translated to Vietnamese and has reached the Vietnam Department of Adoptions. It was officially logged in on June 21st. 

Now we enter possibly the longest period of waiting we have experienced so far. The next step is for the Vietnam Department of adoptions to review our Dossier and officially approve our match. This can take anywhere from 3-12 months. This is where we need all our prayer warriors to jump on board! We are still praying hard that we will travel to bring Rori home before Christmas! That is just 6 months from our LID date! In order for this to happen we need to get our official match letter in just 2-3 months from our LID date!

Here is a breakdown of our next steps:

Official Match Letter 3-12 months

I-800 (Visa application for Rori) 2-3 weeks

Article 5 2-4 weeks

Travel Approval 2-4 weeks

Travel approval to travel 2-3 weeks

As you can see, each of the steps following our match letter can take nearly a month to complete! With only 6 months from our LID date till Christmas we will need to receive our match letter in just 2-3 months so that there will be enough time for all our other steps to be completed!

Please pray friends! We want so badly to hold our little girl and don't want her to spend another Christmas alone!

My shortcomings and His faithfulness.

I must embrace the fact that I am inadequate before I can ever hope to be the wife my husband can depend on or the mom my children need me to be. I know I have said so many times that I am leaning on my Heavenly Father in this process. I have said it again and again, "We could not do this without God." I have said it, but I have not always lived it. In fact I most often find myself despairing and feeling overwhelmed to the point of panic before I hit my knees and remember that He is God.

Pride cometh before a fall. 

About a month ago we sent off our Dossier to be submitted to Vietnam's Department of Adoptions. We had just wrapped up an online auction to raise the rest of the  $3,500 US processing fee that we needed to pay to send our Dossier. At that point it meant we were $16,360.00 from being FULLY FUNDED to bring our daughter home! We were (and still are) praying hard that we will be able to travel to bring Rori home before Christmas of this year. And we had a handful of fundraisers being planned for the next six months that I felt pretty darn confident would be able to get us to our goal and have us fully funded by December! 

Basically, I had come to a point that I was feeling less stressed about raising an enormous amount of money in a short time, and I dare say I had begun to feel a bit CONFIDENT in MY ability to advocate for our daughter and our family in the fundraising department, rather than in my own heart really acknowledging that this was all God!

John 15:5 "….apart from me you can do nothing."

A few weeks ago I was reminded that I am small, and despite my greatest efforts I cannot do this in my own strength.

Back in January I had a fall while holding our 6 month old son and he had to be Life Flighted to a children's hospital. A few weeks ago we received notice that over $31,000 was not going to be covered by our insurance and we had to start paying on it right away. Also a dozen smaller bills from the same incident for hospital services.

At the same time our refrigerator, home air conditioning unit, and van air conditioner all went out. Total cost of about $8,000.00.

To recap….A month ago I was feeling CONFIDENT. We had about 6 months to raise $16,360.00. (A huge amount but it was about half what we started out needing in January so I could see it happening.)

Fast forward to today, we are about $40,000.00 deeper in debt than we were a month ago, and need to come up with lots of cash fast to fix our air conditioning situation, we had just about tapped out our credit already with unexpected home renovations from the previous year, and we still need to raise our remaining adoption expenses.

I'm not gonna lie. I panicked. At first when our air first went out, I though…"This is gonna be ok, we will get through this." Then everything else snowballed and I fell apart. I forgot who I lean on for a moment. I forgot the King of kings is my Father. 

And then God. 

I have never in my life experienced God showing up in my life like He has throughout this process. It just shows me how much He loves His children, and especially how much He loves our little girl. 

Our friends and family showed up, complete strangers showed up, God showed up.

Two families stepped in and loaned us window units so our babies would not have to suffer in our almost 90 degree house.

Our church family started launching fundraisers for us to help us come up with money for our Air conditioning. 

A coworker of Jeremiah's GAVE us an AC unit so that we will only have to pay for the labor! We have not had a new quote yet, but I imagine this will knock off as much as half the cost! (we will still need lots of duct work and electrical done, as our old unit was OLD and the new units need completely different setups.)

Another coworker has offered to look at our van and try to fix it for us!

And a family we do not know stepped forward and donated HALF our remaining $6,360.00 in agency fees! They donated $3,400.00!

A local shop donated Scones that were sold for our family at church sunday.

Another family is making handmade items and selling them to help us.

Our T-shirt fundraiser has sold over 100 shirts! we will make about $1000.00 if I have added everything up correctly!

We have a meeting tomorrow to discuss appeals for our medical bills, praying that we can get some relief on this front.

I don't believe God gives you only as much as you can handle. I don't believe that I am capable of being the person I need to be without leaning fully on my heavenly Father. A few weeks ago I felt as though a jet plane had crashed into our life. I was despairing, I was falling apart. 

I can breath now. We still have so far to go, but I can breath now because I am not relying on my strength. 

I can breath now, but I had nothing to do with it. I did not find some awesome solution to our money crisis. I COULDN'T DO IT. GOD DID. He has been so faithful, and I know he will continue to be. All I need to do is remember that this is not my doing. 

I read something anther adoptive mama said a while back. "Work like its all up to you, but pray like its all up to Him." Because in the end it is. I can drive myself into the ground and exhaust every option I have, but no matter how hard I try the unexpected can happen, and if I am not leaning ONLY on Him I am going to fall.

Please keep us in your prayers as we pick up and push forward! I will post separately to update everyone on our adoption process. Thank you for your prayers and support!

#BringinghomeRori #loveblind  

We have a daughter!!!

The Ford family is expecting another child! My husband and I are adopting a precious little girl from Vietnam! Rori will be our third child, she is a part of the special needs adoption program, our sweet little girl is blind (among other complex medical needs) I cannot begin to tell you how incredibly blessed we are to have been chosen to be the parents of this precious little girl! She is the sweetest little three year old, with a smile that will MELT you! We cannot wait to bring our baby home! 

My husband is a police officer and I am a stay at home mom. We have been working as hard as we can to raise the funds needed to bring Rori home. Whether through fundraising or by taking extra work wherever we can find it. But we are still just over $16,000 from being fully funded. If you feel led to give to help us bring our daughter home it would mean the world to us! We know the Lord will make a way. He has been so faithful, and I know he will continue to be!