Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to Myle's amazing daddy!! Michael's such an inspiration to me everyday. He loves Myles (and Me) from a heart filled with the Holy Spirit who is in love with our Heavenly Father. Thank you for being a great dad!! (and husband, and man!) And a big Happy Father's Day to big Bob and Papa Hulley who our Michael and I's wonderful father's/superheroes and are such great individuals to imitate the way they live and love!

The rest of these pictures are a representation of what we've been up to lately...warning-I'm writing this late at night and it's an attempt at not taking our position in our adoption journey too seriously! I thought we'd have great news last week-or was that two weeks ago?? can't remember-but we're still waiting on a fingerprint appointment to come in the mail before we can turn in our paperwork!


Myles taking pics at the beach with his cousins Charley and Reese-He loved it this year!

the first thing I bought for Marlee...I've wanted one of these tutu swimsuits for a little girl forever, and Michael didn't even balk at me buying it today. He knew I needed encouragement :)

Me anxiously scouring through the day's mail!

news on the paperwork chase

It's been over a week now and I need to update y'all on our paperwork "chase" as some call it! (I have a few other choice words I could call it, but I'll refrain for now:) Anyways, I have to admit that I've got some nervous energy surrounding all this adoption paperwork right now! this past week has been full of adoption talk from our sweet adoption fellowship group get together, some fellow ethiopia adopting mamas got together for coffee one night, and some more news from our agency! So I thought I would put all the facts in bullet form for easier reading:

1. Our agency has confirmed MOWA (Ethiopian govt. that processes adoptions) is only processing 5 adoption cases a day. (this is a large slow down)

2. Our agency has also decided that they would change their policy that we came in under from needing our FDL (favorable determination letter) to complete our paperwork/dossier to not needing it during our "6 month time limit". (we have 6 months to turn in all our paperwork and we have one week left and all we are waiting on is that letter) SO-we are hoping to have BIG and exciting news for y'all on monday ;) stay tuned.

3. We got our first grant money yesterday that will allow us to pay the fees needed to turn in our paperwork!!

4. I had to make some revisions on our paperwork and sweet Tammy from church helped me get that all done yesterday and make all my copies I needed!

that may make little to zero sense to you, but in a nutshell-we are getting very close to being done with all this paperwork phase and moving into the "waiting phase". Soon you can just ask me "what are you waiting on now?" and that may be a great blog heading in the future too! thanks for all of your prayers and encouragement as we press on to do God's will for our lives!