christmas surprise

we spent christmas with jamie's family in ohio. on christmas morning, after all the presents had been opened, our brother-in-law, steve, informed us that there was one last present for us to open. here's what is was:

the popcorn tin was full of rolls of quarters. 54 rolls to be exact. worth $10 each. i doubt i need to say that's $540 to our adoption account. my sister-in-law, janelle is a singer. she did a bunch of performances over the holidays at churches and other various places and gave us the money she made. she did all that without ever mentioning that she was performing, which is a huge feat because janelle and jamie talk on the phone at least every other day. plus, our nephews (ages 3 and 5) knew about the surprise and also managed to keep it a secret. and yes, tears were shed.

both of our families blessed us tremendously this christmas with money for our adoption. my parents wrote a sweet card to their grandsons with money, and my little sister and her boyfriend gave us a check. we are beyond grateful. and all of this happened after we received a few unexpected medical bills, 2 related to our adoption and one related to some stomach problems jamie has been having (according to all the tests, he's OK). it's funny -- i have complained a lot since we started the adoption process that we haven't had one of those amazing stories happen to us. you know, the ones where people say they needed a certain amount of money and they had faith and then they opened their mailbox and found a random check for the exact amount of money they needed. but i've realized that has happened to us, perhaps not in the form of a $10,000 donation, but in smaller increments.

friends, family, and strangers have given us money, bought our coffee, donated to our yard sale, came to our chick-fil-a night, and prayed for us. we even got a random check from social security that we thought we'd have to give back, but when jamie called to inquire about it, they told him the money was ours to keep. when we get our check from the IRS, guess how much more money we'll need to send our dossier?

$0.

yep, i think we've finally made it to $15,500. so this week i'm going to get the rest of our papers together for our dossier, send them to our case manager to check, and then we'll send them to raleigh and then DC for authentication. our prayer is that by the time they make it back to CWA, we'll have our check from the IRS so that the only step left is to send the rest of our money to CWA. then they'll send our completed dossier to ethiopia, and we'll officially be on the waitlist. from all of this, i have truly been convinced that, in his grace, God provides, though not in the ways we expect or think we need.

so here are possibly the last christmas pictures we'll take without our 2 sweet babies.