Lots of stuff going on!

As time has gone on since we announced to family and friends that we were adopting again, we have received the gammet of reactions, comments, suggestions, opinions, etc. This is all of what we expected, but who they came from was the match we didn't expect. So, how do we deal with this? Well, everyone has their personal opinion which is fine and I have no problem with that because I know that we are following what we have been asked to do. God stirred both Ethel and I in our spirits that this was His doing. He will be the one who provides financially, emotionally, spritually, physically, and we fully expect Him to have his hand in every aspect of us bringing home these kids from Ghana. No human can tell us what Ethel and I both felt stirring in us that we knew was the voice of God. It's hard to understand sometimes what His voice sounds like, but in the past 6 months, we have been through some amazing things where we have seen and heard that soft voice stirring within. When we heard that voice again and both agreed that this was another step of faith we were about to take, we filled out the paperwork for Ethiopia. Events churned and as we were getting ready to send in that initial application we discovered the possibility of Ghana. Interesting as it was, it didn't really click. Then, we prayed about it, but it didn't go away. Soon, it became all we could think about. Again, the stirring voice within. A few days after we sent in our application for Ghana, we discovered some startling rule changes to Ethiopia and that confirmed with us that again God knew best and brought Ghana to our hearts and minds. It's amazing how He works. Stay tuned as we move forward with our process as we believe it's going to start moving faster now. Our home study is in process and will be completed in the next two weeks. Most of the paperwork for our dossier is in order besides some odds and ends. Since we've been through this before, we have a lot of extra copies of certain documents which is helpful. For those of you adopting, please make sure you keep those cancelled checks and receipts for anything adoption related. It will make it much easier to obtain that adoption credit from the IRS later. Being the nerd that I am, I kept a spreadsheet for each expense with a total at the end.