Chocolate chip cookies, Mmmmm

Tonight I had on my agenda to make cookies for our camping trip (we are leaving tomorrow). I told the kids that they could help and they were SOOO excited. I made 2 batches so there was plenty for them to do. Alana and Kai helped pour in all the ingredients and then helped me hold the mixer as we "blended". Sarah helped put the dough on the cookie sheets and then she put them into the oven (she was at a friends during the measuring/mixing part). And here is my favorite part... they all sat on the kitchen floor and watched the cookies bake for the whole 10 minutes. It is a facsinating thing you know :) It was a very cute picture ( one I didn't get) of all 3 of them sitting there watching the oven. Oh how I wish I can make time stand still some days. They grow up too fast!

Moving forward, finally!!

After much confusion and time waiting to get a homestudy appointment scheduled we finally have 2! Our social worker called yesterday (after pestering his boss) and we were able to set up an appointment for Sept. 8 & 15. He has none of our paperwork and so we need to pray that he will get what he needs before the 8th so he can write the homestudy as we meet and that it will be done soon after our last appointment. So our deadline of Sept. 1 is not going to happen but maybe we will only be a month behind? I pray that it is so!
We could also use some prayer for an unspoken request about this adoption. We are praying about something right now and waiting for God to lead us to an answer. We need to have a clear direction by the time the social worker comes for his interview so we are a bit on a timeline.
Also, another update. We have decided not to pursue foster care at this time. It seems clear to us that God closed the door for now after finding out that we would have to supervise visits between the foster children and their birthparents. We are not comfortable putting our children in that situation because of their past with foster care. They would have to come with me and sit in on visits as well. Just not a good situation for young children, or me either! So we are putting off foster care to the future when our children are older but are still possibly doing fost/adopt for our next child/ren once we bring home our boy from Liberia.

Waiting and more waiting

But it is worth it in the end, right? Things seem to be going REALLY slowly. We are still waiting for the agency to get their act together to come interview us and then write our homestudy. Once that is done we should be on our way, at least turn in our paperwork to Acres of Hope and start waiting, again, for a referral. There are many new positive changes happening in Liberia right now and it looks like they are headed for a promising future if things continue down the road they are headed. There is electricity running in the city for the first time in something like 20 years. Even though it is only to select government buildings they are planning on connecting it all around within a short time. It is great to see the Lord work in such a devistated country. It only took the new president 7 months to have the power on, I wonder what she will be able to do in the next 7 months... They are also making a stricter policy for adopting parents that will be good for the children. The biggest one is that they are only allowing adoptions from professsed Christian families.

We kind of sort of started Sarah in school this week. Just some slow-basic-getting-back-into-it-kinda-thing. She learned about Helen Keller last week and now wants to learn sign language so I am trying to find a good kids video that she can learn from and then we can practice together. It will be fun for Alana and Kai too! We sat down last week and discussed what she wanted to learn about this year and she wants to learn ALOT! She wants to learn about: China, Liberia, the USA, space, geology, her body, and a different man or woman a week that did something in history. This week she chose Ponce de Leon. We also started the "Little House in the Big Woods" and are doing vocabulary and Christian principles skills from it. I just love those books, they are fun to read and you learn so much about that time period too.

I'm tired, time for bed.

I am now the Mother of a 14 year old Liberian boy!

I just got an e-mail that has matched me with a 14 year-old boy named Randall as his Mother of Love. It is a program from a Liberian orphanage that matches Christian mother's with boys who are either too old to be adopted already or are not likely to be adopted because they are too close to 16. It is not a monetary thing, just encouragement and motherly love through praying, letters and pictures but may help a young orphaned boy feel like he has at least one person rooting for him! Randall's parents are both dead. His father died in the war and his mother died of sickness during the war. He has been in the orphanage since 2001 and was just moved to the older boys unit called Sheppard's Village along with 50 other young men. How sad that these boys have very little hope to have a forever family and also a 1 in 90 percent chance that they will ever have a job! It just breaks my heart to pieces...
If you would be interested in being a Mother of Love you can go to the Children Concerned website and e-mail Candy about it using the contact e-mail. The website is www.childrenconcerned.org/cc/ I asked about it and she sent me a reply with Randall's picture (boy is he handsome and has an amazing smile!) with some of his information and then asked if I wanted to be his "mom". I can send him letters and small trinkets (nothing more than $3) if I want every 2-3 months when there are missions trips from the US and they will take it there for him.
Just think what an impact you can have on a child's life half way around the world! Even if it is just praying for him and encouraging him through your letters. Please give this some consideration, you could change a child's life.

Frustrations

I am really frustrated right now with the speed of this adoption. It is hanging up on our homestudy agency because they aren't ready to come and interview us. They say they have to wait until the fingerprints come in to make sure that we aren't felons or something. I mean come on, it has been 5 months since we have adopted our other 3 children, do ya really think we are bad people? You would think they would take it case by case. After all they do have our money, ALL OF IT, to write our homestudy. They should be working for us, right? So as our self imposed deadline draws near I am realizing that there is no way that we will have all of the needed items in by Sept. 1 like we wanted. We actually have everything else needed for the orphanage but the homestudy holds things up and it makes it out of our control. Sigh... Jonah reminded me last night that it is all in God's timing and we aren't ready yet because our baby isn't ready yet, not even born. I guess he's right but this waiting game isn't fun at all.

On a side note Sarah and I have been having so much fun spending the money for supplies to go to Liberia. We went to Costco and bought a bunch of stuff (clothes, vitamins, baby shampoo and lotion, and lots of Tylenol) and she still has about $220 left to spend. It is so much fun to see Sarah excited about giving to others and she is loving it too. Her favorite part was when I would ask how many of something she wanted to get and then she would just shout out a number and we would put that many in the cart. She is really trying to talk us into letting her come with us to Liberia and give the goods to the orphanage herself. I think it would be a GREAT idea but Jonah isn't keen on it at all. He keeps trying to get ME to say I'll stay at home too but I'm not buying that one.

We have a name picked out for our son but won't be sharing it with anyone until we get his referral. That way we can use his birth name with his new name if we want or we may like his birthname so much we might not change it at all.

Have a great week and I will be posting again soon, I have a lot on my mind...

Sarah is 7!!!

I truly cannot beleive that I am the mom of a seven year old. Am I that old already? We had a great day with some friends over, swimming, cake, a movie and then a special dinner at a place called Yellow Basket which was Sarah's choice. We got her a new bike that she loves and it is still yet a little big for her so it will take some time learning to get going without sitting on the seat and also using hand breaks and gears. At dinner I decided that we would go around the table and say something good about Sarah (we had 2 friends with us). I started and she completely ignored me! So we stopped that and I told her that we would start that tradition when she was older and wanted to hear good things about herself in front of others. :)
So, Sarah... She's only been Sarah for a year now but it seems like its always been that way, that she's always been here. Even she says it is weird when she hears the name Dreama. Reminicing (sp?) today we started talking about the day I went to go pick her up and almost started crying when I thought about how far my little girl has come and how she has captured our hearts, especially her Daddy's. It took Jonah a long time to love her and Sarah a long time to love him but now he is smitten and it shows, she loves her Daddy. When I met Dreama she was a little 4 year old that didn't talk at all, was petrified of men between 16 and 40, pointed at everything and had NO verbal skills. She didn't even know how to use the bathroom correctly! Little by little she started learning the words for fork, salt, plate, pajamas and even though you couldn't understand her it was progress. By the time she was 5 she was talking up a storm in the house but was still shy as can be with others and still hard to understand most of the time. She was hurting but growing and thriving in a loving and secure home that she was safe in. Now that she is 7, my how she has changed!!! I can say without doubt that she is a completely different little girl. Yes, she is still shy at times but not enough that she minds busting out in song at the grocery store! A couple of weeks ago she performed in front of our whole church with other kids to sing a song and she actually SANG AND did the motions!!! That is HUGE for her.
Sarah is still learning what unconditional love is but how lucky am I that I get to show her that! I still have to make her give me a kiss but she is now ready with hugs whenever I ask. I am so glad that God put her in our home, she is such a blessing to me and such a big help. I cannot imagine my life without her in it. Sarah to me is a miracle of a little girl that had all the odds against her in her short little life but she got a second chance and I was the one SHE chose to be her Mommy forever. I still remember the day she said that word for the first time... Mommy. What a precious sound. I can finally say that I am truly her Mommy and she is truly and completely my little girl. I love that girl so much, I don't think she will ever get it.

A blessing in the mail

Yesterday when I went to go get the mail I noticed a letter addressed to Sarah from someone I didn't know. My first thought was it could be someone from her birthfamily(who shouldn't know where we live) and so I opened it before telling her just in case. Inside was the letter she had written about Liberia along with a short note from someone we didn't know. It said, "We got this in our P.O. Box that we have had since 2/2005 and wanted to let you know it didn't reach the intended person. We opened it to see if we could get the correct zip code to send it back and read your letter. We were touched and pray that you will meet your goal. Here is a gift to help the children in Liberia." They enclosed $20 with the note. It is a blessing when others that you know give but for someone to give without knowing us as the Winger family and our integrity really blessed our family. Just wanted to share.

Foster Care

Jonah and I attended a meeting on Saturday from 9-2 to get licensed to be foster parents in our county. It was a long and boring meeting and we knew everything they had to say but it is mandatory if you want to do foster care. We also need to do 11 weeks of training; once a week for 3 hours and then go through the whole foster care homestudy process. It was a bit daunting thinking about what we are going through with this adoption and we even talked about whether or not we wanted to do this (on our 15 minute break). By the end of the class though we both knew that even though it is a TON of effort we were called by God to do foster care. It is not fun or pleasant but if God called us how can we say no? Some may wonder if we can handle it, of course we can and again I say, "How can we tell God no?" Besides I truly beleive that God will not give us more than we can handle. What would that be teaching our children about being obedient to God's calling? We decided that IF we get licensed before baby Winger comes home from Liberia we will take placements but will take off 2 or 3 months after we come home with Baby Winger. I guess you could say it is all in God's hands now and we shall see what happens. We are excited about the future of our family and more and more seeing peace about being "tied" down with a family of young kids. What a wonderful problem to have!!!

Busy, Busy, Busy

We are super busy but there is not much to report from the adoption front. We got our certified birth certs. today and I finished our letter to the Liberian government about why we want to adopt from their country, two more things down and many more to go. We are still waiting for the homestudy agency to contact us and start the interview process. I am praying that they will call early next week and we can meet Friday for our first meeting. It will take the social worker a while to write up our homestudy and the sooner he gets it done the sooner our son will come home!
Saturday Jonah and I are going to a foster care orientation for the county. Not sure if we will be going forward with them or another agency but we could use the prayers for direction and dicernment(sp? that doesn't look right?).
Sarah passed her half way mark today and has now raised $365!!! She is beyond excited and making a list of what exactly she wants to buy. It is so refreshing to see her being so selfless in this and excited about something that in no way benefits her. She is not, by nature, a very selfish girl (although she can be) but it is good to know that she is learning to think of others first. One of our family motto's is "Put Jesus first, other's second and yourself last". She is doing just that with this project. I am so proud of her!