Buy a bracelet...support Haitian Families and bring Joseph home!

We are so close to getting our little boy home.  We're already looking into flights for our final trip and its going to be expensive.  More expensive than we were hoping.  Must be peak travel time for his country because the flights are even more expensive than they were at Christmas time.

Just in time for our final trip and all the costs that are associated with that trip....

We have a very meaningful fundraiser for all of you!  You don't have to live in our neck of the woods to participate in this one...I can mail your purchase right to your doorstep ;)

The Apparent Project

Look at these beautiful bracelets...

 Can you believe that these handmade beads come from recycled paper, magazines, cereal boxes etc.?

 Or that the Haitian artisans that make these bracelets do so because they are wanting to be able to feed their children and support their families? 

 These are just a few of the people in Haiti trying hard to support themselves and make a life for their children.

If you can't read what the above tag says...it talks about Vanessa, a mother of two boys.  She is unable to feed her children so one is with his grandparents and the other has had to be put up for adoption because he spent two months in the hospital for malnutrition.  She is a mother that just wants to be able to feed her children and can't.  These bracelets help bring an income to women like Vanessa and other men and women working to feed and support their families.   

Lorene not only takes care of her 4 children but also her sister's 3 children as well.  Her sister has died and she is trying to support not only herself but all 7 children.

A little bit from the Apparent Project:

The Apparent Project artisans' guild
addresses Haiti's orphan crisis at the root.

Our name reflects our passion: We want to see Haitian families stay together. Skill development and employment addresses the needs of families before they are at the point of desperation, driven to give their children to an orphanage because of exteme poverty. After all, the vast majority of Haiti's "orphans" have not been orphaned by parental deaths, earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods, but are children of living parents who gave them up simply because they knew that an orphange could feed their child. Lagging adoptions, overcrowding, and lack of accountability has made many orphanages less than adequate homes for children, who often develop severe emotional problems such as reactive attachment disorder. This is why we think of our artisans' guild as an "un-orphanage."

The apparent project is allowing families to keep their children out of orphanages by helping them to making a wage to provide for their family.  

This is the kind of product that you can feel proud to have purchased. 

 A portion of the sale of these bracelets goes to our fundraiser to bring Joseph home and the rest goes right back to the individual that made each bracelet.  You can KNOW that Vanessa or Lorene or Makenson benefited and made a wage for their work thanks to you! 


And we're able to raise more funds to bring Joseph home!
Please consider buying a bracelet.  
We will be selling them here on the blog for $14 each to be able to cover the packing and mailing.


Please email me or leave a comment here with your email and how many bracelets you would like and I will email you about an address to ship it to.  Or, if you live locally, just send me an email or leave a comment on this post and we can arrange to get a bracelet to you!

We have a court date!

May 13th!  May 13th!  May 13th!

We are just so excited to finally have a court date.  

And it's on Our Lady of Fatima's feast day, so I know Our Lord's Mother has got this covered for us ;)

Our agency notified us of the court date but warned us that the judge is requesting updated FBI clearances from us.  Our clearances are still good until November 2013 but for some reason he is still not happy so our agency and ourselves are scrambling to try to provide so kind of official document re-stating what we already have.  Just say a little prayer that we can get it all worked out before court so that it doesn't affect our court date.  We've been told this has happened before with this particular judge but our USCIS officer had never dealt with this before.

Looks like Dan will be in-country picking up our son no later than the second week of June!  Hopefully sooner....our agency says 4 weeks after court, but we're hoping to make it sooner if they'll let us ;)

       So incredibly thankful for this journey of adoption, for all those that have supported us through it, and for the amazing son that we will have at the end of all this!

Don't forget your pizza!

For all our local friends....

Don't forget to get out to Brixx Pizza today and have some dinner!

Brixx is donating $3 for every 10 inch and $1 for every kid's pizza purchased with our flyer.

Our flyer is attached to my last blog post....print it and come on out!

We'll have our adoption board there and someone will be there handing out flyers for yet another pizza day event coming up on May 4th! 

Thanks for all the support!

Pray. Support. Donate. Advocate For Orphans

Fundraising to the finish line!

It's really happening.  This whole long process of adoption is finally starting to wind down to the end.  Or I guess I should say all the prepping and preparing is coming to an end and Joseph's new life is getting ready to begin!  Any day now we should hear about our court date.  Four weeks after passing court, Dan will be taking our son out of his orphanage forever.  To say it seems surreal right now would be a gross understatement!  We are thrilled beyond words that soon he will be home and we get to start the hard work of teaching him about the love of family.  Wow, I get excited just writing that!  This boy needs to be home!  The adoption process has been long and hard, but we also know that it is just the beginning.  We have a long road ahead of us with Joseph and we are eager to bring him home and start that life with him. 

You know we are going crazy waiting to hear about our court date....Soooo....it's a great time for some home stretch fundraisers, right?

If you are local, please come out and support Joseph!

Brixx Pizza.  501 Cox Rd. Gastonia, NC. This Saturday April 20th


For those that are local (North Carolina and South Carolina) we've got a Brixx Pizza fundraiser happening at 501 Cox Rd. in Gastonia, NC. this Saturday April 20th.  All day long you can come out and eat some pizza. Brixx will donate $3 for every 10 inch pizza purchased and $1 for every kid pizza purchased when you bring our flyer with you. 

 Just click on this image and a pdf will pop up for you to print the flyer and take with you:

Please come out and enjoy some pizza and help raise the funds to bring Joseph home while you do it!
Don't forget to bring a flyer!

If you're not local or you can't make it, don't you worry!  I've got another post in the works where you can help both Joseph AND the most needy of families in Haiti by purchasing some amazing bracelets.  I have them all ready to sell and mail out to anyone who would like to order them from me.  More on that later!

Many blessings to you!
Pray. Support. Donate. Advocate For Orphans

Guess what we got...

You know all that waiting we've been doing during this stretch of our adoption?  

That pesky little signature from "the officials" in Joseph's country that has kept us waiting for over six weeks? 

 That one little signature that stood between us and a court date? 

Well, guess what we finally got!!!!

Our official signature on our dossier!  Our dossier is now officially moving to court.

We should be notified soon of a court date! 

Yet another thing to be thankful for during this glorious Easter Season!

Baby #5 is growing...

Our little Emmeline is two months old now...

It's all going so fast....and she's looking so much older these days

4 weeks

5 weeks
This picture just cracks us up...
she definitely looked like she was thinking of something very clever... ;)

6 weeks

7 weeks

The other day....at 8 weeks old

The kids just can't seem to get enough of her!

I'm not sure what they ever did before they had her ;)