Fingerprint Dates!

Yesterday was tough.  We are having the coldest weather in decades.  Sounds like a great time for the furnace to stop working, right? The same exact part burned out on the coldest day last year too! I had all the kids snuggled up in blankets in the bedroom with a space heater.  We even had a picnic lunch on the bed! They thought it was great, but I was busy trying to figure out what we would do if we couldn't get the heat back on right away.

This is what cold looks like.

It was especially frustrating because we have needed a constant cascade of repairs since we began this process.  I heard other people talk about this, but had no idea it was so common! Our house is 20 years old and most of the appliances were original.  We knew when we bought it that we would need to replace things, but we didn't know we would be replacing everything within a few months!  We needed to put in a new hood above our stove. We repaired our washer twice before it completely died. The technician couldn't repair our dryer when it stopped working so that needed to be replaced, and we just replaced our refrigerator today.  We needed to put a new engine in our car, but that was also overdue since the car had 185K miles on it.  It has been tough on our wallet, but it has also been tough on me mentally.  I am not a replacer. Our last house had a 60 year old stove going strong, and I loved it.  It was almost old enough to be cool again!

So clearly I started yesterday feeling a bit negative.  I have faith that things will work out, but there has been a lot of "hard" recently.  We had some great news to turn the day around though! I went out to get the mail, and our fingerprint dates for USCIS were waiting.  This is such exciting news! It was just what I needed to change my attitude. Some departments let you come in before your appointment date, so we are going to try to shave a little time off of the process.  The sooner we can get to these boys, the better!

Now, let's talk about fundraising and our financial status.  I hate doing this! I'm going to put it all out there though.  At this moment, we need about $6350 more to be fully funded for these two boys. We just finished one t-shirt fundraiser, and we are about to do another.  I really appreciate all the support we saw with our last t-shirt sale.  I have just been in awe.  Thank you! I don't want to overwhelm people with our need, especially when so many other families and children are also in need.  We are going to keep working hard, and we will get there!

Right now, we are doing a flash finish to our VACATION GIVEAWAY reboot. If you want to enter, you have until midnight on January 9th. Donate $10 to our FSP located HERE, then email me your receipt. We will drawing a name at random to decide who gets to spend a week in an awesome 8 person suite right near Disney! I have only received one email about entering this giveaway. If you have donated and want to enter, you will need to forward your receipt to kayleighbloom@gmail.com so I can enter you!

We will have more exciting news tomorrow.  Remember how I just mentioned we would have more t-shirts for sale soon? We will be selling SUPERMAN WAS ADOPTED shirts! I will open ordering for those for ONE WEEK.


Please remember the other families linked HERE too.