Getting Started

In just a few days we will start our PRIDE training.  This is getting very real.  We've made an official announcement at church about our plans to adopt, and we've told most of the people we need to tell in person.  We have a few remaining calls to make before we make it completely public, or "facebook official." Ready or not, here we go!

We are working on a few fundraising ideas to ease the financial burden.  The first will be a bake sale table at a local vendor fair in a few weeks.  I've already asked several friends to donate to this and have had great response.  I hope that many others will purchase baked goods and make this a success.  We are also working on an idea for t-shirts.  I'm really excited about this one and hope to market them well.  I'm not really sure how this one will work out as far as doing a pre-sale or just buying them and hoping we can sell them all.  Any thoughts on this are appreciated!  We've also started a GoFundMe page (http://www.gofundme.com/56ut9o).  This is the first I'm advertising this, so there aren't any donations yet.  I did see on that page many other families with a common goal.  I even found another bigger family that is going the same route we are and is trying to raise money for the same purpose.

That brings me to our purpose.  While the costs for Waiting Texas Children/CPS adoptions are not huge, we will have a few other expenses that we would like to cover.  The biggest cost will be to purchase a 12-15 passenger van.  With 5 kids under 8, we still have everyone in some type of child restraint.  Since we are planning to adopt young children, we will have even more car seats.  Our expedition technically seats 9, but only 6 are in the back and it's tight with 5.  Plus there's NO extra space for strollers or suitcases.  It's time to move up!  We have no intentions of buying anything new, but we need to raise some money to help towards that investment.

If you have any other suggestions for fundraisers, please let me know.

I hesitate to say this "out loud", but right now, we think that best case scenario is that we are licensed by April or May.  That doesn't mean that we will have a placement right away by any means.  But if all goes well, our home will be open in the Spring.  Then the real waiting game begins.