We met our children via Facetime!!!

What a wonderful, exciting morning we had!!! My heart is overflowing with joy!

At 9:00 this morning, we met Tabitha and Eli via Facetime.  Our son was very excited to "meet" his new brother and sister, not to mention all of his new friends.  Three other local families, besides us, also got to meet their children today...a total of 7 children coming to Chattanooga!!! And seeing all of their smiles and glimpses of their personalities was so incredible and precious!

We learned Tabitha's favorite color is red, and Eli's is blue. She enjoys school and can write her name already, but Eli would rather stay home (which is great since we plan to homeschool :) ). All the kids seemed shy, even Colin, but I doubt that will last long. ;-) We noticed Eli likes to make funny faces lifting his eyebrows! And I think I was right about him and Colin going to have a ball together!! Then, we sang "Happy Birthday" to Tabitha, who's birthday was a few days ago...that envoked a very sweet smile from her, as it may have been the first time anyone ever sang "Happy Birthday" to her.  They were indeed precious and beautiful, and we cannot wait to meet them in person!!  We are praying the next few months will go by quickly. :)

We are so very blessed and fortunate to have an awesome, Christian man with a huge heart for helping these children to facilitate all of our adoptions and to bring our families together! It was so wonderful to finally "meet" him too, the one we've been talking to via email for the last few months. We were able to meet his beautiful family too, and his children were adorable!

God, in all of His goodness and glory, knows exactly what we need, and He has already blessed us tremendously on this journey!  Not only have we been blessed to walk through this with dear friends who first began this journey, but, we have met two more families to share this with, all of whom will now become our extended family! What an amazing God we serve!!!

I cannot express how grateful and humbled and privileged I am that He has called our family to adopt Tabitha and Eli!

We also just found out that our home study is being finalized today (Woohoo!), which means we can now proceed in a number of ways, such as: sending our dossier to Uganda, sending in our I600A to USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) for fingerprinting and approval, and applying for grants to help with the finances.

On top of all this, many donations have been coming in for our upcoming yard sale, May 4, and we have several fundraisers planned and in the works.  We are so encouraged by the support and love we have received from our family, friends, and church...even strangers!  As we have been learning to depend on God for all of our needs, we've been able to see how He has been providing and showing us the way to make this happen!

We would like to ask that you please pray for our family, that the next several steps and months will go smoothly as we prepare for our trip to Uganda to bring our children home!  Satan has definitely been hard at work over the last few months pestering our families, trying to delay our process, trying to hinder us from having Facetime with our children, but we relish in the small victories, and today, we saw a HUGE victory! And we rest in the knowledge that God ultimately gets all the victory, because He is our Sovereign King and He is the One in control!

"For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.  To Him be glory forever." (Romans 11:36)