We got a grant!!!!

Just a quick snippet! We got a grant!  Yeah!!!!!  It is from a small local church in our area.  Since we are on two lists with our agency, we will get $500 if we get a referral for one child.  If we get a sibling pair, we will get $1000!!!!!!!! 

Either way every little bit helps, I have to work 6 days to make just over $500 so that is awesome to me.  11 days for a thousand.  Even better!

I also got word that all of our references are in on our other grant, so we will know within 10 business days if we get that one!  Praying hard.
Denise

Again, still waiting

Man, that seems like all I do now.  I just want some control!  On Saturday we get an email from our social worker asking if we were still waiting on an appt. for Camden with his doctor.  We were like what?  You didn't give us a form for him to get a physical.  We were kinda stoked about saving $25 on the co-pay of not having to take him.  Well guess, what, we do.  Their mistake, not ours.  They didn't give us the form.  So I was able to get him in on Monday and now we are waiting on the doctor to mail our agency the form, silly that I can't have it back and just take it to them, saves me a few days!  But no, I can't have it back, it has to be mailed.  So we are still waiting on our home study!  Don't they know ours expires 2 weeks from tomorrow!  It should of already of been in Russia by now. 

We are also waiting for it so we can update our dossier all at once and just drive out to Topeka, rather than sending that much stuff in the mail.  That would be a very large envelope! 

I finally emailed both of our grant applications agencies.  One misplaced our application, but found it after I emailed it, they are rushing it through, the other they were still waiting on our references.  So I called those people, to try and hurry them along.  Hopefully they have gotten that done also.  Praying we get these grants, we need them badly.

We are also going to a fundraising meeting on Friday night, hopefully they can give us some good ideas on some more fundraisers, because other than a car wash, (which I do not want to do), we are out of ideas.

Hopefully next time I write, I will have my home study in hand, and on my way to Topeka!

Waiting again

Well it has been a long week!  Things just seem to be dragging along.  We are still waiting on our home study because they are still waiting on a few of our reference letters.  I checked with one person, and they said they mailed it Wednesday, so hopefully it will be there today.  Then that just leaves two more!  Then we can get our home study. Good thing because our current one expires on the 14th of April. 

A positive, we had to pre-pay for our post placement visits with our old agency, not so with our new one, so we took that refund we got and put it in our savings!  Still waiting to hear back from the two grants that we applied too also.  We are just kinda in a stall right now.  Waiting for another referral, waiting for our home study, and waiting for grant applications.  I am tired of waiting!!!

The weather here has been insane to say the least!  On Tuesday it was 80 degrees outside, tomorrow, we are expecting snow AGAIN!  Yes it is almost April, yes it is spring.  That is life in the Midwest though, can't wait for Spring to officially begin!

St. Patricks Day

A day late, but no worries, we had our home study visit yesterday, this new agency is VERY thorough, she drew a diagram of our house with the location of all smoke detectors in our house, told us to put one down in our basement, even though we NEVER go down there, and was very thorough on her questioning.  So that is done, and now we are just waiting on references to be turned in.  So that hurdle is done, and now we have to start redoing all of our Dossier 1 paperwork again because everything expires on April 23rd.  I am looking forward to getting all this done so we can get settled back down and wait for our referral.

Yesterday was also our 4th anniversary!  I love having a holiday for an anniversary, very hard to forget it.  We unfortunately didn't get to do anything though because our home study went until almost 6 p.m.  Maybe we will get out another day.  How we are doing it is we are staying on two lists.  We are staying on the list for a single girl, and we are also on the list for siblings, with 1 girl, or sisters.  My belief is we will get the sibling referral.  So I am filling out grants like crazy.  I have sent out two, so hopefully soon we will find out some good news. 

Today was a little somber, we had to mail out our letter of decline for the sibling group, it too has to be apostilled, etc. there is no end to that.  I believe the State of Kansas will get out of debt by the amount of Apostilling we are doing and going to be doing again in a few weeks!  Hope everyone had a great day.

Paka,
Randy, Denise, and Camden

100th Post

I purposefully have not been blogging because I saw that we were at 99 posts and I wanted to save the 100th post for great news.  The news I have is bittersweet. 

On Monday March 7th, I got a call from our coordinator which I thought was weird, but thought it might have to do with us switching home study agencies.  Well she was reading our home study and saw that were were approved for two children, and she just happened to have two children, a sibling pair that needed a home.  A boy and a girl.  Well of course Randy was at work, so I asked if we could call her back tomorrow.  So I called Randy and we discussed and decided on Tuesday that we would accept the referral. 

We got all the info that day and man are they beautiful children.  We submitted our information to Dr. Dana Johnson out of the University of Minnesota, they have a great system up there, all information is submitted online with donations.  There is a suggested donation, but no set fee.  We thought we might get the news by Friday.  Wednesday we got the medical info. back.  The boy is perfect, the little girl, there were some concerns.  So he asked if we would get some more information from Russia.  Well we got all the info. back today from Russia, submitted it, and within an hour we had our answer. 

Sadly we had to decline this sibling pair.  There were some very serious signs that she would have a very hard life, and would not be independent as an adult.  It breaks my heart to have to turn down these two beautiful children, but it would be more than we could handle.  Going from 1 child to 3 would be hard enough without other factors added on.

The bittersweet part is, Randy and I have prayed about it and we have decided to stay on the sibling list.  Rather than go back to the single girl, we are at the top of the list for siblings, so now any day we could get another referral, and we will get the right children for our family.  Though we still want a girl, so it would have to be a boy/girl, or sisters situation.  Please pray for these children that they find the right home, and pray for us as our hearts are broken over having to turn down these two.

Thank you...

To the wonderful person(s) who just helped us out.  Thank you for taking a huge burden off of our shoulders.  Thank you for being a wonderful testimony to us as we plan to do the same some day when we can.  Most of all thank you for generosity and kindness.  I don't know who you are but you just made our week.

We have found our new home study agency and some amazing person paid our update fee for us.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Next week we got to get busy though, Tuesday we are driving out to Topeka to get our KBI fingerprints done, and Wednesday I have my doctor's appt, with my TB shot.  Randy should be able to get in next week also, the fire department contracts with a doctor and they can usually get in within a day or two.  Then we have to send in our background checks, and fill out a HUGE application.  I don't remember the application being that big for the last one.  We also applied for another grant, praying this one might be the one!

Paka,
Randy, Denise, and Camden

CPA

Last night our adoption support group at our church met with a CPA to talk about all the tax hoopla that is going on.  Randy and I knowing that the refundability ends in 2011 and we will not have our adoption finished by then were really bummed that we would not get any of the adoption tax credit.  Well we were WRONG!!!  The way the CPA explained it, after the refundabilty expires, the tax credit will go back to how it used to be.  Meaning you can still take it just not all at once.  It has to be stretched out over years until you reach the $13,170 maximum for your adoption.

Whatever your tax liability is, the # on line 60 of your 1040 is your tax liability to the government.  Say it is $4,000 that year, well, you get to take $4,000 of the adoption tax credit that year, so basically you do not owe the government at all that year.  If you over paid, you get it all back.  I owe $4,000, I paid in $7,000 I get all $7,000 back.  That would take $4,000 off the $13,170 of the credit, and I can roll $9,170 to next year, and so on.  Now you used to be able to roll it over for 4 years.  He did not know what the new numbers will be, but guessed that it would be between 3-4 years after the refundability expires.  So even though you don't get it all at once, you do get it over a time period.  We were very excited about this, because we were told that unless you actually owed the government money you wouldn't get anything.  So this is a huge bonus!  I hope this wasn't confusing to anyone, I tried to explain it as best as I can.  There are also income guidelines, you get the credit as long as you make less than $182,500 and then it is phased out to $222,500 after that there is no adoption tax credit available.  This figure is for married couples only.  Don't know the numbers for singles.

Sorry for the boring post, but I know there are probably a lot of people out there who won't finish their adoption before the end of the year, and was maybe a little confused about this also.  I know we were!