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Big news!

It's been awhile since I've updated the blog. If you want up to the minute updates, check us out on Facebook!

Yesterday was a very exciting day! We were notified yesterday morning that our dossier was submitted!!! WOOHOO! The rest of our documents had just made it into the hands of the facilitation team on Wednesday afternoon (their time), so we were pretty surprised that it was submitted so quickly! In fact, there was one document that we thought we might need to tweak and re-do, but it was great! Of course, 95% of the dossier had been there for at least a couple of weeks (this was the 3rd batch to send over) so they had everything ready to go.

The next step is receiving travel dates! That will be very exciting! We can expect to receive dates in 3-4 weeks, although sometimes it takes more or less time. The family that was submitted before us received their dates fast, so we may not have a whole lot of time left! This is SUPER EXCITING except for the fact that we are still $14,000 short. This is pretty scary. We have several fundraisers in the works - one of them fell through, so we need big prayers for us as we try to raise this money in a short amount of time!

Why did we wait so late in the process to fundraise heavily? Quite frankly, we have hit every roadblock or delay possible. This adoption has taken twice as long as it should and there were a couple of times in the process we weren't sure if we could complete it. So we chose to wait to fundraise until it was a sure thing. We wanted to be very careful to honor the financial contributions of our supporters. Fortunately, God has done great things in enabling us to pay for almost half of the adoption from personal funds, so we haven't needed to fundraise until the end.

What happens if we can't raise the funds? We will NOT wait to travel. We will take out a loan. But this is a VERY BAD financial option for us. When Antoinette comes home, we will immediately incur thousands of dollars in medical bills. AND, each of those bills will come with the expense of driving almost 300 miles each way to the multiple specialist visits. Don't get me wrong, we are 100% okay with these medical expenses - we signed up for this when we committed to the adoption. But if we come home with a substantial adoption loan and add thousands of dollars in medical bills to that, the outcome will be devastating. We know that bringing home a child who will need life-long care is not a good financial decision, but her life is worth the sacrifice. We will provide for her. But we need help getting her home, so we are more capable of making these sacrifices for her and getting her the best medical care possible. 

Please prayerfully consider contributing to help us get her home. You may do so via GoFundMe or Reece's Rainbow (tax-deductible for you!)

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