Finally!

After 18 months of prayer, paperwork, fundraising and waiting, we leave in 4 days and a few hours to bring our boy home!

My friend Mandy and I will leave early Tuesday morning on 7/29, get to Bulgaria on 7/30, head to our boy's region on 7/31 and hopefully get to attend his going away party (how awesome is that?!), and then leave with him to head back to Sofia on 8/1. We will spend the next 13 days getting to know one another, sight seeing, applying for his passport, having his TB test and embassy medical and our embassy interview done.

Speaking of the embassy interview, please pray that the State Department gets their systems back up and running. They have been down since this weekend which means families all over the world are stuck in country with their children as Visas and passports are not able to be printed! Our son will have a Bulgarian passport but we will need his Visa to be able to leave the country! The latest news reports say that their systems are back up but it's currently slow going getting through the backlog as they estimate they receive about 35,000 requests each day from all of the US Embassies around the world.

Our NGO thinks that we should be ok, we had some extra time built into our trip and now I am thankful for that time! I'm keeping the possibility in the back of my mind that we could get extended in country, but am refusing to worry or be anxious over it. I know God has this!

We are really close to being fully funded! Our last facebook auction just ended with a total of $507 in high bids! This brings our total needed to be fully funded to just $1,145! I know that still seems like a lot of money and not a lot of time to raise it, but I refuse to worry! In one way or the other God has let nearly $29,000 come in during this process and the money was always there when we needed it to be!

I do have some of our 'Do Something' tshirts left to sell and a sweet friend who just days ago returned home from picking up her new son in China has donated some awesome 'Sailing to our Starfish' tshirts for us to sale!

I am working on the list now with pictures and sizes available!

Our family was also chosen as one of the first families for the awesome 5/5/5 For Families campaign!

I have a blogpost about this great project coming soon too! We would love to see our family  and friends support this effort which helps 5 adopting families a month for as little as $5 per month per sponsor! Click the link above to read more about them, or go here and check them out on facebook!

Thank you again to everyone for all of your love, prayers, and support during our journey to bring Ian home! We are so excited to be so close to the end of this part of the journey and look forward to starting the next chapter in our family's story!