Adoption Has Ups and Downs

Anyone who has gone through an adoption, or is currently going through the adoption journey, knows all about the ups and downs of adoption.  One day you have encouraging news and see yourselves moving forward, and then the next day you can hit a bump that feels like you are taking a step backward.  We have had our share of ups and downs so far.  This week, we had an ENORMOUS up!  We have been discourage lately, being stuck in the position where finances determined whether we could take any steps forward.  I have been doing everything and anything to raise funds (as most of you know!).  We have raised around 1,000 which is a huge blessing. But that is only the tip of the huge amount we need to come up with.  Then we got the news.

We applied for two grants. One to helpusadopt.org, and the other one to Steven Curtis Chapman's Adoption ministry Show Hope.  We already had a denial from help us adopt, and I figured it would be an incredible work of God if we were to be approved for any grants.  We got a letter back from Show Hope this week, and I prepared myself before I opened it.  I kept telling myself, it's gonna say "no, we are sorry".   Then I read the words "we are pleased to inform you, that you have received an adoption assistance grant in the amount of $4,000" .   I have come close to hyperventilating while in labor with my kids, but this was the first time that getting NEWS has caused me to almost hyperventilate.  I had tears running down my face as I tried to squeeze out the words to Adam.  It is a total miracle from the Lord!  Because of this grant, we can now get our family profiles sent out to agencies in a little bit of a higher price range.  I am so thankful to Show Hope.  I pray that God will continue to bless their ministry, as they help build families through adoption.

With all of this adoption stuff taking up every inch of my mind, and also taking up every inch of my blog, I haven't forgotten that I am a homeschool mom too!  It has been rough lately, trying to get motivated to get school done, and trying to keep things fun.  Especially for my 10 yr old girl.  She is just going through a stage where she doesn't want to do any of the work, and cries when I tell her she HAS to do it. *sigh* It must be the first stages of becoming a teenager.   Every once in a while, I do come up with fun ways to learn things.   My latest experiment was turning the flash cards into a fun game.   Anna is just now getting into 1st grade math books, so I figured it was time for her to learn her doubles.



It ended up being so much fun! I wrote all of the answers on little pieces of paper, and she put the answers on the flash cards as fast as she could.  We used the timer to see how fast she could match the answers.  Before I knew it, all of my kids had to take turns seeing who could get the answers matched up the fastest.

Fun, fun, fun!  Now if I could only figure out a way to make handwriting and spelling fun.  Any ideas?

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