Thanksgiving and Baby Ethan...I know this is late :)

Peace. Quiet. It often takes a week away from home for me to use these words in conjunction with my life as normal. Vacations are nice, but when your kids are little, they are stressful. Aside from the worry that Luke was going to tumble down the stairs, Trey was going to have a meltdown from his late bedtimes, and having so much we wanted to do in so little time, we had a great time visiting family in Michigan. 

We were lucky because we not only got to celebrate Thanksgiving, but also the birth of sweet baby Ethan. Ethan is our boys' 9th cousin. He is also one of the reasons we are adopting Sasha. If my sister-in-law had not discovered that she was pregnant with him, she and her husband would have stepped up to adopt Sasha first. Ethan was born on November 23rd. He weighed 8lbs 8oz. He is mostly healthy, but he has an enlarged kidney from what seems to be a blockage. Doctors have known about it since the 20 week ultrasound, and they have monitored it, but there was nothing that could be done until he was born. He is going to have lots of doctor visits and a barage of tests, but we are praying for his health and we know that God is in this.

Our boys had so much fun playing with their cousins. Trey and Emily were inseparable, and Luke surprised me by not acting jealous at all while I held Ethan. 

Luke really took to Aunt Sara...either it was all of those pregnancy hormones she was putting out there or he's trying to replace me :)

This is how you will find us for the next week, hunkered down.

Igor and a new family tradition

I am praying right now that God is going to give me the words for this. 

This is Igor. 

Igor, like Sasha lives in an orphanage (in fact, he is in Sasha's orphanage). He is three years old and has Down syndrome. Like Sasha, he wants, no NEEDS a family to show him what love is. I can only imagine that he longs to be hugged, kissed, cuddled, and have a mommy and daddy to meet his needs out of love not obligation. Like Sasha, Igor is rapidly approaching four, the age of institutionalization. Unlike Sasha, Igor has no committed family. Gary and I have considered bringing Igor home with Sasha. How do you turn your back on a child who needs rescuing? But we have prayed for weeks without finding God's peace. Igor has a family somewhere. I don't know who they are, but God does. 

I know that this is the time of year when many families are looking for something charitable to do, well you found it! Click here to contribute to Igor's Angel Tree fund, and for a $35 or more donation you can get a beautiful ornament for your tree. Start a new family tradition of helping orphans for Christmas. Each year you can add an ornament to your tree, help boost an orphan's grant fund so they will find a family, and share family prayer time for a special child. 

Whatever you decide to do, please pray for Igor and his family. March is rapidly approaching, and unfortunately for Igor that is when he will learn what the inside of an institution looks like. Please, don't let that happen! 

Non-raffle is here!!!

Here's how it works: 

Make a donation to our family grant fund by clicking on Sasha's picture at the left or here. The donation can be a mailed check or done by using PayPal. REMEMBER: this is a tax deductible donation :) For every $10 you donate, you will receive one entry in the raffle ($10=1 entry, $50=5 entries, etc.). 

You must e-mail me to let me know how much you donated, so that I give you the proper number of entries. My e-mail address is glhagler@yahoo.com (you can find it at the top of the blog as well). Please include your phone number in your e-mail.

The prizes are as follows:

• 8 personal training sessions from Jon Reinicke, owner of  Fitworks ($500 value!) Think how awesome this would be for after the holidays :) Jon will personally call the winner to arrange your sessions. Read reviews of Jon's training sessions here.
• A professional photography sitting with Southern Living Magazine's Beth Hontzas (over $200 value). She does amazing photos! Check her website here to see. 
  
• A beautiful leather-bound Life Application Study Bible (NIV), which can be personalized by Family Christian Store for free for the winner.
  

If you think that this raffle is not for you, because you do not live locally to take advantage of the prizes, think again. If a winner of one of the first two prizes should be from somewhere outside the Birmingham metro area, I will send you a Visa gift card worth $100.

The drawing will be held on Saturday December 18th. I will e-mail or call the winners on this day. 

You want me to abandon myself?

There is a war being waged in my mind right now. I wonder...just how tightly am I holding onto my life? My family? If God asked me to jump off a cliff, would I trust him to catch me? I would like to answer yes, but is that the truth? I am being painfully honest right now. The Bible is riddled with people who trusted God in a way that I dream I would (Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Daniel, just to name a few). What if God asked me to do something that required great sacrifices from our whole family? 

Am I a person who claims the grace and beauty of the Gospel for myself, but ignores the whole "cross-bearing, die-to-yourself" thing? Have I added "The American Dream" to the Gospel even after God says specifically not to add to His word?

How about you? Am I alone?

***Just want to clarify, this is not about Sasha! I have NO doubts about him being our child.***

He makes all things new!

Uncle Scott and Aunt Melina, 

We are so proud of you! Thank you for letting us be a part of this.

Pennies from Heaven...our newest fundraising effort

The birth of a new idea:

Trey wanted to buy a Veggie Tales watch, so I was helping him count out his change (so graciously donated by Grandma :). I naturally started with the quarters, moved on to dimes, and then nickles. I didn't feel like counting the pennies, and I knew he didn't need them. Plus, I figured the cashier would be relatively upset if we paid with pennies. As I cast them aside, I thought to myself, "I wonder if pennies had feelings if they would feel like Sasha." As strange as this thought might be, the paralells are too great to ignore: we toss our pennies aside as if they are worthless, just like Sasha has been labeled; pennies are easily distinguished from other coins because of their color, they are the "outcasts" of the change purse. Right now, our baby is an outcast in his country. But we want to restore him to his original shine, and show him his God given worth.

When God led the Israelites out of Egypt, they took little food with them and were soon in need of something to eat. And we all know that God rained down manna from Heaven to fulfill their need. A tiny, snowflake-like bread was sent to silence the hunger of hundreds of thousands of people. Wouldn't it be neat to see just how much money we could raise with pennies? To watch our need be met with the smallest of coins?

We are asking you to send us your "pennies from Heaven". This can be done in any form. You can add them up and make that tax-deductible donation to our family grant fund, you can take them to the coin star machine in the grocery store, or if you live nearby feel free to drop off a bag of pennies and let us do the work :) 

I really want to see what God will do with pennies, and then maybe we can start to change our thought process and turn back to the Almighty God instead of the "almighty dollar". Please consider joining our efforts, pass this along, and for all of my bloggers/facebookers, please keep our links on your pages, and help us to spread the word. And be sure to keep checking the blog for an upcoming non-raffle (raffles are illegal :)! We already have some great prizes!

One other quick request: I learned today that Sasha's country is in the process of possibly changing their adoption procedures. This spells trouble, but we simply cannot worry about it. Instead we are asking you to help us by praying about it. The real trouble seems that in order to change things, the country would have to close its doors to international adoptees for a few months. If and when they will do this all remains to be seen, but the way it would affect us is that it would nullify all of our paperwork. We would essentially have to begin compilling our dossier from scratch, because the dates must not be any older than 5 months. We refuse to panic, and we have already seen the power of your faithful prayers! Thank you!!!

"the process"

I know that many of you want to know where we are in "the process," and probably even more of you want to know what the process IS. I am becoming highly educated on the international adoption process, and I'm sporting a whole new vocab to prove it, using words like "dossier" (pronounced doss-ee-ay) and "apostilled" in my everyday conversations. Below is a basic breakdown of how the process works (believe me, this is VERY basic compared to actually living it out):

1. Homestudy - this is where a social worker compiles every tid-bit of your life and puts it on paper. It takes awhile (several months) to complete and includes things like writing an autobiography, criminal background checks, physicals, written references, financial forms, information about your house, documentation from an 11 year old speeding ticket (yes, I am still bitter about that), and home visits where the social worker interviews you and looks at your house, etc.

2. Submitting paperwork to USCIS - This includes our petition to adopt, our homestudy, and some VERY costly fingerprints. Once everything is submitted and approved they will give us another form to submit to Sasha's country with our dossier.

3. Dossier - I think this is French for MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF PAPERWORK.  If the homestudy is your life on paper, the dossier is your life on notarized, apostilled paper. Here is the comedy in all of this (okay, really it is not funny at all, but all I can do is laugh) the homestudy gets included as part of the dossier paperwork, but we still have to collect the same documents over again and include them as well! For instance, I am in the process of collecting proof of home ownership. Even though the home study verifies that we do own our home and gives a detailed description, I still have to trudge downtown to the courthouse and get tossed around like a ragdoll from office to office trying to find someone who will type up a 3-sentence letter on county letterhead that says that we own our home. And then I have to get them to sign it in the presence of a notary. Once all the paperwork is filled out, following all 72 rules for each document, then we mail it off to our capital to have them apostille each of them. This is a fancy way of saying that they attach a piece of paper with one of those official-looking gold seals (read: sticker). And because we know that nothing in life is free, each one of those stickers will cost us $5. That doesn't seem like a lot until you see how many papers need stickers :)

4. Travel- Once our dossier is sent to Sasha's country, our facilitator will translate it and submit it for us. Once it's reviewed and hopefully accepted, we will receive travel dates. Things get a little fuzzy for me from this point on. I know that there are several official appointments (SDA, court, etc.) before Sasha is officially a Hagler. We will most likely have 2 trips. Each will be an estimated 2-3 weeks. In the first trip, the adoption becomes legal, but there is a 10 day wait period, which allows for the ruling to be overturned. It is in this time that we plan to come back to the States. The second trip is not as easy as pick him up and fly back. There will be a lot of legalities to take care of (obtaining a visa, medical exams, etc.), which is why the second trip is quite long as well.

Okay, so down to the nitty-gritty of where we are in all of this mess. I feel like a sprinter running a marathon! I'm doubled over with cramps and am panting heavily :) Our homestudy should be completed very soon. We are done with our parts, we are waiting on the report to be completed, signed, notarized and handed over. We have submitted our petition for adoption to USCIS, but they still need our homestudy. We are gathering all of our paperwork for the dossier as diligently as we can, but obtaining even one paper is never as easy as just asking for it and receiving it. Sasha's country will only accept dossiers this year until November 26th. We will not make that deadline, so we will have to submit when they re-open after the winter break in February. If all goes as as planned, we think our travel should come sometime in early April. 

I know that this post has gotten out-of-control-long, but I also want to address one more thing: I have been asked by many people, "why does it cost so much?" My answer: the process! We are doing our adoption independently, which means there are no agency fees. Reece's Rainbow is not an agency and the only money we have paid to them were a small application fee and a love offering. The homestudy, obtaining documents, and USCIS account for a decent chunk of change, but the biggest expenses come from travel and paying the facilitator in country (who does work hard for the money). There is no pork here. 

We are chugging along with the fundraising and should have new fundraisers up and running in the near future. Thanks for standing with us through the stress and the chaos. 

Real Life...Interrupted

We were blessed to have a short trip to the beach last week. I feel like I have to justify the trip to everyone, because we are trying to raise money for our adoption...and then we went to the beach. The trip was planned long before we committed to adopt Sasha, and it was very cheap. Gary travels so much for work, and I always say that the ONLY benefit is that sometimes we get to tag along. Poor Gary had to work the whole time, but the rest of us (including my mom) enjoyed a much needed break. Now, I'm back and ready for more fundraising, more paperwork, and more stress :)

Grandma and the boys checking out Biscayne Bay

Sand...

...And more sand!

Luke really enjoyed throwing fistfulls of sand into the Ocean (very fruitful labor :)

My kiddos are growing and changing every day! Trey is reading; it might not be much, but he can sound out some words, and it seems like a lot to me. He is showing us a much deeper thought process lately. He is able to take things from one setting and apply them to another. He recently learned the term "body of Christ," and one day he said to me, "Mom, doctors are the hands". Today we cooked the seeds from our pumpkin. I offered one to Trey, and he said (I am NOT making this up), "no, but since I don't want one of those can I have brussel sprouts?" 

Luke is talking SO much. I like to ask him, "who loves you?" He always says, "Mama, Daddy, Beans (this is Trey), Papa, Nana, Pa (Grandpa), Ma (Grandma), Aunt EEE (Aunt Melina), Deesus (Jesus)". He loves his stuffed animals and babies. He cannot walk by a stroller without yelling, "baby!" He also really enjoys trucks, planes, boats, anything that goes (just like every little boy). He keeps us busy by throwing stuff in the toilet, taking his socks and shoes off EVERY chance he gets (I picked him up from the church nursery yesterday...barefoot! That is not how I sent him in!), and falling off things. He behaves like Pavlov's dog when the phone rings. He runs to the kitchen, grabs a chair and pushes it to the sink to play in the water. He thinks he can get away with it because I'm on the phone. 

So, yes, we do have our hands full...but we wouldn't have it any other way :)