Various news

Last weekend we had our big adoption fundraising yard sale, and we made $1155! That is so much more than we anticipated. A few families had donated stuff, including Mom and Dad, so the sale was quite good-sized. We weren't completely done setting things out and pricing until Sunday afternoon! Thank you to Mom and Dad for the huge amount of work that they put into this with us! On Saturday I don't think there was a time when somebody was not there browsing until around 2pm. It was nearly the same on Sunday. I had been secretly hoping and praying that we would at least reach $1000 and God beat it by $155. :) It was great weather (I got a bit of a sunburn that first morning).

We ended up donating some of the left over items to a garage sale that the youth group at the Oroville Free Methodist Church was going to be having and then boxing a good deal of it up for another adoption fundraising yard sale some time in the future. There are more people lined up who say they are collecting items to donate to another sale, so I'm thinking it should be good-sized again even if we do it as soon as this Fall.

We're going to be putting the money from this sale into a CD so we can make some interest off it until we're ready to start the adoption paperwork, which will hopefully be mid to late next year.

After almost 2 years of praying and educating ourselves, we finally have a strong feeling about where to adopt from. Our plan is to adopt from Ethiopia, Africa. That's the direction we'll head until God changes the plans. The agency we are most interested in going with is Holt International based in Oregon (http://www.holtintl.org/ethiopia/).

Oh, by the way, we have decided on names for the soon-to-arrive Vassar baby. If a boy, it will be Creedence Dean. If a girl, it will be Cienna Yvonne. The meanings of names are important to me so for those who are also interested, Creedence Dean means "power in faith" and "prosperous". Cienna Yvonne means "the Lord is gracious" and "shielded". Here are a couple pictures of little Creedence or Cienna at 29 weeks:



Cedric has so nearly weaned himself. Until this afternoon, he hadn't even asked to nurse since Sunday morning. It's good. He's ready and it hasn't been traumatic for him or I. :) Very sweet and satisfying.

We're to the stage of having prenatal checkups every 2 weeks now. I can't believe it's already that time. I am so anxious to meet this new baby!