Busy Busy Busy

Im exhausted! We have been so busy over the last two weeks that I'm kind of starting to feel like Im sleep walking! About a week and a half ago Chris and I both realized that we felt God pushing us to change our request from one child to two children! Yay! We are so excited to see where God is leading our family! But this brings another challenge for us. You might remember our concern about the lack of rooms we talked about here and the fact that we only have 2 bedrooms and a loft that has a huge arch opening. Thankfully the loft has a window, 2 closets and a doorway with a door so if it didn't have the huge archway, it would be a true bedroom. Chris and I just figured we would figure out how to afford this after Christmas when we would be close to sending off our dossier. Thankfully I decided to contact our social worker about our change in request just to see if there was anything we needed to do and she informed me that we had to have the archway walled up before we could be approved for another child over 2. Dangit! I kind of wanted to cry (ok fine, I DID cry) and I started to think that maybe this was a sign that we aren't ready for siblings yet. I mean, how were we going to afford another big chunk of money when we are already struggling to afford the adoption all together! And we had to have it in a week! Well again I will say, what God favors, God provides for! My very sweet parents let us borrow the funds to afford the remodel! Praise God! Now I know that this does not insure that we will be approved for siblings but at least I know that we are doing all we can to bring them home!

To add to all the mental and emotional battles that we are fighting, we are also physically exhausted! About a year and a half ago, we started to remodel our upstairs bathroom which is supposed to be Jacob's bathroom. We had no choice, the toilet was leaking, the bathtub was leaking and well the bathroom was just ugly! We started out thinking that we could do it ourselves and quickly realized we needed help! Instead of hiring a professional (ie expensive) contractor, we hired a "friend" who has been doing side contractor jobs for years. Win win right?? Fast forward a year and a half and we have a halfway remodeled bathroom and zero faith in our "friend" because he never calls when he decides he doesn't want to come over to help (um and get paid!). Ugh! Against our better judgement, Chris and I decided to give this guy another chance and offer a pretty nice chunk of change that we had been saving for this project to finsh the bathroom and a few other quick fixes around the house. Friday he even talked to me, face to face, about bringing some donations for another future garage sale when we comes on Saturday. Sadly by 10am on Saturday we still had not heard from him and he refused to answer our texts. I was crushed! What the heck are we going to do?!? Poor Jacob has gone sooo long without an actual bathroom (ok we still clean him in the shower, but come on, every kid needs a bath! ;) and no one is going to approve us without a working guest bath!! Another UGH! We spent the next 20 minutes angry, confused and crying (ok well I cried), debating about what to do. My husband, my rock, decided that WE were going to finish it! What?!? I know we are kinda handy and there isn't THAT much to do...but drywall, and door framing, and floor laying?? I've never done that! I've watched a lot of HGTV but I hardly think that makes me a trained professional!! After a little prayer I decided that well, we didn't really have a choice. So, armed with our TWO home improvement how-to books and YouTube (hey, you can learn a lot on YouTube!) we dove head first into bathroom remodeling 101! I would love to show the before and after pics but the after isn't finished yet! We busted our behinds all weekend long (did I mention how thankful I was that it was a 3 day weekend?!? GOD IS GOOD!) and learned A LOT but we are slow (hey, learning takes time!) and we still have a little left. We are hoping and praying that we can have it done this weekend and we can move on to the next thing on our "getting the house ready for the homestudy" todo list!

I will leave you with a cute pic of Jacob from this weekend

I am so blessed to have a sister (who is also my best friend!) who took care of Jacob all weekend long so we could concentrate on the remodel without distractions! Here he is with his "friends" watching a movie at Aunt Hannah's house!

~Abbey