Learning Focus and Patience

Can you believe my last post was almost 11 months ago?  What has happened in that time to keep me away...too much, I tell you, too much!!

Just five days after my last post on August 10th, I closed on our first house.  Matt was away at Army Ranger School still so I went through the whole process of contracting, obtaining the loan, making selections and closing on the home by myself.  

A couple weeks later Matt graduated Ranger School and mid September the Army moved us to our new Duty Station in Georgia and into our new home!  A new home means a new Home Study is required.  Unfortunately, we had to wait on the Home Study until we had fenced in our yard and fenced out the massive pond at the back of our 1 acre lot.  Sadly, this meant dipping into our adoption fund in order to be able to put up the fence.  

Obviously we needed to pass the Home Study, so the fence went up.  We finished unpacking our belongings into our new home...and Matt received deployment orders.  He spent the month of February training for deployment at Fort Irwin, California and came home with just enough time for our social worker to perform the home visits and interviews before he left for Afghanistan in March.

The boys and I have been missing Daddy so very much each day.  I am finishing up with the final year of my Bachelor's degree program in Family Life Studies and our sweet, goofy boys are so tired of seeing me with my nose stuck to my textbooks and computer screen.  The good news is that I will finally be graduating in December of this year!!  Wahoo!

So mid-June marked three months of Matt being gone to Afghanistan and a whopping 18 months that we have been on the "waiting list".  We are waiting for a baby girl from Ethiopia between the ages of newborn and 18 months.  We also decided that should a baby girl with HIV come our way, we would love to bring her into our home.  So we are learning all we can now about what it means to care for a family member with HIV.  

I have to admit, I thought that we would have our baby girl by now but the Lord has other plans.  I am learning the meaning of patience as we continue to wait and work for our little girl and trust in the Lord's timeline for our family.  When the time is right we will finally be united with the precious daughter that we belong to.  Keep us in your prayers please, we have been waiting so long and we miss having our beloved Daddy in our home.  

More updates to come soon...