::orientation::

Don't forget to enter our Adopted for Life giveaway!!  

We'll choose a winner Sunday, May 1st!

I have a little adoption update for you this morning.  We had been waiting on some financial things (mainly, waiting on the IRS to come through!) before submitting all our financial information to our agency so that our application could be approved.  We realized we probably sent in our application before we were really ready, since we ended up in a time crunch to get all our supporting documents in.  We had to give up on the IRS, and submitted our information as is.  We got a call last week that we are officially approved!  Yea!

We went to Clarksville, TN for the weekend to visit William's family, and when we came back, we found a stack of paperwork waiting for us to look through in preparation for an orientation call with our agency, which took place yesterday.

These all need to be signed and notarized....and they're just contracts!

 We had a thirty minute orientation call that left our heads spinning.  So much information, so much to think about, even more to pray about.

 It was a little bit mentally exhausting. ;) 

We have some things to pray about, and it is already apparent this early in the process that international adoption is WAY different than domestic. This whole thing is a huge leap of faith.
We did find out that a local agency can do our homestudy, so that's really good news. 
:::
In other news, we are blessed to not be under water right now.  The weather is top news these days, and I cannot believe our basement hasn't flooded (yet).  I've spent the last week alternately worrying about tornadoes or flooding.  It seems that all around us people are evacuating because of rivers that have flooded and levees that have breached.  Here are some pictures of one of the many storms we've seen lately.  I took these while we were on the interstate coming home from Clarksville on Saturday.  There was a tornado in this storm, but it didn't appear until we had passed through it.

Growing up in Jackson, Tennessee, I take storms very seriously, so I have been glued to the weather, prepared to run to the basement (which is more like a cellar than a basement, but it is underground so it's a good spot) at a moment's notice.  It's been a lot of sleepless nights for the past week, and it is far from over, but I am thankful we've had no serious issues as of yet.