Hey, Y'all! Hope you all are having a relaxing Memorial Day Weekend, and are able to take some time to stop and remember all those heroic military members who paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we could live the life we do.

Like I've said in earlier post, it's getting harder to write updates since, well.. we really don't have much to update you on as often as we did during all our training and paperwork stage. We're officially 4 months into our adoption journey now, but do have some exciting news to share today:

The most important one of this post... Our financial goal to be able to complete our adoption and bring Baby Powell home is officially COMPLETE! As you'll recall, our fees will total about $28,000.00 in total. We're ecstatic to be able to announce that in just 4 short months, ALL THANKS TO YOU AMAZING FOLKS, we've raised ALL our fundraising goals. When our agency suggested to start a Pure Charity site for crowd-fundraising, and to do yard sales, bake sales (you know I've got that one covered!), group events and whatever other creative fundraising methods.. we kind of brushed it off. Neither of us wanted to "ask" for others help, especially financially. However, after talking with many close friends and family, they all told us that if we didn't start a page, they would. They were all pretty stern with saying that they KNEW so many would want to help us reach our dreams of having a family, and that we needed to just suck up the pride and/or guilt for asking for help, and do it. That being said, we thought "Ok, we'll do it. And we'll be SO blessed if we're able to reach maybe $3,000". We NEVER in a million years thought we'd reach all $28,000. Much less, in such a short span of time. We need to say a VERY special Thank You to a dear couple who we've gotten to know over the past several years. We'll forever be thankful for them, because thanks to a large donation from them, this is what closed up the remaining amount we needed for our goal. They have no idea what a blessing that was to us, and we'll always be so very thankful. We cannot wait for Baby Powell to be able to go meet them, and give them lots of snuggles.

It's such a relief knowing that we've been able to pay all our fees the moment they were due, and that we have the remaining amount for our final payment just sitting, waiting to be sent to the agency, the moment we get to bring our baby home! Talk about MAJOR weight off our shoulders. We're thankful to all of you for being able to give us that.

With meeting our goals, we both agreed that it's time to go ahead and stop using this Pure Charity as a means of updating all of our supporters. We've moved over all the post from here to a blog page, and from here on out we will ONLY be using that as a source of updating. I believe that currently you get emails when I make updates on this page, if you're a follower. That's the only downside to posting just on the blog.. you will no longer get the automatic emails. But I'll be sure to share the blog link on our facebook page as we update it. The link is : http://adayinthelifeofthepowellfamily.blogspot.com/ Please keep in mind it's nothing fancy or special.. as I'm not that fabulous at blogging and design. But, It serves it's purpose.. and the best perk? We can put pictures on there! So now you'll finally get to see picture updates .
 
Also, We got to travel up to our agency this week to turn in our portfolio books. I created one back in early March to give our social worker during our home study, but when it came in it had some pages that were not printed correctly. After battling with that company the past two months, I finally threw in the towel and switched over to Shutterfly and re-created our book. I had to change the layout some, but overall it has the same pictures. Check out the blog link above for some snapshots of the books pages.

We hope the switching of pages doesn't lead to any confusion, but we also don't want to keep using the fundraising site for updates .

That's it for updates this time. We're hoping that now that our portfolio book is in the hands of our agency, we will be getting "THE CALL" sooner than later. Please continue to say prayers for us on this journey, as well as future Baby Powell, and the birth parents making the decision to trust us with their sweet baby.

Love,
B & D