Our little Camille is 6 months old today. She is a sweet little bundle of joy and we are so blessed to have her in our family. She smiles, cuddles and screams. She came out with the most perplexing dark hair, but it is slowly getting lighter and lighter each and every day. She can now turn over very easily and is really trying to crawl. Probably only a few weeks away from that.
Camille lights up with smiles when Ezra and Olivia get up in the morning, full of smiles and excitement for the dayy ahead. Ezra and Olivia both love Camille, though there have been a few times Olivia has thought Camille was ready for the toy helicopter to fall on her head. Both kiddo's are ready for Camille to be able to crawl, walk, run and play.
* We celebrate our 5th anniversary on the 30th of July!
* Ezra turns 4 on September 1st.
* Heidi keeps the ship running. (This is Dustin writing). Heidi is a priceless jewel. Her life is consumingly wrapped up with little ones running around her, over her, under her, etc. and she is a faithful wife who loves the Lord, her needy husband and her children. Her longing is that her children would come to know the love and forgiveness found only in the Gospel desire to train up the children to love Jesus and others with all their heart and lives.
* Real Estate has taken a hit (which is no suprise), but we are thankful to the Lord that along with continuing to work in helping people buy and sell property, Dustin now also gets to help train the new real estate agents who come to work at Windermere. This has been a pretty signifiant year of change for Dustin in terms of eating habits and exercise. If interested, he blogs aout it over at a little website he made up at Average Dad Fitness. Down 30 lbs since January 1st, and feeling a lot better and has far more energy.
Adoption from Ethiopia
Now that Camille is 6 months old, we can jump into the adoption process from where we left off last July when we found out Heidi was pregnant. When we put the process on hold last year at this time we had just completed our dossier and sent it to our agency and to Ethiopia, which means that we are now in the 'actively waiting' for a referral of a boy under 3 years old. Although we don't have a referral yet, we are going to name our son Hudson.
We don't know how long it will take to get a referral, but we are thinking that it will be somewhere within 30 to 90 days. We wouldn't travel to Ethiopia until late late fall or winter or maybe even next spring.
Within the last year, some laws have changed and one of those laws that will be impacting us is that we now have to travel to Ethiopia 2 times before the process is completed. That might not sound like a big deal, but originally Dustin was going to be able to travel one time (approximate cost $2,000) and now both Dustin and Heidi will go one one trip ($4,000) and then Dustin will go on the 2nd trip (another $2,000).
Over the course of the next 8 to 10 weeks, we are praying, planning and working to raise the remainder of the approximately $8,000 to $9,000 needed to complete the adoption.
We are going to be having a HUGE community sale on August 21st. If you read this and have items that you'd like to contribute to the sale, wed gladly come pick it up. (Of course it'd have to be in Spokane).
Also, we are in the process of having home shirts designed that we'll make available for sale as a means of helping fund the adoption. We'll keep you posted.
Also, we're in the process of creating another website in which we will be using as the main means of communication about our adoption.
