Month: March 2016

Today has been a wonderful day. We finally became members of our awesome church Lake Pointe after attending together for almost 4 years. This afternoon Easton got to go on his first Easter Egg hunt with all the kids in the neighborhood. While I was watching him gather eggs, my heart got excited that it is a real possibility that next year we could have two little kiddos hunting eggs. We cannot wait to have our family completed!

Tonight we finished signing and sorting all of our papers for our home study. We are one step closer to having our baby girl home! On our weekly call with the adoption agency on Friday, we found out we have broken the record for getting all our homework finished and our online training courses completed. Woo Hoo! Go us!

If you haven’t checked out our t-shirt fundraiser click here and order a cute shirt. We want to get pictures of all our friends and family in the shirts to add to Ellie’s life book and into the book we send to Colombia to introduce ourselves.

Thanks for all of your support and encouragement on this journey!

Before we started this journey I had been told that the dossier process was stressful, overwhelming and a ton of paper work….I had no idea it would be this crazy. I feel like I have gone a million miles an hour every day for the past two weeks. This week (since Monday) we completed 10 hours of training courses with tests, got our FBI fingerprinting done, filled out countless papers, took pictures of the exterior of our home and sent and received 100s of emails.

This is a much different journey than being pregnant was. When we were expecting Easton, we got ultrasounds, check ups, my belly grew and we felt him moving around. I am trying to make this journey as special, although different than the first one. When I get stressed out I try to close my eyes and picture the moment when I see my baby girl for the first time, when I get to hold her in my arms for the first time. In that moment all this stress will fade away, much like those sleepless nights did with Easton.

On a more exciting note, today we launched our T-Shirt fundraiser! We receive a portion of each of the shirts sold. It will run for 21 days, so if you like t-shirts buy one from us! Click here to check them out. We will be having more fundraisers and if you want to help out with them it would be fun to have a cute shirt to wear!

Thank you each so much for being along with us on this journey to bring our Ellie home.

We filled out, signed, notarized, prayed over 180 documents that are the first step in bringing Ellie home. Along with those documents our first large check had to be sent in. Oh and Easton threw up on the floor in the post office while I was addressing the envelope, never a dull moment with kiddos.

I really can’t believe that this is really happening now. Adoption has been on my heart for years and I feel so very blessed that God has opened the doors for this journey to begin.

We are having a garage sale next month and all the proceeds will be going towards the adoption. If you have anything you want to donate, please let me know. Also, if you are lucky enough to not have any spare junk in your house and you would rather make a tax deductible donation to our agency, here is a link where you can do that.

Thank you all so much for supporting us, praying for us, praying for our sweet Ellie, and for being cheerleaders for us as we go on this journey.

When I first found out I was pregnant with Easton, I couldn’t wait to start thinking up names for him. Now that our sweet daughter is growing in our hearts, we wanted to give her a name.

We decided to give her the name Eleanor “Ellie” James Hollis. Eleanor means Bright and Shining one and James is in honor of Cody’s Great Grandfather who was an amazing WWII veteran and a man who loved his family and his community. I had the honor of meeting him a couple of weeks before our wedding and he asked Cody and me to start working on his 5th generation as soon as we were married. I wish so badly he had gotten to meet our kiddos.

It is great to have a name to think of and pray for. Please join us in praying for our sweet Ellie.