Getting there

Our fundraising garage sale/ bake sale is this weekend! Time is flying. 

We have our completed home study in hand and only have 1 meeting and the photo book approval left before we are officially considered to be a 'Waiting family'!

Thank you will never be sufficient to show our appreciation for all who have given time, money, items, and prayers for us and our little one. Please continue to pray for him or her and the birth parents as they go through one of the most difficult times of their lives.

PS
I highly encourage all parents to check out the 'Empower to Connect' conference and resources on TBRI through 'TCU Institute of Child Development'. We attended a simulcast of the the conference earlier this month at our agency and it is INCREDIBLE!! 

Progress Report

Friday afternoon I came home from a lunch with some of my dearest friends (side note: Spending time with women of the Lord can be SO refreshing and energizing even in casual conversation!) to find a packet from CAS (our adoption agency). I jumped up and down in the street a couple of times, did a little dance, then ran (literally) inside to bring Luke the envelope.
Much to my relief it was exactly what I thought...OUR SIGNED & NOTARIZED HOME STUDY!!! Woohoo!!
The packet also included instructions for our next steps. We need to have a meeting with the agency director since she is the liaison between the pregnant families and prospective adoptive families. She wants to be able to know us on a personal level before she can recommend placing a child with us in her conversations with the mothers.

Now we are full steam ahead on our photo book. (This is a printed photo album that the agency will use to show the mothers as they try to decide on placing their child for adoption or not.) We plan on having it completed for approval by Friday the 8th. We have made significant progress on it this past week so I have every confidence that we can make this self imposed deadline. (digging through all these old photos is pretty fun)

We are also now working pretty hard to fine tune and submit our grant applications. It is certainly humbling to ask for $15,000 but God has used this as another way to grow us in sanctification. We are learning how to ask for help raising money, help organizing this yard sale, help actually running the yard sale (emails have not yet been sent on this front), help for items to sell at the yard sale. As I said, humbling. I have been a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude of this yard sale that we've planned, but the Lord has brought along several brothers and sisters to use their various gifts and help bear this burden. I am probably sounding like a broken record lately, but God has been so incredibly gracious!!

I am getting more excited every day thinking about the child/children that the Lord has ordained for the Henderson family. I just can't wait to see who He has in store for us!

(first time walking into our McDowell town home)

Yard Sale

We have gotten an official date for our Henderson Adoption Fund yard sale at our church.
On April 23rd we will hold a yard sale at the Imago Dei Church building in Raleigh from 7:30 - 12 noon.

We are super excited and have already received TONS of donated things to sell. I will edit this post later for more details and pictures of our crowded guest/baby room. If anybody wants to be creative and make a flyer for us, I won't say "no"!!

Meeting #2

We had our second home study meeting this past Friday between celebrating Luke's actual birthday and the Saturday spoil day that I had planned for him.
The meeting, again, went very well and was around 2 hours. This time we split up and each met with Walt for about an hour to go over our autobiographies and provide further details into our histories. Much like writing the autobiography itself, I found it to be a ton of fun with the different old memories that were brought up by the questioning.
We have been given a little more homework of things to think through and organize before our next meeting. One of his main points of concern is where we are with the funding. I was a little disappointed at his reaction because I thought we have done really well. (over half way there) But the agency is not able to place a child if we don't have the full last payment at the time of placement. Since we have very few restrictions on the child that we would be willing to take, we will most likely have a shorter wait time (Lord willing!!). His concern has increased ours, so please forgive us if you see several updates on fundraising activities in the near future.
As soon as the home study is completed we can begin to apply for grants and things. We are trusting the Lord's timing, but also trying to be proactive about getting applications as filled out as possible for submission as soon as the approved home study documents are received.

We will have our last home study meeting with Walt in 2 weeks (again on a Friday afternoon).

As always, thank you for your prayers!! They are certainly felt.

~Lynn & Luke

Home Study Process Begins

Well Team, after a couple of weeks of emailing the agency for a file update we were assigned an actual case worker! Then we waited for a couple more weeks for him to call as we weren't given any contact info yet.
Luke go the call last Thursday night and we were able to schedule our first home study meeting (the one in our home) for Monday February 8th. Yes, that's right, we had the first meeting this evening!

It went well and was not stressful at all. He gave us a little bit of homework regarding some parts of our file that he needs additional detail on, but for the most part it was a really easy meeting.
Our second meeting will consist of individual interviews with Walt and the third will be all together again. We are required to wait at least a week between each of the meetings. The last two meetings will be in a more central location as he lives 45+ minutes from our home.
After these 3 meetings he will write up our final home study and we will meet with the agency's founder, Doris, within a month of that. Then we will be available online for mothers to see as a waiting family!
It seems so close and yet so far all at the same time!

This past weekend we had a spur of the moment date. We spent the time reflecting on our childhoods and what we want to provide in the lives of our children. It was pretty surreal to have that discussion knowing that we're almost to the point where we could meet our child literally any day. I am so grateful  that I can look forward to that day with a longing that brings more than pain. Our God has been so faithful and gracious to change my heart and turn it back toward Him. I don't know that I could have enjoyed this time of waiting in this way just a couple of years ago.

Thank you all for your prayers, keep them coming!

 

 

 

 Little Lynn  

Ninja Luke

Happy New Year

Happy New Year Everyone!
We are praying that this is the year we add a little one to our family. But we are trusting in the Lord's timing even if it is not 2016.

We are so close to being a waiting family online for mothers to see our profile.
We have completed all our paperwork and only have our infant CPR training (this should be done by the end of January), our photo book, and the home study process. We have followed up with CAS (our agency) to try to get the home study & subsequent meetings scheduled.

We have raised/saved enough money for our next installment AND are actually over a third of the way to our goal!

I cannot believe how much has gotten done in the past 4 months! We are in shock nearly every day as we reflect on how smoothly the adoption process has gone for us so far. The Lord has blessed us with so much, and we can't wait to share it with our future child. We pray daily for that little one and his/her parents.

This past weekend we thought we might be pursuing a specific little boy in Texas, but his mother has decided to parent. Please join us in praying for their provision, her healing, and praising the Lord that she has chosen life for her son!

As always, we love you and are eternally grateful for your prayers.

(here's a little 2012 New Year flashback)

https://www.youcaring.com/luke-lynn-henderson-445032

papers, papers, papers

It is exciting to say that we are nearing the end of our paperwork!  I can hardly believe it, but we just checked, so it must be true!
Our agency is a Type-A person's dream.  They have an online portal where we interact with our case worker when we have questions.  There is a section where they have broken down our required documents, trainings, and other activities into several checklists as we upload documents or mail them to CAS we can check the item off the list and each checklist gets submitted to the case worker as it reaches completion.  She reviews the documents that we've uploaded and marks the list as 'accepted' if she has all the information needed.  Its a great help for organization, timing, and for reviewing when I feel like I haven't done anything towards the adoption in a while.
We received confirmation that our references have gotten their letters and are working on those for us.  It kind of makes it a little more real to know that some work is being done by others toward the end of Baby Henderson!

Additionally, I had some wonderfully encouraging conversations with several friends this week.  It was incredible to feel loved by each of them in such special ways. 

I have decided that we will do a Spring yard-sale to help raise funds, so if you live nearby and have items that you'd like to donate start thinking about it and making a pile because spring will be here before we know it. 

Lastly, one of our sweet talented friends has been busy working on some home décor items that she will be selling for our adoption at an undisclosed location on a Saturday in November from 9am - 3pm.  Please stop by Ozilia's Originals (this is a working business name) and check out her handy work! This is all done free hand which blows my mind, see the example below:

oziliascott@gmail.com if you want to place an order. (I don't know if shipping is an option)