We chew, Hebrews, They Choose

So far in 2015 we are seeing some slow but steady progress in our adoption process.  In the summer of last year I felt like we were being called to do a Daniel Fast in January if we didn’t have a new family member by then.  A Daniel Fast is a fast running for 21 days where participants only eat fruits, vegetables and grains--no sugar, no preservatives and no animal products.  In addition to the food restrictions it’s also a chance to seek the Lord and His will and in my case take a break from running.  For us this year we wanted to focus on God’s will for our family after all, the amount of money needed for the process still seemed so far off and we were having little luck with grants.  Maybe we needed to take a different approach?  Were we being called to do a foster care or special needs adoption?  We weren’t sure but as the 21 days of praying and fasting went on we started to see clearly.  One verse that stuck out to us was “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” Hebrews 12:1.  This verse gave us peace about the journey we were on.  If it took several more years to add to our family then so be it.  That would be His will for our family.  About a week after the fast ended we got a call that we had been selected for a matching grant.  It further confirmed that we were on the right path.

Through the amazing generosity of our friends and family we were able to receive the maximum amount for our matching grant in just about half the time allotted for it.  Progress was being made but it still seemed so far off.  We checked with Pauquettes and found out there was an agency in Chicago that was charging less than we had initially thought we needed.  After finding out how much we’d receive in tax returns it was go time.  We were able to make the long awaited call to Pauquette’s saying “Ok we are ready to start having our profile shown.”  This set off several long nights of working on our profile book but it was well worth it.  It wasn’t long before our profile books were shipped off to Pauquettes and on to the agency in Chicago.

It’s exciting to know our adoption now is in someone else’s hands.  We have tried so long to save, find extra sources of income and write grants.  Up until this point we were still responsible for when this process would continue.   In some ways we still do hold the reins.  If we are able to add another $2000 to our adoption account we’ll have enough to share our family profile with several agencies that cost more.  That could significantly change how much longer we wait for a new family member.  Even though that is true, it is still crazy and exciting to know that at any time we could get picked to be adoptive parents.  With one phone call our lives, our schedules and our family dynamics could change.  I pray that God would prepare us when the time comes and that He would grant us patience in the waiting.

Prayer points:

• patience for us
• guidance of where and when to send out family profile to other agencies
• pray that God would prepare MaeLynn for the role of big sister
• for the birth parents of our future child and health for the child
• that we would be wise in our spending

How you can help:

• pray for us
• make a delicious meal.  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  Twenty percent of all sales go into our adoption fund.  Thank you to everyone who has already purchased products.  For more information or to order go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse
• buy a piece of our puzzle and be part of our story.  See previous blog posts for more information

Hurry up and wait

Hello there!  I’ve been meaning to update the blog for a while but two things keep stopping me.

1) Sheer busy-ness:  parenting a two year old, Youth for Christ, selling Wildtree, grant writing, MOPS, running, need I go on? 

2) Always wondering if I’ll have something new and significant to add in a couple days. 

Most of the summer Clint and I worked on our home study in one way or another.   We would get our education done together at night after Mae had gone to sleep.  As a psychology major in college I found topics like abandonment issues and stages of adoption-related grief very interesting.  For Clint it was a bit more of a challenge, but he took it all in stride and did great through all of it.  During this time we were also filling out stacks of paperwork and going to various places to get specific documents signed.  Along the way, we have had a lot of help from friends and neighbors such as our neighbor Sandy who we discovered is a notary public.  That saved us a lot of time and inconvenience as most of our documents had to be notarized.  What a huge help!  Also, if I had this to do over again I think I would print off a lot of labels with Pauquette’s address on it.  As time went on, I ended up writing their address over and over on envelopes that were given to different government agencies and departments to send documents in for our home study to be completed.

Ideally, now that the home study is completed, we would select several agencies that we want to work with for a child placement and send in our family profile.  Then we would wait for the much anticipated call from the agency that we had been picked by a birth-mother.  The Lord has had different plans and is placing another obstacle in our journey, a financial one.  We thought if we just kept plugging away and saving, that we’d be able to send our profile to at least one agency with a lower fee before the end of 2014.  When I called Brian at Pauquette’s to share our plan, he informed me that the first potential agency to which we would send our profile had raised its rates above what we can afford, and was no longer working with them.  From the very beginning of this process Clint and I decided that it is best for us to wait to submit our profile until we know for sure we have the money to pay for the full adoption.  We know that the emotional strain of being placed with a birth-parent and then not having the finances to back it up would be horrible on our end, and potentially on the birth-parent as well.  So here we are saving and waiting, waiting and saving.  I feel like in this waiting process I am learning so much about the Lord’s character.  There are times when I have said to Him “Why isn’t this happening faster?  I thought this was Your will for my family.  I want my baby to be home.”  The response I usually get is “I am enough, it will happen on My time.”  How can I argue with that?

Prayer points:

-patience for us

-favor by the people who will be potentially selecting us to receive adoption grants

-for the birth parents of our future child and health for the child

-that we would be wise in our spending

How you can help:

-pray for us

-make a delicious meal.  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  Twenty percent of all sales go into our adoption fund.  Thank you to everyone who has already purchased products.  For more information or to order go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse

-buy a piece of our puzzle and be part of our story.  See previous blog posts for more information

From the outside looking in

Our home study is officially underway!  On May 20^th we drove down to Portage and met with Brian Tool of Pauquettes Adoption Services.  Other than a lot of questions, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The couple weeks prior to this we had worked on answering a handful of essay-like questions about ourselves so the agency could get to know us better.  Clint and I both separately typed up our answers to questions such as “Tell us about your life growing up” and “What are your future career aspirations?”  Never ones to be brief on topics like this, Clint and I both were relieved to get all of the questions done.  I personally rewarded myself with a couple marshmallow peeps and a new issue of Runners World.  Our interview with Brian was very low key; he answered some questions for us, let us know what to expect from here on out, shared some stories about his life as an adoptive parent and adoption social worker of 35 years and, yes, we did talk about our essay questions as well.

The following Tuesday it was Brian’s turn to make the trip.  He came and visited out happy abode here in Marshfield.  I’ve seen a meme on Facebook that says “I clean my house more in the 10 minutes before someone comes over than the rest of the week.”  The same can be said for a home study—all of the cleaning and organizing we had be putting off for so long magically got done on Memorial Day and the hours before Brian’s arrival.  His visit again was very low key and relaxed.  He toured our house and checked out our backyard and garden (Clint’s pride and joy).  MaeLynn joined us for part of the time; being her typical self she kept walking past Brian and saying “hi.”  Our cat Oscar being his typical self was very interested in Brian and tried in vain a couple times to jump on his lap.  All in all child, pets and neighbors all acted normal during his visit which is just what I was hoping for.

Now comes the homework part of our home study—20 hours of education to complete (most of it online), forms to fill out and a profile to create.  Clint and I agreed that we would sacrifice at least one night a week that we would typically watch “Scrubs” or “Sherlock” on Netflix to hammer out education instead.  I started a file on the computer yesterday to put pictures in for a profile book and I’m working on making goals of when to have certain clumps of paperwork done by.

I realized this morning a lot of what this boils down to is how people see our family.  From the outside looking in who are the Gosses?  What do we stand for?  How will we parent a child that is not our own biologically?  Of course I want them to see a loving family that has room for more members, people who love God and follow Him, living in a home that is safe and close to a couple parks.  But what else?  Should they know too that we are a snuggly family that loves hugs and Eskimo kisses?  Or the fact that we like to watch birds and squirrels in our backyard while we eat breakfast in the morning?  I don’t know.  I guess ultimately I want them--whoever “them” may be—that we are so excited to do this and would love nothing more than to add to our family through adoption.

Prayer points

• ·         the biological parents of our child-for their health and wellbeing
• ·         for efficiency and timeliness in getting our paperwork, education and profile done
• ·         for guidance in choosing which agencies to send our profile to
• ·         Our finances: that we would be wise in our spending and that God would provide extra money for us to put away to pay for the adoption

How you can help

• ·         Pray for us
• ·         A couple smaller fundraisers might be on the horizon—I’ll post when I have more information
• ·         Make a delicious meal!  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  With a possible promotion in sight, now is a great time!  All of the proceeds from my sales continue to go directly into our adoption fund.  Thank you so much for those of you who have already purchased from me!  If you enjoy the products, tell your friends!  For more information, or to order, go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse  

Big P, little p, what begins with P?

One of big-sister-to-be MaeLynn’s favorite books is a Dr. Seuss ABC book that has every letter in the context of “Big ___, little ___, what begins with ___”  Clint and I both have it memorized.  I felt like it was fitting this time, all of my updates start with P.

Patience-We got a call from Pauquettes about 1 ½ months ago saying they were ready to move us off of the waiting list and into the home-study process.  It’s great news, but we realized we need to be a little more financially prepared before we start the process.  I told Lynn that we were still hoping to be ready for placement in October so we agreed to plan for our home-study in June—if we had saved enough by then.

Promotion-After getting the call from Pauquettes, it really motivated me to get a promotion with Wildtree.  If there was something else I could do to make sure we stayed on schedule to bring our son or daughter home in a timely fashion I wanted to do it!  I called my up-line leader and started working on a plan so I could promote to team leader.  So far it’s involved some extra training and stepping out of my comfort zone.  I need two months of strong sales and recruiting to do it.  For a while it was looking like I was on track to make my numbers this month but if all else fails I’ll keep trying!

Praises-God has been blessing us financially in a couple different ways.  First of all the His Kids Sale on April 5^th went well. We had a good turnout, thank you to everyone who helped, attended or donated rummage sale items!  A shout out to Diana Ugoretz and Aimee Clay for going above and beyond the call of duty to make this event a success.  Overall it raised $2,600 to be divided between the His Kids Fund and MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers).  We plan on asking for some of the money raised to go towards our adoption.  We are planning on making this an annual event in hopes that it will make adoption a reality for more families.  We have been blessed with a couple unique financial opportunities these past couple months.  As I type this Clint is hard at work on the sound system for a wedding at church.  Two times in March I was asked to judge 4H speaking or drama events—both of which I got paid for.  As a result of that too I now hold an official 4H fair judge license.  Hopefully this will provide me with more opportunities to judge this summer while adding a little here and there to our adoption fund.  Also for the first time since we have been married, we received a tax refund—enough to pay off what we had lingering in credit card debt and add to the adoption fund.  Thank you Heavenly Father for how you are working in our finances!

Plans-I started writing the draft of this blog about a week ago.  Not long after that I realized our schedules are filling up and if we were going to do our home-study soon we better get it scheduled.  After looking at Clint’s teaching schedule I realized June wouldn’t actually work so we have the two parts of our homestudy scheduled for the last two Tuesdays in May.  OH MY GOSH THIS JUST GOT MORE REAL!  And so begins the first of many moments where I will question, “Did I do this right?” and “I hope we look like responsible people.” For anyone who has adopted in the past, we’d love your words of wisdom on preparing for home-studies.

Prayer points

• ·   the biological parents of our child-for their health and well being
• ·         for our upcoming homestudy
• ·         Our finances: that we would be wise in our spending and that God would provide extra money for us to put away to pay for the adoption

How you can help

• ·         Pray for us
• ·         Make a delicious meal!  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  With a possible promotion in sight, now is a great time!  All of the proceeds from my sales continue to go directly into our adoption fund.  Thank you so much for those of you who have already purchased from me!  If you enjoy the products, tell your friends!  For more information, or to order, go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse  

And the winner is...

Well after much searching and speculation we have chosen an agency to work with.  This process took a little while--as is evident by the nearly 3 month gap in posts.  We met face to face with two agencies, talked to another one over the phone and then also did some searching online.  There are some amazing agencies out there working hard every day to get kids placed in loving homes.  When it all came down to it, we needed to find the one that fit us and our situation.  The agency we decided to go with is Pauquettes.

In late January we submitted a sheet requesting to be on their waiting list—while it was a simple sheet of paper I think it’s probably the most excited I have ever been to write on a sheet of paper!  On it we indicated that we would be open to a child of any race up to about 12 months of age.  We also said that we would be ready for placement beginning in October.  Only the Lord knows the real time table involved here but we felt from our perspective that this would give us enough time to get our house and finances ready.  Of course too this just means that that is when our profiles start being shown to birth families, it could take many months after that for someone to pick us.

In other news we have set the date and started work on a fundraiser to be held at North Ridge Church called the His Kids Sale.  Held April 5^th 9:00 am to 2:00 pm, this event will include vendors and crafters from around the area, a silent auction, a bake sale and a garage/rummage sale.  It will be held at North Ridge Church, 1021 W. McMillan Street in Marshfield.  Three quarters of the money raised will go into the His Kids Adoption Fund (a fund at our church that helps families offset the cost of adoptions) and the other quarter will go to the local MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) chapter.  We are hoping to receive some of the money raised at this event to put towards our adoption.  If it’s a success I’d love to make this an annual event and bless as many pre-adoptive families as possible.

In addition to planning the event we are also working on hammering out some education hours or should I say working on figuring out how to hammer out our education hours.  The state of Wisconsin requires about 20 hours of education during the adoption process.  I was supposed to do a couple hours via webinar a few weeks ago but it got cancelled due to the presenter having a family emergency; it has yet to be rescheduled. 

Beyond that we are just listening—listening to the stories of adoptive families and trying to get a feel for what to expect.  If you have a story to share we’d love to hear it.

All I know for sure is an adventure awaits us!

Prayer points

• the biological parents of our child-for their health and well being
• The His Kids sale, that vendors and crafters would come forward, that we would get a good amount of donations for the garage sale part of it
• Our finances: that we would be wise in our spending and that God would provide extra money for us to put away to pay for the adoption

How you can help

• Pray for us
• Do some spring cleaning—if you have any unwanted items that we could use in the garage/rummage sale we’d be happy to take it off your hands for you
• If you are a vendor or crafter have a table at the His Kids Sale or donate something for the silent auction or bake sale
• Come to the His Kids Sale.  Here is the Facebook link to it:  https://www.facebook.com/events/342472275895254/
• Buy a puzzle piece, the price is up to you.  If interested please email me at Elizabeth.gosse@gmail.com
• Make a delicious meal!  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  All of the proceeds from my sales continue to go directly into our adoption fund.  Thank you so much for those of you who have already purchased from me!  If you enjoy the products, tell your friends!  For more information, or to order, go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse  

All I want for Christmas is a winning lottery ticket

Last Wednesday we took a two hour road trip to Portage to visit Pauquette’s adoption agency.  I’m not sure what I was expecting; all I knew was that I had really psyched myself up for it.  I had psyched myself up in good reason too, after all this was the most serious adoption action we’d ever taken.  This meant my dream was getting closer to becoming a reality *cue the happy dance*

We met with a fantastic woman named Lynn.  She explained the process to us in more detail along with the cost and what to expect along the way.  She told us that their Interstate program worked with agencies in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Chicago among several others and that most of the babies adopted out of these programs are not white.  Lynn was very knowledgeable in all things adoption related and her heart for adopted children and transracial families was evident.  It was a pleasure meeting her. 

We decided that we’ll look at another agency or two.  While we both really liked Pauquette’s and have heard excellent things about them, we want to make sure we are getting the best fit our family and our needs.  In the meantime I think we might start working on our 18 hours of required education.

The financial aspect of this whole process still discourages me and scares me sometimes.  I look at where we are at and think that we have so far to go.  “At this rate MaeLynn will be 5 years old before she gets a little brother or sister,” I think to myself.  Alas I have to remember God’s goodness, faithfulness and timing—it’ll all work out in His time.  He is already working in amazing ways and we have been able to save more than we had anticipated.  Regardless, it would be really convenient right now if His plan and timing involved a winning lottery ticket or something of the sorts.  Tis the season right?

Prayer points

• Guidance in picking an agency that meets our needs
• the biological parents of our child-for their health and well being
• Guidance in planning a potential craft/garage sale fundraiser in the spring
• Our finances: that we would be wise in our spending and that God would provide extra money for us to put away to pay for the adoption

How you can help

• Pray for us
•  Buy a puzzle piece, the price is up to you.  If interested please email me at Elizabeth.gosse@gmail.com
• Make a delicious meal!  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  All of the money I make with Wildtree after taxes and supplies will go into our adoption fund.  Go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse 

Thank you everyone for your outpouring of support and prayers.  We are truly grateful.

Our journey begins!

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Well this is step 2 or 3 out of what could be a million steps.  Our journey could take 6 months or it could take 6 years.  I’m not sure what God has in store for us.  All I know is one thing:

We want to adopt a child

There, I made it cyberspace official.   In our hearts we long to bring an infant into our home that would otherwise not have a home or worse yet, not have been born at all.  We know there are people struggling out there with unexpected pregnancies.  Our desire is to come along side one and provide a home for their child—a child in the United States, perhaps of a different race.  Idealistic?  Sure.  Possible?  Absolutely!

We titled our blog “Piecing together the Gosses” because in essence that’s what we are doing in the coming months and years.  In each post you’ll see the progress we are making on our adoption fund through our puzzle.  We purchased a puzzle with 500 pieces in it, each piece representing another addition of money to our adoption fund.  An average adoption ends up costing $20,000-$30,000.

In addition to the picture on the front of the puzzle a different picture will develop on the back side of the puzzle.  On each piece we plan to write down where the money came from-from who, where or what.  This gives our adoptive child a story.  They will know what it took to bring them into our family-all 500 pieces of the story.

When you think about it an adoptive family is a lot like a puzzle.  Each person or piece comes from a different part in the box (in my case Massachusetts, in Clint and MaeLynn’s cases Wisconsin) yet is made by the same Creator.  Each person or piece looks slightly different and when all of the pieces come together they make a beautiful picture.

We invite you to come on this journey with us as we piece together our family!

How you can help

• Pray for us
•  Buy a puzzle piece, the price is up to you.  If interested please email me at Elizabeth.gosse@gmail.com
• Make a delicious meal!  Buy Wildtree products or host a Wildtree party.  All of the money I make with Wildtree after taxes and supplies will go into our adoption fund.  Go to www.mywildtree.com/lizgosse

Prayer points

• the biological parents of our child-for their health and wellbeing
•  Our meeting at Pauquette’s adoption agency on November 21^st: patience in waiting for it and guidance with how to proceeds
• Our finances: that we would be wise in our spending and that God would provide extra money for us to put away to pay for the adoption