CIS and Grants

Well we are off this morning to got to CIS for our fingerprinting. It will be so great to have this marked off of our list! Please pray things go smoothly and our paperwork is processed quickly. On another note I spoke with Gladney yesterday and they assured me that our homestudy is done and will be mailed out to me this week! Yay! Very exciting stuff. They mail us two copies and then we mail a copy to Kate at KBS Dossiers (a copy goes in our Dossier) and then I am not sure if we keep the other copy or it goes somewhere else. Gladney will mail one to CIS for us and then they can approve us when the fingerprints are processed and the homestudy is in their hands. Also, if we are going to apply to any grants we will have to make a copy of our homestudy and send it to wherever we are applying for the grants. We are looking to apply to a foundation called Caroline's Promise which is only for those living in North Carolina (which is great for us because competition won't be so high as a nationwide foundation) Here's the link: http://www.carolinespromise4u.org/assistance.html if your interested in looking around. Also the widely known Shaohannah's Hope : http://members.shaohannahshope.org/site/PageServer?pagename=homepage is another we are looking into. PLEASE watch the video called Hidden Treasures on the Shaohannah's Hope site, it made me cry and you'll love it. We are really amazed at how much of the cost has already been paid. This is completely God's grace! When we started we had NO idea how we were going to pay for everything but God has ben so gracious! We are now looking at the remainder of our agency costs, which will be due when we accept our referral and our travel costs (which will be quite a chunk of change since we are both traveling and will be in a hotel 8 days).
Our Dossier is coming along great! We are still waiting on just a couple items but those may take some time and the last thing we will be waiting on is our approval letter from CIS. We also had to have a refernce letter redone because the notary's seal expired in less than a year but we did have the most dedicated friend working on that and literally two hours after I asked her to redo the reference had it waiting on my doorstep with not just ONE but TWO redone letters (your amazing Alyson!). We had some family pics taken last week so hopefully I will be able to post them soon. It is very difficult to get two children to look at the camera and smile at the same time so we'll see!