Back Home and with a Passport Praise!

Koen and I are back from Fort Collins, Colorado for our Campus Crusade for Christ conference. Keith is driving back, but because he wasn’t feeling well today, didn’t make it very far.

My renewed passport came today!! Only 3 weeks and without expediting it, when it was supposed to take 8-10! That’s a praise! I was worried it could take months, and I would need it while they had my old and new one. So, I'm thankful to not have to worry about that!

Also a praise, but sad for us, is that my Grandma passed away on July 14th in the evening, soon after my mom, sister, and I had visited and said goodbye. I’m thankful she is with Jesus, but I will miss her, and am having a hard time remembering her when she was younger and still full of life. This is Koen with my 95 year old Grandma Beth (my dad's mom) in December. We will miss her.

On Monday we meet with our social worker to finish up the home study (I think we should be finishing up anyway). And, our agency recommended we fill out the I 600A form and send it to them, so when they receive our home study they can submit it to the gov right away.

Koen started walking about a month ago now, but while we were gone really started to prefer walking over crawling. Now that we're home, I'm realizing how much harder it's going to be to watch him, and there are so many more no-no's!

That's what this conference was- for all the ministries under Campus Crusade for Christ. Crusade has a ministry under it's umbrella called Hope For Orphans, that is just getting started and is partnering with existing orphan aid ministries. One of their focusses is to train people to start an orphan ministry in their own church. But, they are also wanting to partner with Crusade staff like us that work with college students, in order to send college students to needy orphanages in the world on mission trips. The vision is that many more students are interested in doing humanitarian work, than are students to do typical evangelizing mission trips. And, even non-Christian students are often excited about humanitarian work. So, believers involved in our ministry on campuses will invite their believing and non-believing friends to join them on these trips, and often the non-believing friends are moved by the lives of the students they are serving with, and it opens the door for them to know and receive Jesus as their Savior. Not sure if that makes sense when I explain it, but I'm excited about it. We talked with the Orphan ministry's representative and are probably going to help get these trips organized and recruit students to go. We're excited that we can combine our role with college students with our passion for helping orphans. We've been praying God would show us what to do with this passion, and He is starting to answer.

Koen in the apartment we stayed in - walking everywhere!
On one of our mornings off we went to play in the river. Koen loved the rocks.
Fellow staff from the northwest gathered for an afternoon at a ranch.
One afternoon we got to join other adoptive families at a farm. This is a hay ride full of adopted kids from inner city LA to Uganda to Russia.... The event was sponsored by Hope for Orphans.

Life and Death

We leave for CO in two days. My Grandma Beth is in the hospital- she’s had two heart attacks in the last 3 days. Nicole, a good and long-time friend of mine had her twin boys this morning – Teagan and Korbin – a month early. Life and death. I wonder when my little girl will be or was born. I hope she isn’t born yet, but I’m sure she’s at least in the womb. She exists and is alive!

We are currently calling her Dot. We’re trying to come up with an acronym for her : Darling Our Treasure, or Daughter Our Trust… Others we’ve come up with are: Liv (Love in Vietnam) and Dov (Darling of Vietnam)…. Koen can say dot (sounds more like dote or dut), but he said something along those lines when we asked him what to call her.

Her real name probably needs to start with a K – so she feels a part of the family (Keith, Kelly, Koen…..) We will see though.

We sent in more of our dos paperwork today – the VN application, the VN post-placement commitment, and the financial statement, all of which needed to be notarized.

Our social worker, Mike, also sent us a draft of the home study. Looks good, just a few grammar or misspelled names. We will meet with him the Monday after we get back, and keep this moving forward.

We celebrated my Grammi's 91st birthday a few days ago (not the one in the hospital). Here's some pics from the party:

Summer in Salem

We were in Salem all last week, so we could only get a few things done. We sent off about half of our dossier documents on 7/5.

Koen officially started walking consistently Saturday 6/29 when we arrived in Salem.

Koen went swimming in the little blow up pool in the backyard almost daily and loved it. He also got to play with Alexis and Gavin and Caleb – getting a few more bruises trying to keep up. He was pretty good and happy the whole time, sleeping well in a different place. I think we only had one night he didn’t want to go down well.

We also got to celebrate the 4th and Gramma's birthday while we were there.

We got an email from our agency today that they got the documents we sent and all looks good so far. The hard part will be the letter of intent and the Vietnam application – mostly because I’m not sure how carefully to write the application – in caps, dates.... Good to know we made progress anyway.

*Passport and Police

Sent off Kelly’s passport to the national passport service to get it renewed.
Also got on the WA state patrol website to get our record printed. Good thing is we have no record. We sent one plain sheet of paper printed from the website to the WASP to get them to write a notarized letter authenticated them. Then we can send them in to our agency.