Ways You Can Help

It has been so wonderful to share the news of our adoption with everyone. This has been such a long journey and it is finally starting! The most common reaction is "How can we help?" So we thought we would add an update with ways to help. There is no expectation or obligation for our friends and family to do anything at all, but enough of you have asked that we thought it would be helpful to identify ways for people to help:

1) Please continue to pray for us. Traveling with two small children for two months or more is no easy thing. We need people who will commit to praying for us. Please pray for peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control (when we want to scream too), for protection from disease, for the transition in and out of country. Please also pray for our bonding as a family. This is not an immediate or a smooth process and we will need the ability to endure. Psalm 121 I lift up my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of Heaven and earth.2 

2) We need an old WORKING iphone that is not currently under contract with a cell phone company. We will be able to buy a sim card in country and use this phone to facetime, update the blog and facebook while we are away.

3) Luggage - we plan to bring as much as we can to Uganda to bless the babies home. However, we don't have much luggage. We would like to purchase a few of these bins to pack in and take with us. Afterward, we can leave them at the orphanage for them to store supplies in.  

4) Donate Personal Care items to the orphanage. We are encouraged to bring gifts to the orphanage (but lets face it, we want to anyway). Out of all of their requests we have decided to help with the following:

• (new) children's underwear & socks
• Medicines (Children's Tylenol, Children's Cold Medicine, Children's Benadryl, etc.)
• Desitin
• Baby shampoo & soaps
• Baby lotions

5) Make a Donation. Many of you have attended one of our fundraisers along the way and we are so thankful for the outpouring of generosity we have seen. As we face the possibility of an extended stay in country we are again trusting God to stretch our finances (even the most modest rates for staying in country add up when you are staying for 8 weeks or more!). Plus, the addition of Cara on the trip now adds some additional costs we had not budgeted for when we first did some financial planning over two years ago. If you feel led to you can give online at www.youcaring.com to help us cover these costs.

Helping After We are home:

1) Gift Cards - When we return home we will be overwhelmed. Gift cards for groceries or restaurants that have a take out option will help us grab dinner in a pinch. They will also help with "date night" since we won't be able to use traditional babysitters for at least a year.

2) Take Them a Meal - our church will be setting up a meal plan for us at www.takethemameal.com where people can sign up to bring us a meal in the weeks after we return home.