Fundraising Poll

We are currently waiting for our home study to be completed so that we can send it on to the next person. I have been brainstorming and researching fundraisers that would work for us. We have come up with three different ideas....

I found these cool bracelets on one blog that I follow and really liked the business. It is MudLove and they have bracelets and some coffee mugs also. They sell these products and they give 20% to Water for Good which helps give someone in need clean water! These are just a few of the bracelets that they have to choose from.

Everyone loves T-shirts and I've seen many adoption shirts around. I do not have a design yet, but we are working on coming up with something that ANYONE would love to wear. I don't want something that says "Robinson Adoption" or I don't even know if I want a China specific shirt. Maybe something as simple as saying "Adopted" on the front...well because we are ALL adopted by God! This is just an example...this is not our design! But maybe something similar.

Lastly, I saw a post on Pinterest of an adoption Christmas Ornament! I haven't made one yet, but have the stuff to make one to see if I like it or not. I could not find an example for China, but here is one for Africa to show you the idea. Just something simple so that you can hang it on your tree and remember that YOU helped bring a child home to his/her FOREVER family!

*Please vote for your top choice. We may end up doing a couple of these, but just wanted to see what y'all were interested in before we go all in on one of them. :) Thank you for your support in our journey to adoption.*

Which product would you purchase for our fundraiser?

MudLove Bracelets

Christmas Ornament

Adoption T-shirt

Poll Maker

Home Study Visit

Almost 2 months have passed since my last post! Wow! We have been gathering paper work and had another interview in Nashville with our social worker. Everything has been going pretty smoothly. We had our home study visit on Wednesday the 14th. We had 2 weeks from our last interview to prepare for our home visit. Our social worker had told us not to worry about the home visit that it really wasn't as crazy as you'd think....but I was still nervous not knowing what she was gonna be looking for! Thankfully our house was already pretty child proof so we didn't have much to do in that area. I spent most of the day Tuesday cleaning and decluttering our house. We made sure all of our smoke alarms had batteries and were working. We worked on our special needs consideration list until about 1am on Wednesday. We wanted to have the list complete for her when she came, but we still have a few needs that we need to research and pray over. That list is so intimidating and hard to put a yes, no, or maybe on each need. So please pray with us about that list! We know God already has a sweet little one waiting for us, but we don't want this list to delay our process.

So Wednesday is here and we are going around the house making sure the house looks presentable and the kids are all dressed! I got up early and made pumpkin chocolate chip muffins so the house would smell like FALL....and for some breakfast for us and a treat to offer our social worker too! She gets to our house right on time. Our kids are wonderful and they actually talked to her when she was asking questions. Sierra even made a picture while she was here of "mama, daddy, and our little boy" in China. She said we were running to each other in the picture! Wow, what a sweet sister....and NO we did not pay her to do that! HAHA! Everything went great during the visit. She basically asked if we had any questions for her and we gave her some of the paper work we had been working on and then I showed her around our house. She then went through our 'next steps' with us and was on her way! She was at our house for maybe 30 minutes! I was relieved to have that part over with even though it really wasn't as bad as I had imagined it might be.

So our next steps are to get a couple more pieces of paper work in to our social worker and she will write up our home study report. Then she will send it to us and our placing agency for review. Then when it's finalized it will be sent in to Immigration! CRAZY!! And the waiting begins....While we wait we plan to start some fundraising. We are brainstorming some ideas and hopefully in the next few days I'll post some ideas and y'all can give us some feedback to help us in what direction to go with our fundraising.

We are so thankful to have such a wonderful group supporting us in our adoption journey!!

Interview, Paperwork, and More...Oh my!

We finally made our first home study appointment for Aug 10th. So thankful for Mrs. Robin and Ms. DeAnna for hanging out with our kiddos while we went for our first appointment! Y'all are AWESOME!! We made it up to Nashville right on time for our appt. NICE! Our social worker is very sweet and is working hard with us to complete our home study in a timely manner. The first interview was just a kind of an intro to home study. I had already filled out several things for the application so she had a little info on us already. She had a few get to know you questions for us up front. Then she had the blue folder of paper work to read over with us. Every time she went over a set of papers she would ask if we had questions...we'd look at each other and say no...I felt kinda like 'should I have questions?...I do feel overwhelmed.' Anyways she was very thorough with everything and really made sure we understood each part. So we left there feeling pretty good about our home study agency and social worker. Lots of paper work ahead of us, Dr appts to schedule for everyone, and background checks to be performed. Let the fun begin. She said the ball was in our court now...meaning we control how fast this next step will go.

After we finish a few questionnaires and our autobiographies we will schedule our 2nd interview where we will have separate interviews and one together if I'm remembering correctly.

Blue folder of paper work to complete!

As for homeschooling, we are on week 3. We've been easing ourselves into everything. At first it felt like a rocky start, but we had a really good day today! Sierra had been bored with learning new words, but today she read two lines from her first poem! She was so excited and couldn't wait to tell daddy how she could read. I'm so proud of my big girl! She's been going around all day reading to anyone who will listen. Savannah is finally interested in learning her letters! She learned how to write the letter E today and was so proud of herself! I too am very proud of my girls! They are so smart. I am enjoying being the one to teach them these things that will be with them forever. Thank you Lord for this opportunity with my kiddos! I'll add a few pictures of our learning these last few weeks.

We learned about apple trees and how apples grow!

We learned how the apple blossom
turns into the apple! So amazing!

Sierra's drawing of an apple.

We learned about God's promises!

Savannah learns the letter E!

Sierra learns to READ!

Home study in process...

Hey y'all! Sorry to leave you hanging for so long. We finally got our paperwork in to the home study agency and now we are trying to schedule our first interview in Nashville. We will have two interviews at the agency in Nashville and one at our home. This is the only real update I have on our adoption so far. I'm sure in the next several weeks we'll be gathering documents and getting physicals and such! Let the busy season begin!

On another note, most of you saw that our little man just had ear tubes put in on Monday. He did really well. I'm proud of my sweet boy. There's such a special bond between a mom and her son. I just can't explain it. We haven't ever had to do any other surgeries with the girls, we've been extremely blessed to have such healthy kids. Thank you Lord! But as we sat in the room as our little guy was getting ready for his very routine surgery, we looked around at all the precious kids there waiting to have surgery too. I wondered what kind of surgery they would be having and what their story was...I was thinking about our adoption journey and about all the sweet kids just waiting for someone to bring them home. Some of those kiddos just need a simple surgery and some love! I thought maybe this is why we are here right now in this hospital...and as soon as I had that thought, Jarred was saying the very same thing to me. Was this God slowly preparing us for what we may face in the future with our new little one? If so, I'm thankful that He is opening our eyes to these things now. He is always in the smallest and largest of details! I don't know what special need our little one will have, but I do know that no matter what God is preparing us to love this precious gift with all that we have!

Little man ready for a ride!

Lastly, we are planning to start Robinson Academy on Aug 10th. I'm a little nervous and excited all at the same time. This will be our first year homeschooling! Just want to ask for prayers that we all have fun and learn lots. 

A New Journey

About 5 1/2 years ago I started a blog so that family could watch our first baby girl grow and learn new things. I've since lost that blog and gained 2 more precious babies. Today I start a new blog for a new journey. I've been wanting to start this one, but had a hard time finding a blog name/title. I've asked Jarred to help me come up with something and here's what he came to me with..."Rocks by the River." I kinda chuckled when he mentioned it and then I realized he was for real...HA! He told me the story in Joshua 4 where God told Joshua to choose 12 men to take up rocks from the Jordan and place them by their camp for the people of Israel to see and remember what God had done for them. This blog is our "rocks by the river" for us to remember ALL the things God is doing for us throughout this new journey He has set us out on for His glory!

With all that...some of you already know where I am going with this. We are on a new journey together to bring a sweet child to their 'forever home.' Jarred and I have always talked about adoption and definitely wanted to adopt one day, but we weren't sure how/when/what that would look like for our family. So here is our story of how we got to this point...

After our sweet Savannah was born we talked about our next steps. We weren't sure if we should have another baby of our own or step into adoption. Well of course God knew exactly what we should do. I found out I was pregnant so that was our answer and we put adoption back on the back burner. We then had our sweet little guy, Seth! We were back in the newborn stage and just trying to survive day to day. We hadn't really talked anymore about adoption until Seth was a year old. God was then stirring in both our hearts again. I had come across Francis & Lisa Chan's book "You and Me Forever." It's a book about marriage and your relationship with Christ. We started reading that together. The first chapter we read talked about them adopting...and saying that God tells us to take care of the widows & orphans, and that we should "DO SOMETHING." Wow..ok! So then we just kept getting little whispers from God saying to do something to help the orphans. We prayed and talked to each other about what we had been feeling about adoption. We both agreed that it was time to get serious and look into starting this process! WHAT! Francis Chan said in a video we watched that he thinks you should be pursuing adoption until God says no and closes that door. So that is what we are doing. So far the door is WIDE open.

We are so blessed to have several friends from our church who have already walked the adoption road. I know God has placed them in our lives at just the right time. We've been able to talk to them and ask questions and get advice. Thank you for that!! Right now we have found an agency that we are so excited to be working with, our social worker is super sweet and really seems to care about our family. We are now about to start the long home study process. This will probably be the longest part of the whole journey. I plan to put a timeline of everything on the blog so that you can look at where we are in the process.

We are so excited to have y'all come alongside us on this exciting new journey!