A special thanks......

to all those that help make our garage sale fundraiser a huge success. We raised a lot of money and are so thankful for all those that helped!  For those that don't know, Jana and I had a humungous garage sale last weekend to help raise funds for our pending adoption.  Friends, family, strangers, neighbors all donated items to the sale making it one of the largest garage sales I have even been a part of let alone seen.

Jana and I wanted to take a moment a once again thank all those that contributed item to the sale:

Courtney Festa

Amy Robinson

MaryAnn Lock

Rich and Bonnie Wallace

Ola Plaskon

Lynn and Lane Esden

Lynn Olmsted

Kevin O'Brien

Sherri Sartin

Our neighbors Heather and Lonnie for the use of their tables

Kerrie Ireland

Over the last month all these people have donated boxes of items that we were able to sell this past weekend.  Initially, Jana and I thought that this was going to be a bust.  At most we might get a few people to donate some small items but it turned out to be an episode of hoarders in our garage the days leading up to the sale. Computers, furniture, housewares, linens, clothes, toys, bikes, fish tanks, movies, books all made up the sale.  From 7:30am until 2pm we had people constantly in and out of our garage. By the end of the day, 3/4 of the items donated and in the sale were gone!

Although we were of course excited about how much money we raised we also enjoyed watching people happy and grateful for their purchases.  Many people from a variety of walks of life benefited from the donations we received and were able to take home with them.

Seeing as this was to benefit our adoption Jana had the great idea of designing shirts for each of us to wear highlighting our adoption efforts (see photo below).  Many people noticed and would ask what the shirt were for which sparked some great conversations about adoption and our personal story with complete strangers throughout the day. 

.............as a side note we moved up a total of 8 spots last month making our new waiting list number 23!!!  When I first saw that number I was in shock.  With the impending arrival of baby in the belly in March it looks like our referral could come somewhere around that same time if it continues to move at this rate.  Of course this would pose challenges for Jana to travel to Ethiopia and thus delay our acceptance of a referral, but I guess we will worry about that when we get there.   That topic can take up a whole nother blog.  In short, we are taking it one day at a time.   :)