The End Is Near

Hey Guys! I just wanted to post an update and let everyone know what's up with Kenzi's adoption. :) Well, as far as fundraising, we're almost done! We have a few things going on right now to get us over the hump and fully funded, here they are!

Kenzi's Hair Bow Auction

If you have little girls in your life, that one is for you! No starting bids for anything and super low shipping! 

Kenzi's Giveaway

Tons of crazy awesome items, get an entry for free, get more entries for donations to our FSP!

Last, but not least...we're having another puzzle fundraiser! Someone donated a gorgeous puzzle of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow to us. It's 500 pieces, and we're selling the pieces for $5 each. If you would like one, donate to the new chipin provided on the right of the blog. Anything raised above and beyond what we need for adoption costs, will go towards Kenzi's medical care (heart surgery, oral surgery, hernia surgery, etc). 

Isn't it pretty?!? I love it!!! I can't wait to see it hanging in our dining room!

Ok, so on to the other updates! We had to make a short notice trip to Nashville to get a couple more apostilles....between overnighting the paperwork, the certifications/notaries/apostilles, gas, and feeding the kids...it set us back over $200! But, it's done now and hopefully we are really, REALLY done with paper chasing now!!!!

Our paperwork is either on the way to the Judge, or with the Judge in Kenzi's region...I'm not sure which. I do know that once the Judge has the paperwork in hand, he either has to issue a date or request more paperwork within 10 days...so we have a semi-accurate window for when we should expect our court date. When we get the court date, we'll also know whether or not our 3rd trip was waived. People seem to think it will be waived, but I'm hesitant to get excited until I know for sure. 

So, in short...we're still waiting! I can't wait to get my sweet girl home so please keep praying for our family as we continue to pace the floors waiting for travel dates and funding to come through!

Much love, 

Cilla

PS....Isn't it amazing what love can do? These two pictures of Kenzi, the left is her RR photo, the right is her playing with her mama....and I love that she's wearing the same dress in both! <3 This princess owns my heart!

A Plea

This is going to be one of those posts that make trolls squeal with delight...you know the ones I'm talking about, where you breakdown and wear your heart on your sleeve and basically grovel for help on behalf of a sweet, innocent child, your child, that you've held, kissed, loved on...and left behind so you could continue the fight for their freedom from 6,000 miles away.

I try. I mean I really, really try to stay strong through this process, I try to keep myself busy with anything and everything so I can maybe forget that the little girl I love is halfway around the world, an orphan who doesn't even "get" what it means to have a mother. It kills me when I sit down and let my mind go there, to how much pain she is in from an untreated hernia, from rotted out teeth. How tired she is from living with a bad heart that has never been treated...I just don't understand how anyone can watch such a sweet little girl suffer, and not do what needs to be done to heal her literally broken heart. 

I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for travel dates. Waiting to hear whether or not the judge in our adoption has agreed to waive our 3rd trip. Waiting to see if my baby girl will be home in her room, in her own bed, in less than a month...an orphan no more. This little girl is going to go from orphan to princess overnight. Her life will read like a Disney fairy tale...we just need to get over this final hurdle...the hurdle being $2,500. 

How crazy is it that a $48,000 adoption has boiled down to a $2,500 need! I'm so eternally grateful to everyone who has gotten us this far, who has gotten our sweet Kenzi this close to  home! All we need is one final push to get us over this hurdle! Will you help? We have a giveaway going on right now, you can FIND IT HERE, and you could win an awesome prize for a very small donation. Please consider entering! It ends in 11 days!

I need to get serious about this financial need. It is truly, truly a need. We don't have money tucked away where we could pull from to cover it, we don't have credit cards we can put our plane tickets on if we end up not getting funded. We're tapped. We've sunk everything we had into this adoption before ever asking for a donation from anyone. This adoption, start to finish, is about $48,000, Kenzi had $10700 in her grant, we have $14500 in our FSP, and we put in nearly $20,000, literally everything we had, our savings, cashed in retirement, all of it. We are going on nothing but faith at this point. Faith that the adoption community won't leave a precious little girl behind. Faith that our friends and family will wake up and see how much these kids need parents, advocates, prayer warriors. All we have left is faith, and it's scary to walk into the final stage of this adoption completely blind, and completely dependent on the kindness of strangers, but that's what we have to do now, so please, if you feel led at all...help Kenzi come home.

Kenzi's Room

And the award goes to...

For the worst blogger *ever*....

Me!

So sorry I've been MIA for so long. I have been swamped, overwhelmed, on the verge of total craziness! lol

I'm also sorry for the shortness of this status update. Yo Gabba Gabba is about to end and my 2 year old will be bouncing off the walls again so I have to be quick!

THANK YOU to everyone who joined Team Pasha and Xenia and made our auction a success! We won the challenge and because of YOU 5 precious little ones will have a month long advocate! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

Our giveaway is still going on! Please check it out and join in on the fun!!! 

I'm gearing up for some facebook fun in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for that announcement! :)

Our dossier is on the way to Russia! We will hear very, very soon what our travel dates are! We are still $3,500 short, so please....if you feel led to help close this deal and get our girl home...now is the time!!!

Thank you so much, and God Bless! I will write more soon!

The Contest

The easiest way for me to explain the orgin of this contest, is to copy and paste a status update from a dear friend. 

Ok, so here's my thought: I'd like to do a race, to see which team of advocates can get "Team Kate" to $7500 or "Team Priscilla & Becki" to $7500 first, by midnight EST on August 1st. I'm getting ready to do a blog post on it. You can use your best fundraising techniques- including flat out begging, short auctions, whatever you can do, but we would do it for 10 days only- keep it intense and focused. The winning team (if either team reaches at least $5000 in donations in these 10 days) will get to pick five children that I will then feature on my blog and advocate for, for an entire month. I will advocate for them on facebook, real life, and the blog, as much as I possibly can and focus on them like I did my kiddos at 39. I will also ask as many of my friends who blog to also feature those kids at least once during the month, so we can spread the word as much as possible.

So yeah, I'm asking you to pick a side :) both sides will "win" in the sense that any money that comes in obviously benefits a kid getting home!

Priscilla Morse's FSP will need to read $17100 (http://reecesrainbow.org/29701/sponsormorse) and Becki's FSP (http://reecesrainbow.org/38523/sponsorlittle) will need to read $2185 for Team Priscilla/Becki to win!!! 

Kate Hogeland's FSP (http://reecesrainbow.org/35808/sponsorhogeland-3) will need to read $10,160 for Team Kate to win.

Now personally, I think it's going to be an interesting challenge. I wonder whose friends are going to push the hardest? I wonder if we'll see any matching donors pop up and offer to help push and meet goals? We have two different countries represented, 3 different special needs, a little something for everyone.

Ok, so who is willing to jump in? If either team wants to do an online auction, I will bring back a surprise of European chocolate to be raffled off for either one! First person to set up a Team Kate or Team Priscilla/Becki auction page and then ask me for it, gets that prize!


So, that was the beginning of what we will call....the contest! Becki (my team mate) and I have started an auction on facebook. It was thrown together REALLY fast since we only have until August 1st...so we were kind of scrambling looking for items to put in it, so we decided to have fun with the random stuff that ended up in our auction! lol  We are having a contest *within* the contest! If you have something funky, crazy, weird, whatever!! Please consider adding it to our auction! The owner of the funky item with the most bids, will win a prize! I hope you'll come have fun with us!!!


I've added a chip-in on the right side of my blog. If you feel led to join "Team Pasha and Xenia", feel free to donate a few bucks to help us win!!! Thanks so much!!!


Let the games begin!

Meet the happy couple who will benefit from this contest!!!!

Double Your Dollar

Hey guys! Just wanted to pop on and let all my sweet blog viewers know that something really cool is going on until Sunday night! A very kind, generous person has offered us a $1,000 matching donation for our sweet Kenzi! Right now we have $285 towards it, so by Sunday night, we need to have $715 more in our FSP! 


The total number we need to hit $1000 for the matching donation is: $11861


If we get to that number by midnight on Sunday...someone will put another $1,000 in, taking us to $12,891 which would put us at only $3889 away from our estimated FULLY FUNDED number!!!


Please spread the word, and help us get our sweet girl home! She's counting on all of us to help spring her from that orphanage crib!

Remember we have a pretty huge giveaway going on right now too, so you can use your money for good, and for a chance to will a pretty cool prize! CLICK HERE to enter the giveaway! We just added MORE prizes so don't miss out on the fun!


The thought of being less that $4,000 away from KNOWING we'll have the funds for our sweet girls ransom gives us so much peace! We can't do this alone. $48,000 is a TON of money, and how we got this far is a miracle. We just need ONE MORE miracle to get us to the end! Will you help? 

And don't forget! From now until Sunday night, your donation will be DOUBLED until we hit $1000!!!!! 

For Beatrice

Sometimes I think about what Kenzi's future might have been had we seen her picture, and looked away.


Adoption...
It's too expensive.
It's too hard.
It's too time consuming.


Special Needs Adoption...
It's a lifetime commitment.
We aren't 100% what we're getting into.
We aren't prepared for the added "burden".


All of these things cross *every* adoptive parents mind at one time or another. There is no shame in it, it's ok to be scared of the unknown...but sometimes you just have to take a chance, and every single child DESERVES to have someone take a chance on them.


We took a giant leap of faith when we committed to our precious daughter. We didn't know where the money would come from, where the love would come from, where ANYTHING would come from. We did know that we were led to her for a reason, and that reason wasn't to just walk away and pretend we weren't touched by that sweet face.


Then, we met her. Every doubt and fear...gone. All we knew was she was OURS, always had been, it just took us a little while to find her. We were smitten, in love, in awe...amazed at how beautiful she was, how smart she was, how FUNNY she was!! In our world, the sun rises and sets on our children, all 3 of them.


Every child deserves to have parents that are in love with them, who rejoice in every milestone they meet, from clapping their hands for the first time, to running a marathon. Every child should see the pride their parents have in their achievements, they should have parents that push them to reach their full potential, who kiss boo-boo's when they fall, who hold them when they're scared, who love them unconditionally.


It is nothing less than an honor that Dave and I get to give that to Kenzi. She deserves it, she deserves it 100x more than we are humanly capable of giving it to her, but rest assured, when that little girl comes home, she will never again go a day without knowing that she has a Mama, and a Papa, and that she is loved and treasured and accepted for exactly who she in in a family who thinks she hung the moon.


It's time to help another little girl find her Mama, somewhere out there is a Mama with empty arms. Maybe she doesn't know her arms are empty, maybe it will take a little push, a tiny nudge, for her to realize that there has been something missing in her life!


Sweet tiny Beatrice. She is only 9 months old, she has no eyes, she has no nose, yet she might be one of the prettiest babies I've ever seen! "Perfection" and "Beauty" do not always mean the same thing. Beatrice is beautiful and she deserves to hear it everyday of her life, she deserves a Mama who will cheer her on, hug and kiss her, and make her LOVE LIFE, despite the obstacles she will face.


Are you her Mama? Maybe so! If not, you can be her *advocate* until her Mama finds her. Please, join me in helping this precious baby find her forever family!


http://reecesrainbow.org/41025/beatrice


^^ This is her Reece's Rainbow link. Share it with the world! Blog about her, post about her on Facebook, Twitter, tell your mom, your sister, your book club, your co-workers, your roommate....tell everyone that THIS little girl, she's worth something, and she isn't forgotten!


Her grant fund only has $10, can we change that? I'm going to go double it right now, I can't afford much because I'm in the process myself, but I can afford to do SOMETHING, and I'm really hoping that other people step up and decide to help Beatrice too!


August 3, 4, and 5 there is a flea market in our town, and I'm going to have a donation jar out for Beatrice as well as several Reece's Rainbow bows available and the proceeds will go towards Beatrice. After the flea market I'll be starting a FB page, and 50% of all sales will go towards Beatrice. The other half will cover supplies and shipping. I hope you'll check it out when it's up and running!


Thanks for reading, and please keep this sweet girl in your thoughts and prayers!