God's Love for us

I have been thinking about God's love for us lately. That he is the ultimate Father of adoption, who adopted us. Without God's grace and love our adoption with V would not be possible. Jesus hears the orphans prayers and we have followed his calling. The love of a child through adoption is the greatest feeling! For a child who only spent 4 weeks of his life here with us is now our family. What a great God we serve! I am reminded by this just when V says "I love you mom!"

#waiting

I haven't updated in a while so I figured this was a good time! So many exciting things are happening as we are coming to the end of our paperwork. From the last time I posted, we have filed our Immigration paperwork with USCIS. That was 9 weeks ago!! We still have not gotten our approval, but should any day. It gets easier when you get assigned a case worker and have a "real" person that you can talk to instead of being someone's paperwork on someone's desk. We get updates from the case worker often. We have finished our Dossier paperwork, and as soon as we get the 171 approval from USCIS we can mail it to Ukraine. We are hoping within the next week or so. Starting next week, Ukraine will go on a 2 week vacation to celebrate Easter. All government offices close down. So we were told that our Dossier will be submitted to the government after May 13th. This will probably put our travel date in the middle of June for our 1st trip (SDA appointment) we are hoping. You never know because you are at the mercy of someone else's time with processing paperwork. There is nothing that we can do at this point but wait. Seems like this is the main theme for an adoption, waiting. Trying to remind ourselves that everything happens on God's timing and He knows best. We will get there, but the closer we get the slower time goes. We know we won't get to see V in May but June hopefully. Keep telling ourselves that we only have to go one more month without seeing him. The wi-fi has been out at their school for 3-4 weeks and we have been talking on the telephone and through VK. The past two weeks more of the telephone than anything. (EEEEEKKK) I'm going to have to work extra hours to pay for these international calls, but it's worth it. That 30-45 min of us talking makes him so happy!! (us too) You have to take the good with the bad. Some weeks we won’t speak to him for 7 days and then some weeks every day. So we talk as often as we can, when we can. He is practicing his English talking to us and he rather speak to us than type back in forth in Ukrainian on VK. He knows we will be coming soon, so he is having a hard time waiting. V keeps telling me what he wants to do when he is "home." He wants to play outside every day, eat good food, and spend every second with his new family. I asked him the other day about making friends in America and he said ok, but he rather spend time with his family. :) That makes me smile! We have decided that we might have to take two trips to Ukraine. If we did it in one trip, we would have to stay an awful long time. Two months. Well we can't do that because we both have jobs so we will have to break the trip up into two visits. Our first trip will be an appointment with the SDA (adoption agency in Ukraine)for them to approve us for adoption. Then we will get to go visit V at the orphanage and spend some time there with him. We are hoping he will not be gone away at camp for the summer. If the kids aren't on a hosting list they have to go to camp. We will then have to go to wherever he is to see him, if that is the case. We are hoping that they will let him stay at the school because we will already have a date assigned to visit by then. We will then be assigned to a court date. During that waiting period we will be returning home. It will probably be a 3 week span. We will go back to Ukraine for court and stay for another 2 weeks. The second trip can be the longest. After the court date the judge will make the child wait at the orphanage for 10 days before he can officially "come with us." They do this when the child has living parents in case they want to re-new their parental rights. That would not be the case with us, and have nothing to worry about. His dad is living but wants nothing to do with V. After the 10 long grueling days we can finally pick him up. We will then have to get new birth certificates, visa's, passports and we will have a meeting with the US embassy so he can be cleared to leave the country. All of that takes about 2-3 weeks so we will be hoping for the 2 week end and we can return home as soon as possible. We won't be taking Tripp or Hannah with us when we go. We will just be doing so much traveling in country; with the time change and the busyness of the trip we didn't think a 2 year old would enjoy it. It would be more torture than fun for him. For us too!!! Both times Tripp will be staying with grandparents, probably not realizing that Jerry and I are even gone. He loves them so. The region where V's school is, is about 8 hours away from the capital of Ukraine and we will be traveling back and forth doing a lot doing paperwork. Well, it seems as if our paperwork is almost done on our end... now it will be the hard part. Waiting. Waiting, Waiting, and more waiting. I will update when we get our approval from USCIS and our Dossier is accepted by Ukraine :) Keep praying that things go smoothing and in a timely manner for us! God is SO good ALL the time!! :) In the meantime we still need donations. We have a little bit of stuff left to pay for. All of the in-country travel can be expensive and we will both be out of work for a while. We still have 150 shirts left to sell! Please consider buying one to help out with the adoption. You can order one via PayPal here on the donation site: http://www.youcaring.com/adoption-fundraiser/bringing-vitalik-home-to-america-/39023 we can even ship them! They are $20 and come in sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL. Just e-mail me your size and address if you need them shipped. kendallhudgins@yahoo.com Thanks for all your prayers and thoughts!! Blessings, Kendall, Jerry, V, Hannah, Tripp.