So, what made you decide to adopt from Liberia?

I get asked this question often. I think these pictures explain it better than I ever could with my words. These are of a precious little girl named Ruby that was adopt by a wonderful family. You can check out their journal at www.petersonadoption.blogspot.com

Good news today...we have been officially accepted by Lighthouse. Now it's time to start the massive amount of paperwork that we will be required to fill out over the next few months. I've already received some of it in my email today.

Hopefully we will be ready to move forward with Adoption by Gentle Care next week. They are the agency here in Columbus that will be completing our home study. I have almost finished the first batch of paperwork they require, but we are still waiting to make sure that they can work out everything that needs worked out legally with Lighthouse before we send in the first of many large, non-refundable checks.

More good news...we have been given a nice head start on all of this financially. My family surprised us on Thanksgiving Day with a very generous commitment. We are extremely grateful. Several friends have stopped by with change they have collected, which we are ready to start counting. Any suggestions on counting large amounts of change? I really don't want to waste money on the machine at Kroger which charges you 8 cents for every dollar. We would like to use this change towards our home study which is going to be more expensive than we initially anticipated.

So, that's where we are right now. Thank you for your continued support and prayers.

We our beginning our first fundraiser. As a family we have been collecting our change. We are asking you to do the same. We have baby bottles for you to use for collecting your change. After it's full, you can drop it off at our house. We will dump it into the giant pot in our living room and you can fill it again. Inside your bottle you will find the following information:

Every 15 SECONDS another child becomes an AIDS orphan in Africa.
Every DAY 5,760 more children become orphans.
Every YEAR 2,102,400 more children become orphans in Africa alone.
Every 2.2 SECONDS another orphan ages out with no family to belong to and no place to call home.
Many of these children accept job offers that ultimately result in being sold as slaves. Millions of girls are sex slaves today, simply because they were unfortunate enough to grow up as orphans.
Not all are called to adopt, but anyone can love an orphan be helping other families adopt.

So many of you have called, emailed, or stopped by our house to encourage us as we begin this process. Thank you so much! Your prayers and encouragement mean so much to us right now.

I think we have settled on a local agency to do our home study. Our application should have arrived in Colorado at Lighthouse yesterday or today. Things will really start moving now.

Here we go...

Tomorrow morning we will be sending our application to Lighthouse Adoptions. This is the agency we will be working with to complete our adoption with Acres of Hope. We have already had a short phone interview with them, but this application will officially get things moving. The first step will be to find a local agency or social worker to complete our home study. Lighthouse is in the process of looking for referrals for us. Hopefully we will have more information soon.

This is the beginning.