More Dresses!

So I've decided that I absolutely love sewing.  When we do get a referral and eventually find out if we are going to be adopting a little boy or a little girl, you will be able to find me hunched over my sewing machine creating billions of tiny little outfits.  Secretly, I hope that we have a girl so that I can make a tutu dress that looks like this:

Of course, she will have one of every color and will always be in a tutu, no matter what the occassion.  OK, so maybe God shouldn't give me a little girl to play dress-up with....

Regardless, here are a couple of the dresses I made this past week.   

Lady Violet's dress (2T brown with torquois birds)

Miss McKenna's dress (5T Pink with white polkadots)

Cutting out the dress

I LOVE PLEATS!

Little Dresses for Little People

And the wait continues..... 

I stumbled upon this verse yesterday: 1 Samuel 1:27-28 "²⁷ I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him. ²⁸ So now I give him to the LORD. For his whole life he will be given over to the LORD." While John 13:7 is a verse that means a TON to our family, I feel like this verse specifically means a ton to me.  This child will be a child of my prayers and of my heart, not of my body.  And I need to constantly remember that he/she is God's child and is only given to me as a blessing.

I'm anxious and impatient to meet our little one, but I'm not even sure what I'd do if we actually got THE CALL.  I mean, honestly, I have practically no idea what to do with a tiny baby.  I've been talking to friends, and my mother, and everyone I can think of about how to care for a newborn, but I don't feel like I am any closer to having it figured out than when I first began.  For instance, how do you give a baby a bath and cut their fingernails? How often do you give them a bath?  Do all of the answers change if you have a baby of a different race?  There is so much to all of this and sometimes I get the feeling from people that it's all just trial and error....

While I'm not trying to get our nursery, or my brain, ready to have a baby in our home, I've been working on some crafty projects.  I told some really good friends like 6 months ago that I would "try" and make both of their daughters pillowcase dresses for this summer.  After going over how this was going to work without a pattern a million times in my head, I finally just started cutting.  I used an old garnet pillowcase that I hardly ever use as a trial dress.  Pictures of the completed project are below.  It turned out so well that I went ahead and added some ric-rac to this dress and gave it away.  Now that I semi-know what I'm doing, I started working on the dresses with the good fabric (pictures of this fabric below).  More pictures to come shortly, as I'm trying to make sure I document each step.  

Finished: mini-gamecock dress?

Bright pink polkadot material for Miss McKenna's Dress

Brown and turquoise bird pattern for Lady Violet's Dress

Lastly: I found this ridiculously cool charity that takes pillowcase dresses(which are super easy and inexpensive to make) and sends them to Africa for the little girls to wear.  Most of these dresses end up at the orphanage where the kids don't have a lot of clothing.  Check it out! 

Little Dresses For Africa

I'm Asking.....

I was talking to a co-worker just yesterday about our t-shirt fundraiser, and after buying 7 shirts (yes, you read that right, 7 SHIRTS), she quoted me some scripture: James 4:2 "You have not, because you ask not."  First off, this is not the first verse that popped into my head when I was thinking about fundraising, etc, etc.  I assumed that by letting people know that we needed money to finish our adoption, that they would automatically get the hint and just give it to us.  Turns out, she's been listening to me talking about this for months now, but I had never come out and asked if she could help, so she never gave me anything.  Apparently a lot of people are just like her.  Since I gave all the money stuff to God and confessed to Him that I had no way of coming up with this money on my own, he has showed up in HUGE ways.  I'll provide you all with a brief list of the events that have occurred over the past week.

1) We recieved a rather large donation from a highschool friend of mine and his lovely wife literally an hour after I posted about how I was giving the money problems to God last week.  This gave us just enough to write a check to our agency to get current on our fees.  HUGE RELIEF!  Ryan and I were not at all expecting to get such a gift from these friends and we are soooo thankful for their support and prayers. 
2) We recieved a call from Project 1:27 (check them out here: http://www.projectonetwentyseven.org/ ) informing us that they were going to be giving us their adoption grant.  We are so blessed to be part of a church that really values its role with widows and orphans.  We are now ahead of schedule with our fees! 
3) We got in touch with Ben Walker about creating adoption t-shirts to sell.  Ben works here: http://www.imageinksc.com/.  He's helping so much with making sure that the shirts look amazing and that we can make as much money off of them as possible.  He gave us tons of advice about how to sell them and for what price, etc.  I've never made shirts before, so I'm really glad that he's helping with all of the little details. 
4) We've had a ton of people order shirts!  It seemed that all we had to do was actually tell people that we needed help with this, and simply ask if they'd donate or buy a shirt.  We've also had a lot of people just give us donations.  After only 2 or 3 days of advertising, we have 40 or so shirts sold!  It's been such a blessing to watch God work.

T-Shirt Fundraiser!

We need your help! We've raised half of the money needed to bring Baby Shumpie home, but still have a long way to go. Please let us know if you would like to purchase our adoption shirt. They are $15 a piece and 100% of the proceeds go directly towards bringing Callen or Layla home.

The shirt will be based off of the painting I made after our first miscarriage with John 13:7 on it. We'll be selling both Yellow and Charcoal Grey shirts. If you're in, leave a comment with the color shirt you'd like to order and shirt size! You can pay using the donate button on the side of the blog, or just pay when we distribute the shirts. 

Where is my Umbrella?

About midway through last week, I suddenly got struck with my absolute favorite ailment: stomach ulcers.  Note that I ONLY get these when I'm ridiculously stressed out.  I look at them as God's physical reminder to me that being stressed out about everything makes me and everyone around me suffer.  So, as I struggled through the day, trying to figure out what to do to get rid of the ulcers, I started realizing that I was worrying about WAY too much.  Between Ryan somehow managing to break his shoulder and the looming financial issues with our adoption, I realized that I was standing in the middle of a thunderstorm and I had forgotten to bring my umbrella (God). It's so true that when it rains, it pours.  I'm fairly certain that I'm in the rainy season and I've been relying completely on myself instead of letting Jesus take care of my junk.

This whole time I've been pretending like I'm not ridiculously worried about how we are going to come up with the money for our adoption.  I've been talking about how I need to give it to God, but I never actually have.  I've never wanted something to happen so badly, but not had the money or ability to do it myself.  Instead of letting God show up, I've been frantically brainstorming fundraising ideas (all of which never seem to work.) 



So in lieu of my realization that I'm getting soaking wet for no reason, other than just being stubborn (I'm sure that God has been waiting for me to get to this point for quite some time).  I spent the weekend doing things that I LOVE, and hanging out with people that I LOVE, and not worrying about the other stuff.

 

 My two favorite four-legged babies finally making friends with each other.

 Now that Maverick and Maddox (I know the names are too similar, but it's too late now) are buddies, Maddox has decided he needs to do what Maverick does..... Graze..

 Of all the things he could be doing.....he chooses to try and be a horse.

 Calmly watching as Maverick runs his energy out and pretends he's a race horse.

 Sunday afternoon's Carolina baseball game.  Thanks to my boss who gave Ryan and I free tickets to the whole series.  I was hot, sunburnt, and had a fabulous time.

 Chillaxin in the AWESOME hammock that Ryan bought me.  Oh how I love hammocks!

I also spent some time painting.  Here is a super early picture of a ridiculously large painting I just started working on.  Hooray!