Timing and Patience

Hello everyone!
Things have gotten increasingly complicated in our very simple lives. I am not one to put my kids in a lot of classes, we like to learn at home, exercise at home and do crafts at home. However, this year my oldest son got interested in baseball so we are now at baseball every Tuesday. My youngest daughter decided to try her hand at computer coding and finishes up her last class at Sylvan this Thursday. My second oldest, who wants to divide her adult life between short term missions to China as a therapist and a full time job as a baker, had the awesome opportunity to take a 9 week Wilton Decorating class through our home school co-op. So we are running every which way right now, which is definitely not the norm in our household! I am sorry that I have not been able to keep up with my writing!
Please allow me to fill you in on what we are doing now in our adoption process:
We have sent our dossier and fee into the hands of our agency and they are getting ready to ship it to China to be logged in. Once we get our log in date(LID) we no longer have to worry so much about deadlines. This is a huge relief. Our dossier was our last huge packet of paperwork. We are happy to say goodbye :-).
We have sent our paperwork and fee to immigration and are now waiting for them to set up another fingerprinting.
We have sent in our medical checklist to our agency. These sheets have every disability you can even imagine and many you do not want to on it. We are very open to almost every disability but there are many disabilities we think the agency would deny us due to the number of children we have in our home.
Many of you know that we have had our hearts set on adopting an older child. We received the heartbreaking news that we will not be allowed to adopt a child who is out of birth order. This means that the child we adopt must be 10 months younger than our youngest(Josiah just turned 3). We received this news 3 weeks ago and are just now beginning to recover from that news and set our minds on having another young one in our home. I will have another post on this subject at another time, as many people have been upset and some angry over our agency's decision. So stay tuned.
On another completely unrelated note but not really because it has to do with family: my amazing mother is battling bone marrow cancer- also known as multiple myeloma. I wont invade her privacy or mine by going into all sorts of details but I will ask you to be very patient with me, my time and my emotions.


Our prayer requests have not changed much :-) but here they are:
1- sorry! financials!!! We got to our deadline, passed it, received a VERY generous extension, passed that, and ended up having to pay the fee for our dossier out of funds from another of our accounts. We have bills to pay that may take a hit this time around. So please pray that we start making money quickly. We have a vendor show, another garage sale, a bake sale, and many other things planned.
2- for time for me- between trips to see mom, trips to drs, trips to classes with kids, keeping up with meals and cleaning and home schooling, and on top of all of that trying to plan and carry out fundraisers, Im is feeling a little overwhelmed. Please pray that God grants me extra times in my schedule to just snuggle in bed with my kids, spend quality time with Jeremy, and just look at my family. Praising God that school is almost over and we can enjoy a long summer.
3- for my mother, for pain management, relief from chemo side effects, and so much more.
4- for Jeremy who is trying to balance finding grants and being the provider of our home.
5- for me and my back. Knowing that now we will be picking up a baby in China I need to have time to work on strengthening my back, which is damaged due to years of working with people in wheelchairs. Once our child realizes that we are taking him or her they tend not to want to be put down and will want to be held most of the 2 weeks we are in China. Most importantly, however, holding our child also fosters attachment which is SO critical at the age our child will be. They encourage that a child attach to one caregiver primarily and it would not be good to have him or her attach to Jeremy first because as soon as we are back in the states he will be at work full time again. So pray that my back can handle constant carrying of a child who will be the size of approximately a 1 or 2 year old.
6- the referral process. This is by far the most difficult thing about our adoption. Children are brought to us, we review them, and then we decide who will be our child. There is obviously a lot more to it but this is basically what we are doing. So please pray for this very emotionally difficult process.

Thank you so much for your time reading through our blog. If you feel led to donate please do so by going to our gofundme account at gofundme.com/hoffmanadoption. Please continue to pray for us. We know this is a long time to wait, trust me, we definitely know :-). And we thank you for continuing to support us and ask us about our baby. Love you all!!!!!