Hello Court Date!!

All of those prayers are pulling us through, keep on praying!!!  We got our court date and we are praying for a quick turn around. We are leaving on a jet plane! The good thing is Kent and I are going to Rome on the way to Ethiopia!! I am not looking forward to meeting our daughter and having to leave her, but I am so ready for all of this to be finished, and our family to be complete. Please pray for our newest daughter to have health and happiness and for us to be able to do anything and everything for her to let her enjoy life to the fullest! The reports are all positive for our little bit, but the fact of the unknown and not being able to see her and hold her myself is so faith challenging. The good thing is, I have not alternative at this point, but to lay everything down at God's feet!  What an amazing blessing we have to be able to pray and turn all of our cares and worries over to the Lord!

Waiting, patiently, waiting....

Well, we are trying to be productive, and very observant of all of the time the Lord has blessed us with upon this earth..... but when you know you have a child on the other side of the world that you are trying to get to, you just want time to speed up! I have such mixed emotions right now, I don't want my children to grow up any faster than they have to, but I do want to get to our daughter so we can have her in our lives. If there were some magic pause button that we could all go to some kind of "not growing, not changing time" while we are waiting on our court date, that would be perfect! I will be working on that, and then in turn, I will be a millionaire!!!

        So we have been preparing baby "K"s room this week, here are a few shots of where our little princess will reside when she comes home! What an interesting thing it was, painting with three children, 8 years old and younger! Those pictures are on a different camera, but we will get those up eventually! So putting up the crib was a little easier than painting!

We are having a having the rocking chair re-upholstered and a window treatment made. Emma also has a twin bed in the room, because she feels she needs to sleep with her sister. So after we get all of that outfitted and some awesome wall decor, we will be ready. So please let the courts know that they can go ahead and give us a court date!!!
Thanks!!

We didn't get the call.......

Don't you guys wish I would actually keep up with this thing??? Sorry, I am not a very good blog hostess, so many of yours inspire me! Well there is BIG news at the McQuilkin household!!!! As of last Thursday June 3 2010, we have a new family member!!!

We accepted an infant girl off of our agencies waiting list! She is absolutely amazing! We are just going crazy over here, ready to meet her. The good news is, we will be meeting her faster than we would have originally, since we have to travel for court. The bad news is, we will have to leave our daughter in Ethiopia and return home waiting for an embassy appointment. We are going to be one of the first few families traveling under the new regulations with our agency, so wish us luck!! We are also a little nervous about court closures!! Ugggh, it is almost that rainy season time of year in Ethiopia! So we are praying that we get a court day before they close the court!!! Our newest daughter is beautiful and we can't wait to share her pictures with everyone, but we have to wait until after court. The good thing is, the pictures we will be able to share will most likely have been taken by us, or have us in them. God is Amazingly Awesome!!! We never dreamed our daughter would make her way into our lives this way, we thought we would get that long awaited and anticipated call. The funny thing to me is, I somehow thought that I had already passed all of the unknowns and craziness about what to expect in adoption. I think sometimes God is trying to say to me, "Sally you are not in control, I am, and you should just trust me!"

We mailed off our first "care package" today, to another traveling family. They insure us that they will bestow our love and gifts to our daughter and hopefully will be able to bring back some great new photos of her with them. I will try to keep you posted on when we hear of a court date!! Until then, we will continue to bite our nails and be anxious!!!

Lucky 13!

Well, we have now slowly but surely moved to #13! I never thought I would like the number 13, but now I find myself enjoying it! There have been a lot of things going on here lately. Emma has been asked to join the gymnastics team. She is so excited, but what a commitment for a 6 year old. It is 4 hours of practice a week, and somewhere around 4-5 competitions in a year. I haven't made a decision on this yet. Max is starting baseball season and we have his first game coming up soon. Samuel just continues to be an ever present and constantly happy 3 year old. As for our other daughter, we still have no idea! It is interesting trying to speculate on when she will or has been born, when we will hear about her, when we will become a family with 4 children..... so much to think about. Fortunately I have the other children to keep me busy so that my head can only dwell for so long!

So Kent was a part of the Charleston International Film Festival over spring break. He did a great job, and we got to spend an evening on the red carpet!! How exciting. His animated short film Al

fred Noyes' The Highwayman has been involved and entered into many a film festival the last few months.

Most exciting and newsworthy for me was an event I was privileged to volunteer for here in Knoxville, TN called Hope in the Dark. It was an event to benefit Africa and orphans. Wow, what a journey. Almost two years ago when adoption was put in my heart, I would never have thought that we would be involved in something like this here in Knoxville. I am so greatful to God, Mike and Beth Hamilton (UT athletic director who has 3 children from Ethiopia), Watoto Children's Choir from Uganda, Steven Curtis Chapman and family and B

lood Water foundation for making such a wonderful evening. I am sure it was a real eye opener for a lot of people who attended! They raised $230,ooo dollars in table donations at the end of the night alone. If you don't know anything about these people you should definitely look them up! Hopefully next year, our daughter will have been here with us for a while, and we will be able to sponsor a table in honor of her birth family and country. The amazing thing about this is that God seems to know exactly the right moments when I need a boost or confirmation that we are headed in the right direction. This event was yet another sign of our wonderful saviors presence in this world. So thank you God for making these opportunities available to all of these wonderful people to be advocates for orphans and Africa. So on that note I will try to leave you with a few recent photos of our crew!

Peace and Blessings!

Thats right, we are now in the teen digits!! Hopefully we will be surprised how quickly this spot will change as well!!! The new news is this: as of last week, you now have to make the trek to Ethiopia 2 times!! We will actually have to go appear before the court to state that we want to adopt our daughter and then leave her at the orphanage and return home:( Then we can go back when we have an embassy date to actually bring her home.

We are not excited about this change, but we will do anything needed to bring our daughter home. Emma says, "you will go for a few days to Ethiopia, and then you will go for a week and that will be scary!" I am sure this whole process is really hard to realistically understand when you are 7,6, and 3 years old, but someday they will forget all of this and just be happy to have a sister!

I am one of these people that sees the bright side. I think it will be very awesome that Max, Emma and Samuel will be able to see videos and pictures of us holding their sister. I think in some ways it will make it more realistic to them. All I know for sure is this: God has a plan, and I am sticking with it!!

Fourty- three!!!

We are now officially number 43 on the list!!! Although things will change again soon I am sure. Our consultant restated that referrals for infant girls remain around 14-15 months so we will possibly be looking at a referral this summer!!! We have been waiting eight months now and are getting very excited!!!

Look at my timeline!!!

I cannot believe that we have been waiting on our little princess girl for 7 months. I don't think anyone really reads these updates. but when I created this blog, I was looking at other peoples counters and thinking of how we had just begun the wait for our daughter. Now I look at it and think 7 months!!! How did this happen?? We are so excited. Samuel enjoys going into his baby sister's room, oh how this may change when she actually gets here!!