Our first $1,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wow! What a great start! We're really feeling the love! Our first $1,000 already! Wow.

So instead of doing real work I instead wrote out 21 little dollar bills which stand for the 21 thousand dollars we need to raise to bring Joel home. (I'm trying to make this huge amount seem smaller.) Every time we take one bill out by raising $1,000 I will draw another of these pesky $ disappearing (in this case EXPLODING!) off our list! And my art just gets better!

(PS: No it doesn't. Stay in school, kids.)

Now for the Q and A!

"You say you raised $1,000, but it only says $870 on the sidebar of your blog. What gives?"

Our sidebar dollar amount is updated every hour instead of automatically if I remember correctly. So it just lags behind a bit. (UPDATE: It lags behind a lot. It's been several hours. Maybe it updates twice a day?) (UPDATE AGAIN: Whoops, I forgot to hit the refresh button. There we go! False alarm, it works. Looks like it updates about once an hour.)


"Hey weren't you given the estimate of $24,000 for this adoption? Why are you only raising $21,000?"

Answer! It will cost us $24,000, BUT Joel already carries a $3,000 grant.

"How did he get $3,000? Voodoo?"

Actually we have been doing fundraisers for him for the last eight months. Remember the first one we did? We were so thrilled to raise $640! That seemed like such a huge amount! Then remember when a donor stepped up, contacted me and said, "We can do better!" And that donor matched donations up to $2,000 then gave a $500 bonus! And at the end of that blog post I wrote a letter to Joel's future mommy... which turned out six months later to be me. So... I'd read it to myself in front of a mirror but that might be awkward.

Yep awkward.

"Wait, you've been raising funds for your adoption all this time? How come I'm just finding out about this?!"

That's the zany part! We weren't planning on adopting him ourselves! We had lots of excuses for that! Please. Can you see me with two kids in wheelchairs running over my toes?! What about the medical expenses! Or the time it takes to do therapy everyday! We believed the lie. And I'm not saying everyone can and should adopt (and I will throw rocks at people who say that), but I'm saying we could and we closed ourselves to it. Until this little boy broke through that is.

"Why doesn't Joel's $3,000 get added to the Wesley grant?"

The $3,000 we raised before we committed to him stays in Joel's adoption account, and will never show up in our Wesley account. When we fly over and get our baby, then we'll get Joel's full grant. This protects Joel in case an adoptive family bails out for health, eligibility or other reasons.

So lastly, before I run off and do a happy dance, I just want to say a big thank you! We have gotten phone calls and emails and Facebook comments from our wonderful friends and family supporting us. And that's been backed up by donations in our account! Wow. I'm so full of love. This is the kind of humanity I want around my kids! Thank you so much.

Here's to you! And the first $1,000! And to the second!