Garage Sale Recap

This really was the garage sale to end all garage sales. We (the Sloniger, Gumm, and Bruyns families) have been blessed to overflowing with donations from people over the last couple of months. We filled up Jen’s carport, storage room and patio and my garage. So much so that we decided to just sell the stuff already at Jen’s house this weekend, then bring the leftovers to our house for another sale this weekend.

We spent about 10 hours on Thursday pricing things and trying to get stuff organized as best we could, but honestly we were very overwhelmed. Stacey and Sherry came to our rescue and helped with pricing for several hours too.

I didn’t get to bed Thurs until about 12:30 and it was at least 1:30 a.m. before I fell asleep. I was up again at 4 to head to Jen and Dustin’s house. We started pulling tables out into the driveway, moving out the big furniture, etc to start the sale at 6. Dustin put our alloted 6 signs (city requirement) and the traffic started to flow. We got quite a bit of traffic from moms after they dropped their kids off at school, even people on their way to work.

Things we learned:

• People will buy it. Seriously, the stuff you think is junk, someone thinks is great. Honestly, some of the stuff we didn’t even know what it was. Put a 25 cent tag on it and you can guarantee that it is bought.
• Clothes - typically not a huge seller but we had TONS of them - seriously like at least a 20 huge yard garbage bags full. Jen had the great idea of doing Fill A Bag for $5. I bought a couple rolls of 4 gallon trash bags (like for little wastebaskets). Then we just laid a sheet out on Jen’s lawn and dumped the clothes in huge piles. There were people who literally spent an hour sifting through just the clothes. We didn’t even get all of them put out. I think this weekend we’ll try to sort them a little better (we did just kids and adults last weekend) and hopefully we’ll get rid of even more of them.
• There are some people who will ALWAYS negotiate with you. It’s a $1 dish and they want to know if you’ll take 50 cents for it. Come on!
• Stacey told me that in her experience Fridays are actually better garage sale days than Sat. and she was RIGHT. Our take on Friday was almost double what we made on Saturday.

We closed up shop about 1 on Friday afternoon. We were all soooooo tired! I was in bed by 7:30 that night.

Saturday we were back at it from 6 a.m. til about 2. The traffic does really die down around 1 though. Then we loaded up all the leftover stuff to bring it over to our house. We’ll add our garage full of stuff to it and have at least one more day of sale this weekend.

Here’s a few pictures but really, they don’t even give you an idea of the amount of stuff we had.

This is the trailer loaded up with all the leftovers. And that is Kim’s way-too-smart 3 year old Judah who pulled the tricycle up to the trailer, got out and proceeded to lower the trailer down until it was resting on the back of his bike

Garage Sale Day 1

We are joining with two other families in the West Valley to have a garage sale w/ proceeds going toward our 3 Ethiopian adoptions. So many friends and family have given an abundance of stuff. Jen was seriously stressing with all the stuff we had stored at our house. We did 7 hours of sale today and will do at least 7 tomorrow. We were blown away with how well we did today. But like Jen I’m not going to tell yet. You’ll have to tune in tomorrow night We’ll give you some pictures too so you can see how much stuff we had.

The Naming Issue

Lots of people have been asking us “Are you keeping their names?” For those of you who don’t know us in person, and therefore don’t know their actual names, you’ll have to read this with some imagination

B-girl’s name is short (only 4 letters) easy to pronounce, and beautiful. It means “redemption” which is awesome. It’s not something you’ve probably ever heard as a name but it would just be another “unusual name”. W-boy’s name means “I have a brother”. It is longer (11 letters) and a lot harder to pronounce by looking at it (or even hearing it - usually takes people a couple times). Yet it rolls off our tongues, even the kids and I think it’s pretty cool. It does manifest a nickname of 5 letters which I use a lot (and then Natalie corrects me with his whole name).

At 8 and 7, obviously their names are much more entrenched then those adoptive parents bringing home infants and toddlers. These are names their parents gave them and the names their grandmother still calls them.

So we’ve done a lot of reading and talking to other adoptive parents. Seems that a lot of adoptive kids WANT to be given American names. I don’t know if they realize that it will help them fit in or if all things American are just “cool” and therefore they think it’s cool to have American names.

So for now the plan is to come up with American names that we would like either as a first name OR a middle name and let them decide. If they choose the American names then they will keep their Ethiopian names as their middle names.

If they decide to use their Ethiopian names we will respell W-boys name so that it is more phonetic and ideally someone looking at his printed name could at least get close the pronunciation.

Now we just have to come up with names. Hm?

Officially Certified!

Just when I was beginning to get a little impatient…we are certified by the AZ courts to adopt! Yeah! There was an email from our social worker waiting for me this evening.

So I will pick up the homestudy paperwork from her on Monday and it, along with all the other paperwork we have gathered together (collectively referred to as our dossier) gets taken down to the Secretary of State where they scrutinize all our notary stamps and then authenticate everything. Hopefully that will go smoothly, but it is not uncommon to have to “redo” something. Luckily all our references, births, marriages, etc are in AZ so anything that isn’t right should be easy to fix.

After that the dossier begins its journey - first to AWOP in Spokane, then to Washington, D.C., then to Ethiopia.

What an extra blessing this Easter weekend!

What Can You Do Right Now?

After reading my post about Baby Moses, Stacey asked “What can I do to make a difference today?”

That’s a good question. The orphan problem can seem so overwhelming at times. And sometimes that causes us to freeze and not do anything.

I know adoption is not for everyone, but everyone can do SOMETHING!

One great way to get started is to check out Five for 50. It gives you 5 easy ways that you can impact the 50 million people in our world that are suffering from HIV/AIDS. The majority of those are orphans or those that will leave orphans behind if they are not helped.

Still Waiting…

So we’re still waiting on the homestudy to come back from the courts. Other than that (and the pieces that our social worker sends with it) our dossier is all ready to go. Once we get those pieces from her we carry the whole pile down to the Secretary of State where she authenticates it. (That’s fancy speak for going through every notarized document and verifying that our notary is actually a notary, did the document properly, etc.) It’s not uncommon for them to find something that you need to redo so I’m just going to be prepared for that and go with it. I’m really hoping that our homestudy will come back sometime next week. I think the beginning of next week will be about 4 weeks.

So while I’m waiting, I did some shopping. I’ve been wary of buying B-girl any pants without being able to try stuff on. But after reading some of the adoption groups, I realized I needed to buy some pants to take with me when we go get them. They don’t wear shorts in Ethiopia - kids or adults. They also tend to dress the kids in lots of layers - despite the warm weather. So I figured now was maybe a good time to find some clearance stuff. I found some cute yoga pant/sweatshirt sets on OldNavy.com that were about $8 for each piece. Pretty good deal. Couple pairs of casual pants too.

Other than that she has a closet full of skirts, tops and dresses that I snagged at the thrift stores.

W-boy is a little easier as I think he’ll pretty much be the same size as Noah. Not that I intend to make him share all his clothes but it’ll get us by on pants until we get them home and into shorts (which they will want in Phx. in the summer).

A Must Read Post

The story of how baby Moses died

I’d recommend reading the other stories that Seth has linked, but at a minimum, read this one.

FINALLY!!!!

I just got a wonderful email from the AWOP director with pictures attached. Our kids are beautiful and we now have pictures of them with Grandma that I’m sure will be a treasure for them when the arrive.

We can’t post pictures of them until they are legally ours, so this is all you get - their hands, holding our family picture.

New Case Manager

When we got home last night we had a message on our machine. Apparently our AWOP Case Manager is no longer working with the agency so we have a new CM. I called the new CM back and we had a nice chat about where we were in the process, etc.

And then I said “Can you PLEASE find out about pictures of our kids?”

So we’ll see what turns up.

Waiting for Pictures

So it’s been 19 days since the AWOP director left for Ethiopia and I’m dying for pictures! I emailed our caseworker last week and she said the staff was returning on the 18th and she would forward pictures as soon as she had them.

Well then over the weekend I heard from Becky and she asked if I’d received anything yet because one of the other AWOP families had. We commiserated a little bit together on our wait. Well, she just emailed me tonight and she’s got pictures! Yeah and congratulations to her.

Now I am totally on pins and needles