Keeping up with the Lacocks

Wow, what a fabulous evening!!! It went off without a hitch. It was a candlelight dinner with a Thai, Ethiopian, Korean and Italian food buffet!!! Just wonderful. We also had live music from a saxophone quartet and a classical pianist. We had over 80 silent auction packages ranging from a Chicago getaway (dinner cruise for 2, Shedd Aquarium passes and hotel) to a golf package (including golf balls and titleist hats) to Spa packages, Pampered Chef baskets, Starbucks baskets......the list literally went on and on. God was definitely in this event and worked in many hearts to give to our event. So how much did we raise???? Over $10,200!!!!! Praise the Lord!!! It was A LOT of work and I need a couple months off before we start planning next years event! This will be an annual event that I will be a part of to help enable our church to offer grants and interest free loans through ABBA fund. Thank you for all your prayers!

Unfortunately none of those exciting things relate directly with our getting a referral :( We are, however, super busy with our fundraiser dinner & Silent auction, which is in just 3 weeks....aaahhh! www.onelessorphan.weebly.com We also are launching our church's orphan care ministry next Sunday. A lot of time and energy has gone into that as well. November 7th's service is going to be an awesome example of how adoption is one of the purest examples of the gospel, in how we had nothing and God adopted us into His family. We had nothing to do with it and nothing to give back to Him.....such a neat picture! Our Pastor was on Moody radio today doing an interview about orphan care and the role the church has in this process. It was SO good! I wish you all could have heard it! I'll have to see if I can get the transcripts and post them! Anyway, I'm as busy as ever, but it still doesn't keep my mind from thinking about my little girl in Thailand, and ho...

I am VERY excited to announce that our fundraiser has been "set in Stone" now! Here are the details: Saturday, November 20th 6pm-8:30pm Castleview's Family Life Center 8601 Hague Road Indianapolis, IN 46256 $15/person or $25/couple We are having live music, dinner including dishes from Thailand, Ethiopia, Korea and America. A fabulous silent auction including things like: Dinner cruise for 2; Hotel nights, Dinner for 2 at Eddie Merlots; Scrapbooking weekend getaway.....and much, much more!! Proceeds will help bring 5 orphans home to their forever families. Visit www.onelessorphan.weebly.com or call Stephanie at 661-644-2889 to reserve your seat today!! Hope to see you all there!

Today we went downtown to the USCIS office to get our official fingerprints for the visa immigration paperwork so that we can get our I800A approval. Interestingly we found out that our fingerprints expire after 15 months. Why in the world would fingerprints expire? Fingerprints are unique to everyone and they never change....hmmmm! Anyway, it was a quick and painless process. We hope to get the pre-approval letter soon so we can hurry up and wait some more!! Ha ha! We are very busy right now planning, with 2 other families that are adopting, a fundraiser dinner - complete with silent auctions and live music! It is set for October 9th. It is a huge undertaking, but we are confident the Lord will provide all the funds that we need for this adoption one way or another, this being one of them! So if you live in town, mark your calendars. We will start pre-selling tickets soon.....so stay tuned! The name of our fundraiser is: One Less Orphan. It is a way for many people ...

In emailing back and forth with our agency today I asked where we were in the lineup to get a referral. There are so many variables right now with our adoptive country that I think I just needed on concrete answer.......so what was it......well, you are either 13th, 3rd or 1st. This should have been frustrating to me in my goal of trying to find something concrete out, but for some reason it was really refreshing! Maybe it was the fact that worst case scenario I am only 13th on the list and not 31st. After our adoptive country started to change their referral process back in April, they still haven't narrowed down how everything is going to work. There are 10 families that had pre-identified children (they had already had a child picked for them and accepted the referral) and so they are processing an adoption of that specific child. If those are all processed according to plan, which our agency thinks they will be, then there are two families in front of us. Those two ...

Exciting news! I talked with our agency after they received our dossier. They said everything looked great and they were going to go ahead and send our dossier overseas. She said it would be there this week!! So exciting and yet so many unknowns. We are one of the first dossiers to go over there since there were some changes in the adoption process. So everything is unknown right now as far as when we will get our referral, how long the whole process will take etc... Our hope and faith rests in Christ. He has done so much for us and we love the fact that we can be a living example of His adoption of us into His family! I can't wait to be able to share that example with the many people that ask us about adoption once our little one is home with us. What an easy way to spread the gospel to others! My prayer is that we won't miss even one opportunity to share what God has done for us and the gift He wants others to receive. The good news of His death on the cross for...

Boy, It seems like it has taken forever to get to this point, and the wait has only just begun! Yesterday I took to FedEx our dossier and our I800A application. I must say this is the first time that I have been actually nervous about mailing something. Knowing all the time, effort, work and money put into getting the Dossier together if makes me a little nervous to think about them damaging or worse losing it! I did make copies of the whole dossier but that really doesn't matter since most everything has to be a notarized original. So now the wait is on. Our agency has not, since all the changes in Thailand, sent any dossiers over there. We will be one of the first to see how the process has changed. Hopefully we won't experience any great delays. Now to start the grant applications and fundraising efforts!!

I feel like between Tom's tax season and homestudy/dossier prep these last few months have been a whirlwind! Our homestudy is finally complete! We had our last meeting on Saturday. Praise the Lord that part is over. We have almost all our documents ready for the dossier....just have to wait for our homestudy to be written to send in our I800A and dossier. That's the exciting part. The not so exciting part is that our adoption country has put a hold on all healthy adoptions. We have decided to switch to the special needs program, which normally would cut our wait time in half, but probably not anymore. Due to the hold on healthy adoptions, now a lot of countries that have never done special needs adoptions are wanting to start programs. This is going to slow our process down :( I am having to continually tell myself that this is God's will, I am God's vessel, and it will all be done to His glory. I do pray daily for my little one that is alive and waiting for...

Why? you might ask, because I got a tetanus shot yesterday and I am amazed at how sore arm has been all day. No wonder little babies have such a hard time after shots....poor little things!!! We had our second homestudy visit today. Our social worker got to meet our kids, see our home, and interview Tom and I as individuals! Tom must have stuck to the script I gave him because it went really well! LOL! Keelan was asked if she was excited to be adopting a little sister and she replied, "As long as she isn't annoying like that one" (Pointing to Ireland) Oh my word, I didn't even know what to say! She then proceeded to tell her that Ireland annoys her sometimes because she always gets into her stuff while she is at school. Ok, well that's understandable. Our social worker just laughed. I'm glad she saw the humor in it. I was mortified!!! Ha ha! Hope to have everything finished and our dossier on its way by the end of April....we'll see!

Well, I must say that I didn't know what to expect when I walked into the agency for our first homestudy meeting. And I really hadn't been concerned about the first meeting until the morning arrived. I felt myself getting anxious and had to keep quoting to myself Phil 4:6: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." Thank you to all of you who prayed. The first meeting went SO well. I love our social worker. We clicked with her right away. It ended up being so much fun and laid back. Our social worker was adopted and is also an adoptive parent, so she has so much insight and we are going to learn so much from her. Praise the Lord for giving us the perfect social worker for our family!! God is so good....always!

You all should see my dining room table right now! It is absolutely covered by homestudy and dossier paperwork! I am trying to fill out all I can so that Tom just needs to "sign on the dotted line" for most things. I feel like my head is spinning with so much happening right now. I just pray that I don't forget something that slows down the process. I also am trying to get everything that needs to be notarized together so we can take it to our notary all at once. Plus filing passport applications, CA and SC background checks, and setting Dr appts for all of us so they can verify our mental (seems kindof funny right now) and physical health!! We also got assigned our case worker. Our first homestudy appointment is next Wednesday! I am so excited to get going on it! I am not, however, excited about the 12 hours of adoption training and 3 books I have to read in the next month....I know it will be good and insightful, but where do you find the time?! LOL! Loving ev...

This past week has been draining....As we have been trying to patiently wait to see if our adoptive country is going to close it's program for this year.....we have been waiting and praying. Our agency has been great in trying to find out more information so that we can make an informed decision. We feel strongly that God has placed the desire for the country in our hearts. Although it seems easier to not go down a road of unknowns and to just switch countries, we believe that that isn't giving God much credit for being able to work things out for us in His timing and in His plan. So we will just continue to walk down this path until all our options have been exhausted. God wasn't shocked that this happened. He knew the timing for our adoption and for this countries shut-down would be the same. Although, I don't think that this will affect special-needs adoptions, which we are open to as well.....so we wait and see! Pray that God would give us peace and lead ...

I just finished my autobiography for our homestudy. Wow! I think the homestudy agency is going to know more about me then I know about myself!! LOL! It did really make me think about questions in regards to parenting an adopted child. Tom cracked me up because he called me after reading the first question on the questionnaire and said he was stumped already!! Guess that's the difference between men and women....women can talk (or type) about anything for hours! My autobiography ended up being 7 pages long...and I had to cut out some words to make it nicely fit onto 7 pages. Tom will probably summarize his life in 2 pages!! After he completes his autobiography then we will start the interviews and home visits with our homestudy agency....fun fun!

A lot has happened since Tom's last post. He was laid off for 2 months and we got to see the Lord work, first hand in our lives, in miraculous ways! Through that time, one thing in our hearts did not change, our desire to adopt. If anything it grew stronger with each passing week. James 1:27 says this " Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." We are continually convicted that God says everyone falls into one of two categories, in regards to adoption....those called to adopt and those called to help others adopt. We are excited that God has placed the call to adopt in our family and look forward to the time when we can aid others to carry out His call in their own families! So here we are today. Tom has a job, praise the Lord!...and we are starting our adoption journey. First destination.....Asia! (For privacy and agency reasons we aren...