Let the Fundraising Begin

Friends -

We are beginning to exhaust every effort we know how to in an effort to bring Ellie home this year. The fees associated with adopting from Kyrgyzstan are roughly $37,000. We have some of these fees, but no where near ALL of the fees. We are implementing some small fundraisers here on our blog.

• There are links to the left for magazine sales. We get 40% of the cost of the subscription and the rates are lower than most places.
• We have added an ONLINE MALL for those of you who shop online. We get a small percentage if you make purchases. If you regularly buy things online, consider coming here to this site, clicking the link to the left and connecting to the site that way. We only get paid if you go through our link. There are wonderful stores like Wal-mart, Target, K-Mart, Dell, Circuit City, BestBuy, Overstock.com, RitzCamera, Office Depot, Toys R Us, KB Toys, I-tunes, GAP, The Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Dicks Sporting Goods, Nike, Linens and Things and PacSun. There are also LOTS of SPECIALS and CLEARANCES that are only good through these links.

These are the small things we are doing. Some of the other "small" ways we are trying to fund our adoption account include:

• Our family is cutting out "eating out" for a month. That money we would normally spend is going into our adoption fund. The additional benefit is we will eat healthier for a month.
• We are cutting back to basic cable. We only watch a couple of channels at our house and think we can save around $30 a month here.
• We are looking for "found" money. Everyone occasionally gets a check for something they weren't expecting. Just this past month we got birthday money, a check for a sweatshirt we had sold to someone, Christmas money and money from selling a couple of extra tickets we had to the Music City Bowl. This alone added several hundred dollars to our adoption account.
• We have cancelled our Netflix account. $10 a month there is a savings, considering we hardly ever use it.
• Kevin is having repairs made to the van and we are going to sell it.
• We are considering absolutely every purchase on whether or not we actually need it or just want it. Wants are out the door until Ellie comes home.

Will it add up to $36,000? Not each of these things individually, but we hope that it is the start of a snowball effect and that other fundraising efforts we will try in early spring will help. Continue to pray for our family as we seek to do God's will.

Kevin, Maria and Joshua