My head is spinning and my heart is joyous! Several ideas that I have been working on are coming to fruition and several brand new and very exciting prospects may be on the horizon!!! I am continually in awe of what an exciting journey this fund is providing for me and I am filled with faith and thanks, that God is allowing great things to happen. The big news of today is that Thursday, November 19th at 9 pm EST, myself and two of the waiting parents will be doing a PODCAST with Deanna Jones. Deanna, is an adoptive mother and author that is well known throughout the adoption community. Thanks to her kind heart, she has agreed to help me spread the word of the Kyrgyz 65 and Altynai's Fund. Stay tuned for more details on that event and if you want to learn more about Deanna, please check out her website at www.mothertheworld.org.
The Silpada sale is up and running and the first few orders have started to come in. From the looks of the stat section on blogger, a lot of people have been checking in, which is exciting. I spoke with Silpada's corporate office today and they are going to donate some jewelry for the Fund that we can either raffle or auction. Thank you Silpada!!! The sale will be going through November 19th so please take a look at what they have to offer and/or share the invite with a friend.
So now that I have brought you all up to speed, I would love to introduce Aman and the Hughes' Family.
Adding Aman to Our Family: The Hughes Family’s Journey
On a summer night back in 2007, we watched a movie which changed us forever. It was a movie with an adoption theme. At the end, there was a message about adding to your family through adoption. Watching that movie stirred up old feelings for my husband and myself.
You see, after a few years of marriage, and unsuccessful fertility treatments, we explored adoption as a way of adding to our family. Our strong desire for children led us to a private adoption plan where the birth mom ultimately decided to parent her precious little girl. After a move across our state, we again tried to adopt, this time through the foster care system. After we completed our homestudy, and were about to be introduced to a special little boy, I miraculously conceived! We later gave birth to our two precious daughters, who are now 13 and 11. Two years after our second daughter’s birth, we had a son who died in utero. This was quite devastating for us.
Fast forward to the movie night in 2007. Again we considered adoption. We still wanted more children. We decided to pray as a couple about whether we should adopt. When we both felt confident and brave enough to go down the road to adoption again, which by now we knew was not an easy road, we introduced our daughters to the idea. We asked them to pray with us. After much prayer and discussion as a family, we applied to our adoption agency on October 9, 2007. We flew through our homestudy visits, dossier, and immigration paperwork. We turned in our dossier in early December 2007, and just a few days later, we were blessed with the referral of our sweet boy Aman. We were smitten, of course. We said “yes” in a matter of days, and only needed our immigration approval to apply for a court date. Unfortunately, our immigration paperwork took 13 ½ very long weeks to be approved. By the time we finally received our approval and were submitted to court, the courts had stopped accepting cases in the court district in his country.
After almost a year of delays, we were devastated to learn in February 2009 that a moratorium on adoptions had been put in place in Aman’s country, and that no adoptions would take place while his country revamped their adoption laws.
After many more months of waiting for adoptions to re-open in his country, we found out about a wonderful little boy who was waiting for his family in Korea. We found out about our son in August 2009 and he was home with us in November of that same year! That was an adoption miracle all in itself! He has now been home almost 2 years with us, and he is SUCH A JOY! He is old enough now to understand that Aman is his brother, and that he lives in an orphanage far, far away, and that he needs his family. He prays for Aman to “come home soon and share my room and share my toys and play with me”.
And that is what we pray, too!
You might ask why we are holding on to the hope that Aman will join our family. After all, as of this writing, he has been waiting over 3 years, 8 months to join his forever family! We believe that he is our son, and he will always be our son, regardless of where he is living. Just a few weeks prior to our receiving his referral, I had a dream. In my dream, my husband stood up before our congregation at church and said, “We have decided to call our son Elijah, for he will be a man of God.” Later that day, we attended a church while on a trip away from home. The first song that we sang during Praise and Worship was “These are the Days of Elijah”. We believe that God hand-picked our family for Aman, and that He named him, and that He has great plans for his life.
This has been a definite faith-walk for our family. We had already paid all fees for Aman’s adoption except travel, prior to his referral. Now we are faced with having to pay all the fees again. Your giving to Altynai’s Fund will help get Aman and many of the other waiting Kyrgyz children home to their families.
Thank you!
The Hughes' Family
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