Mowing em down

Well we are really cranking through the details that are all part of the requirements to adopt. This week we completed our CPR / AED training on Monday night, we got 3 hours closer to completing our parent training on Tues night, we had our water inspection yesterday and will get those results next week. Our house is ready for the fire inspection now that there are electronic gadgets all over our house- haha. Things are moving along.

Crazy days

Sorry its been a while since I posted, we are very busy. We are in the midst of our adoption training. The classes are really intense as they focus on foster parenting. We have seen some very sad movies about kids who have been abused and neglected. There are some neat people though who are sacrificing to help kids all over. We also have to get CPR and First Aid Training. We are getting CPR certified tonight actually, First Aid will be in a few weeks. We are having a fire inspection to our home this Friday. We installed 5 smoke alarms yesterday and we need 3 CO2 sensors, one for each floor of our home that we will purchase later this week. We also bought 2 fire extinguishers and an escape ladder for the upstairs area. We hope to be through all of the training by the end of October. Thanks again for everyone who helped with our auction and dinner. We are using the money we raised to get us through this training, and the main item is our home study which is $3000. Like the title of this post, we are in the midst of crazy days at the West home!

Fund raiser results

We had a great night last night with about 100 people or so that came to the dinner. Everyone seemed to have fun and enjoy the dinner and the auction. We had 149 of the 151 items bought. We raised $5,300 net from the dinner and auction. One of the really neat things that happened last night was some friends of ours who have been dating for a while, the man won the nicest auction item we had, a diamond / tanzanite ring during the live part of our auction. He then came to the middle of the crowd and asked for the microphone and proposed to her right in the middle of the auction. It was just one more example of how God is doing some special things through all of his work on our journey. We pray that he will continue to get the glory and to touch lives all around us. We thank everyone who came and who was involved. It was like getting married times 2 as I told some of our friends there last night. Wow was that a lot of work and so many people did so many things, we are truly grateful for all of you. Our prayer is that God will richly reward you for your acts of selfless love and sacrifice.

The day has arrived!

Well everyone its Friday September 12th, the day of the dinner / auction. We have so much work in front of us today, looking forward to it all coming together. We hope you all can make it out tonight and that you will be blessed with a great evening. We are SO thankful to all of you who helped make today possible. Tonight's program has a list of all the donors, I can't believe how long it is. It has been amazing how God has orchestrated all of this. Whenever we had a need, there someone was to help us along the way. People secured donations on their own, places that we had not already been to, then some of you made phone calls to places we had been to as follow up, and then all the creative people who helped make our signs, put together our baskets etc etc etc. We have 150 items to auction off tonight. Something for everyone. Pray for everything to go well tonight. God Bless you all. We will update within the next few days or so how everything turned out. Here we go......

Basket Mania

I have never seen so many baskets in my life! We are in the midst of craziness at our house. We are working like crazy trying to put together as many cool baskets of items for the auction. We have stuff everywhere. Many people have helped us. One of our friends friend put together about 19 baskets for us from our items and even some of her things. She was very creative and they look great. We now have more baskets and some other folks coming over Saturday to finalize everything hopefully. We have to have all of our items ready by Monday so we can get all the info over to our good friend who is publishing our program for the night. Somewhat stressful these days as the clock is ticking. Lisa and I have been on one another's nerves lately it seems as we have had a few arguments lately. We are just tired and stressed just a bit, but its all going to work out great. Once again we are overwhelmed by all of the people helping us. We are SO thankful for everything everyone is doing. Only 6 days left!