Garage Sale - Adoption Fundraiser

This past weekend we had an adoption fundraiser garage sale.  What's that, you ask?  Well it's a garage sale where friends donated things they were ready to get rid of but instead of just taking it all to Goodwill, they gave it to us and we sold it at our sale!  We had lots of great items donated!  So thankful to all our friends who dumped err gave us such great stuff to sell!  It was obviously great things because we sold about 90% of it!  We did the sale Thursday, Friday and Saturday and what I had been told about garage sales held true.  You most the most on day 1, then each day following is half of the day before.  Thursday morning was non stop people.  I'm extremely thankful for my friend Meredith and all her help with the boys that day.  Tyler had training at work so he couldn't take either day off of work so if she wouldn't have offered to help I would've been solo.  There's no way I would've been able to do it without her that day.  Day 1 we made $800!  I was blown away.  Day 2 was much, much slower.  My friend Megan was able to help me that morning, but I felt so bad because it was so dead.  Was very thankful for her great company though!  By the end of the day though we still ended up making another almost $400!  Then Saturday was a little busier than Friday but still nothing compared to Thursday.  We ended up at about $200 which put us at a total of $1400! 

Lincoln's first lemonade stand!  

Lucas showed him the ropes :)

I was so overwhelmed with how generous so many people were.  I'd say majority of the people that stopped at the sale said they stopped mostly because the sign said it was an adoption fundraiser.  Lots of people would over pay for their items telling me to just keep it as a donation.  One guy just walked up asked who was adopting, I told him we were and he handed me $10, didn't buy anything just wanted to donate.  My neighbor, who is hardly ever outside and so we haven't talked to her much, walked over to our sale and handed me $100.  Said she's never donated to anything before but really wanted to donate to our adoption.  I was so touched. 

Over and over again things like that happened and I was just blown away.  And I heard story after story of people who stopped by and they themselves have adopted, or they were adopted as a child. 

So we are now $1400 closer to that goal of $24,000.  So far we have raised right at $14,000 so ONLY (haha, only) $10,000 ish left to go!  It's such a great feeling to get over that half way mark.  Feels a little more reachable now. 

I also wanted to update you all where we are in the process.  We are now in the midst of all the homestudy paperwork.  Lots of it.  I remember it all from when we did our homestudy for foster care so at least it's not all new.  A little less confusing :)  This next week we will get fingerprinted, get things ready for the fire inspection and fill out the rest of the papers that are needed for our first homestudy visit.  This coming Friday we have an all day orientation at our adoption agency that will include 5 of the 12 hours of training that we need to complete.  The rest of the training will be completely with online courses. 

So we are little by little chipping away at all this paperwork and getting closer and closer with each day!  Just getting more and more excited about this whole journey to our next child.