NEWS FLASH!!!

Predictable, hum-drum, normal, boring life? NOPE!! Not for us!! :)
I'm quite certain our lives will be forever changed by the decision we made yesterday! We are hosting Tatiana a 13 year old girl from Ukraine for 8 weeks. And.... she comes this weekend!
To say we are excited is quite an understatement!!! Peyton has been to the airport numerous times to pick her up already and keeps informing me of all the things that Tanya will be playing with him and what all he and Tanya will do!! She is at an orphanage that has quite a few small children and is said to be very good with them so we are hoping the age gap won't be too large that they can't have fun together! Although the excitement is quite large he also has tears right at the surface... he's feeling like his little world is getting rocked and he's not sure how to handle it.

So how in the world did we ever get to hosting a girl from Ukraine???? I will try to give you the short version.. We have always been interested (?) in hosting I would occasionally check hosting programs websites and view their children that were coming and dream about which one I would pick IF we were hosting and Bill and I always thought it is something we would someday like to do, but it definitely seemed most logical to adopt our family first before we hosted. So that is how this started, I had looked at the photolisting of children coming for the summer hosting program through Project143 and this little girl immediately caught my eye and I thought if we were hosting out of this batch I would sure pick her! Fast forward to last week and Project143 sent out a plea for four more host families, and here if this little girl was one that still needed to have a family!! If only we weren't in the middle of an adoption and had $3000 extra dollars laying around and and and! Not for us, not now. Now Yesterday a last and final urgent plea was sent for ONE more host family to please step up and make this little girls dream come true!! They had till last night to find a family for her and yes it was my dear Tanya! How could it be?? My first pick and here they were desperately looking for someone to host her in the final hours before they had to tell her she couldn't come! I called Bill and asked him if we could host a 13 year old girl from Ukraine for 8 weeks and much to my surprise he didn't so absolutely NOT!! We talked and discussed and prayed and wondered if we had totally lost all our common sense! The verse quietly came.... 'my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways!'
We talked about it from every angle and some things simply did not make sense, but there was always the underlying feeling that this was the right thing to do... for US, NOW!
Maybe some time soon I will have time to give more details, but then again it may be awhile!:)
The excitement is only growing as we count down the days till her arrival!!
Keep us in your prayers as this is very much out of our comfort zone and such uncharted waters for us, and no doubt will need help, wisdom, guidance and most of all your prayers on our behalf!!
Celebrate with us as we welcome Tatiana to Alabama this weekend, where she will undoubtedly leave footprints on our hearts and we will never be the same!!!

P.S. I know you are wondering how this will effect our current adoption and the answer is it won't. The director said if we get our SDA appt. and need to travel before Tanyas time is up, she will find a backup family for her, but at the pace things are going I'm not worried at all that this will interfere, just make the time pass faster! :)