Success!

My weekend was so exhausting I have been too tired to even blog about it!

We had our big garage sale/bake sale/raffle adoption fundraiser over the weekend. It was a lot of work, but absolutely worth it.

Going into this fundraiser, there was an amount that I secretly hoped we would reach, but never really thought we would. Let's just say we exceeded that amount...on the first day!! The fundraiser was a huge success.

As amazing as the financial success was, the love and support we received blew me away.

Some people came that I have not seen since high school. They knew about it from facebook and made the effort to come and support us.

There were families that saw our ad in the newspaper so they knew it was an adoption fundraiser and took the time to come and share their own adoption stories. I met one woman who has eleven children, five of them adopted. A birth mother in an open adoption also came. I met so many amazing people.

There were even families from our own adoption agency who came. Someone who waited two years and two months with our agency gave me a pep talk that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. Another woman who adopted from our agency three times came with her five year old daughter. She told her daughter that I have been waiting two years and she said, "Her baby must be very special." We all had tears in our eyes after hearing that.

Overall it was one of the best weekends of my life.

Yes, we received much needed money for our homestudy renewal, but it was so much more than that.

I have a list a mile long of thank you cards to write. People who baked things to sell, people who donated items to sell in the garage sale, people who donated money and bought raffle tickets, people who bought items to be raffled off, people who bought newspaper ads for us...the list goes on and on.

Then there are the core people who we literally could not have done this without. The people who did the physical work and put in the long hours. My family was awesome- my Mom, my Dad, my sister and brother in law (who drove all the way home from Boston to help.) Then there was @melachrino and @creepygroovy who worked so incredibly hard and spent a crazy number of hours there. I am forever grateful for their help. I absolutely do not know what I would have done without them.

A special thank you goes to @nicoleella10 who has been my friend for twenty years and played a major role in making our fundraiser as big as it was. She is the one who came up with the raffle idea and donated a zoo membership to raffle off. Her father baked cakes, her mother put information about our fundraiser in their church bulletin, which led to other donations. Nicole and her family made this bigger than just your average garage sale adoption fundraiser.

Adam and I are both so grateful for everything.

We have an amazing story to tell our baby someday.