Haitian Bracelets and Garage Sales

  First and foremost, thank you. The amount of love and support that has came in for us has been uplifting, it is awesome to know that so many people are there to help us through it all. Most of you know that my wife and I have had to walk a hard road for the past year. Never in either of our lives have we had to go through so much hardship and loss. Then when it came time to really sit down and talk about our future and children, it was scary. Do we try again and hope for a miracle? Can we even handle another late term loss? Why.....? 

  As everything progressed and Mary Jane and I learned about the odds and challenges of us having children we started to realize that unconventional means might be our way to start a family. So then we asked ourselves, could we adopt? Then I remembered back to when my wife and I had first started dating. To that first time when people ask silly questions to each other to just try and feel each other out, 1,000 pointless questions about food, colors, animals, hobbies, the future, ect... Once we got to the point of talking about our own personal futures, we got on the subject of kids. How many each of us wanted, and what our goals as parents would be. Then after all that, she asked me: "If you couldn't have children for whatever reason, would you adopt?" I said yes. Only now my wife was looking at me and she wasn't joking. Would I adopt? 

  I knew that years later my answer hadn't changed. I would, without a doubt, adopt. So here we are. Walking down a new road, a better road. One with a light at the end of the tunnel and a chance of having a family of three. But it isn't without its struggles. As most of you are probably aware adoption can be vastly expensive. Mary Jane and I are working as much as we can to save towards our adoption. I wanted to make this post to let everyone know more about why we were adopting and some little fundraisers we are doing to help us be a family. The first fundraiser is awesome, it is called The Apparent Project. The Apparent Project is a humanitarian artisan's guild in Haiti that seeks to prevent child-abandonment and relinquishment by creating jobs for parents at risk. What they do is send you the bracelets that you see in both of the photos. Each bracelet has the photo of the worker that made them and a little bit about them and why they are part of the project. The bracelets are sent to us free of charge, but for each one we sell we have to give a percentage back to the project. The bracelets are $10. 

  Once all the bracelets are sold, we send money back to Haiti to help international children stay with their families and prevent child-abandonment, and the other portion of the proceeds goes towards our domestic adoption. So the money gets split between our adoption and international at-risk children, which is great. If you want to learn more about the project you can check them out at www.apparentproject.org, but regardless if you have time you should check out their promotional video: http://vimeo.com/70765636. Our other fundraiser is a garage sale that we will have some time in June during a neighborhood garage sale day. If you happen to have something in your house that you don't want, or that has been sitting in your attic for far too long, this is as good a chance as any to get rid of it. All the proceeds we can make from the garage sale will be going into our adoption fund. Nothing to buy here, just give us your reasonably sellable junk! Once we have a set date and time we will make another post about the garage sale, that way we can work something out to get any items that are being donated to us. Again, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to show love and support for our cause.