Dinner In Birmingham And Pulling Into Prattville!

We had a great dinner Wednesday night with The Potts who I mentioned in the previous post as the family who recently adopted Katya and Nastya from Ukraine and brought them home in November. Stephanie's husband stayed home with the other kids while Stephanie and her mom brought the girls from Texas to the international adoption clinic here in Birmingham and let us know, so that we could all meet up. We had dinner at California Pizza and the kids immediately hit it off. Grant wanted to give the girls his Ukrainian picture book as we have two, so they all had a lot of fun going through the Ukrainian and English words in it. Grant and Katya even walked out the restaurant arm and arm and Inna walked them to their car to get big hugs good-bye one more time. When we got in our car, Inna and Grant both said that they wished that they could ALL be brothers and sisters. The kids are going to write letters.
Pics: Stephanie is beside me and Katya is on the left (brown hair) and Nastya is on the right of Grant (blonde)




One recent transition that I havent had a chance to update yet on here is in the church we attend. We have been going to Christ Community in Montgomery for almost 10years now and have so many wonderful relationships there, but we began to feel that the Lord was leading us to pull into Prattville for as much as possible, which included our church. It wasnt an easy decision, but we began attending the church directly across the street from where we live and it does seem to be where God has has us for this season of our lives . Thankfully, we are still able to keep in touch with many of our friends from CCC and got to spend New Years with some of them. I was concerned about the transition of church in the midst of so many other adjustments, but wow...the Lord really took care of this and the kids our loving it so far and God never ceases to amaze us...our first few Sundays/Wed there, we just kept meeting families with older adopted children that had so many similar experiences as ours. Since it is across the street, we just walk to church. We have even ridden our bikes to eat at the restaraunts down the street afterwards, which was a lot of fun.
It is amazing to see things come full circle...
we first decided to move to Prattville it was because after much prayer that is where we felt the Lord was leading us once we decided to downsize our house to help with adoption finances since we had just started the process. In fact, we expected to keep Grant at his private school in Montgomery and travel. We were considering a house in this same neighborhood that we are in now and the more we prayed about it, the more it just didnt seem to be the right one (even though there was nothing wrong with it and was in actually better condition than the one we did buy). We decided to move into the one we are in today and we later found out why God would not allow us to have peace about moving into the other house when shortly before we were leaving for Ukraine, a bad tornado (I re looked up the report and the damage was a quater of a mile wide) hit our neighborhood and took out a big majority of the houses. This is a pic of 2 houses that were hit(just the first pic I found on the net)...
My heart just sank when we drove by the first house we were considering as it was destroyed from the tornado. I was so thankful that we were able to hear God's voice speak to our hearts about this house or we would not have even had a home to bring any adopted children home too. Our actual home was left undamaged (lots of debride flying around our home and in our yard from other homes, but only our fence was down). We were even more blown away when my sister, Niki, who works with the Red Cross told us that she got a map of the path of the tornado and on the map our swimming pool was the boundary where the tornado stopped in our direction. God was showing us just how much he protected us! Anyway, we didnt know all of this when we chose this house, but it has all come full circle as we visited the school in the neighborhood and loved it and it has been a great school for him this year and last year, so we are in walking distance of the school, the YMCA where they played sports this year is in walking distance in our neighborhood, and now we walk to church. Pretty cool, huh?

Comments:
Ukraniac~ Grant fix...haha! Got Dr. Jim's email this week about ya'll coming in March...looking forward to it! By the way, praying that the heat ordeal doesnt effect you. As soon as I heard about it, I checked your blog to get the latest updates from inside :)

Stephanie~ Just sent you an email...write back when you can!



Have a Great week!