A Home For Howie

We are still working on getting a new house. Scheduling conflicts have kept us from meeting up with the lady from the bank about a mortgage. Hopefully later this week or next week! I am really wishing and praying for this to work out. Buying a house would cut our monthly living expense in half. That is a lot of money we could put toward the adoption! It would give us about a 3rd of what we need to complete the adoption and get Howie home.

I am actually excited about the idea of a new house too. I have so many ideas for what I would like to do with Howie’s room. Well, it will actually be Howie and James Elijah’s room. The two boys will share a room and I think that will be great for both of them. Both having come from orphanages where they were used to sharing a room with a dozen other kids… well, they should take some comfort in being together and not all alone in a room.

My fingers are crossed that I can post good news next week.

edit:   well I didn’t have to wait for the end of the week. we’ve got bad news already. we are not going to be able to buy a house right now. we have too much debt and our credit is less than perfect… those things combined mean we won’t qualify for the mortgage right now. this is a huge blow to the adoption plans AND to my emotions right now.

We found out we qualify for a grant program that will pay the down payment on a house. This is a program for first time home buyers. This is great news! That means we will not have to take any money away from the adoption to put towards the house.

Now, if we can just get approved for the mortgage loan. We are keeping our fingers crossed on this one. We are very worried that we already have too much debt and that we won’t get approved.

We’ve decided that our home is not the one for Howie. No, that does not mean we are not going to adopt him and give him a home with our family. It just won’t be in the house we are in right now. My mom always told me that your home is not the house you live in, it’s the family and the emotions and the memories. Her stance was that you don’t sell your home you sell your house. So, by Mom’s logic, I guess it’s our house that is not right for Howie, not our home.

Starting tomorrow we are going to be looking into buying a new house. I know that sounds kind of crazy when our biggest issue for not getting this adoption going is money. Really though, money is one of the biggest reasons we made this decision. We are going to find a house that would give us smaller payments each month. We rent right now and because of that we pay twice as much each month as this place is really worth. Buying our own house makes so much more sense financially. We can get a bigger, better house for less money out of our pockets each month.

We have other reasons besides the finances for doing this as well. Our neighbors here aren’t the greatest. One side is a family that likes to party and has people coming and going all the time. The other side has a 3yo living there that has no discipline in his life at all. The kid runs wild and does what he wants, including playing with anything the other kids in the neighborhood happen to leave outside. This leads to the other major reason we want to move… we don’t have a fenced yard here. We need a fence for safety and privacy.

Hopefully we will get good news this week and will find out we can qualify for a mortgage loan.

I am new to WordPress and just testing this out for now. I have done Blogger for years, so this is all new. I am not sure how often or how well I will be able to update this site. If you have stumbled across this blog, please check back from time to time to see how I am doing.

The purpose of this site is to journal my progress with the adoption of a little boy from Kazakhstan. I am hoping the format here will make journaling easier and more organized.

I know this is sort of a lame first post, and when and if I really get this site going I will likely delete it. For now I am just testing the waters, so to speak.