Show your LOVE! Adoption fundraiser plus huge giveaway!

Back in 2009, I was honored to help a high school friend raise funds for their first adoption (they have since adopted another son!). All About Cloth Diaper readers contributed over $300 to their goal.

To this day, Jessica still sends our family a Christmas card and keeps us up-to-date on how Jake is doing through Facebook. Never did I think that our little $300 contribution would mean so much to them.

What was even more unexpected was the immense feeling of humility to be able to play a part in growing a family.

Here we are 4 years later and we have another opportunity to assist a family in adopting a child.

This time it hits a little closer to home. One of my dearest friends, Mindy, is the one adopting. I know this family better than I know any other family. Because of this I am passionate about doing all I can to help them meet their financial goals.

I could just ask for donations but I want to make it FUN!! Here’s how it will work.

not pictured: 2 pairs of Baby Leggings, an *amazing* minky giraffe blanket, 3 handmade burp cloths

For TWO WEEKS the Ultimate Guide to Cloth Diapers will be on sale for $14 and ALL PROCEEDS go to the adoption fund! {{That’s more than a 33% off the normal price!!}}

Every one who purchases the Ultimate Guide to Cloth Diapers will be able to enter the drawing for an awesome gift basket!

You already have the book?? That’s okay! You can click the image below and donate $14 for an entry!

Want to donate more??? GO AHEAD! You will receive one entry for every $14 you donate. If you donate above $100 you will receive 10 entries! Paypal will redirect you to the Rafflecopter form where you will select your entries. (form is below if it doesn’t)

I asked Mindy to share her heart with us so you could get to know them as well.

“A mother’s heart is an indescribable place where love grows unconditionally. How a heart can have such depth of love is unimaginable, but proven. How a heart can love those not yet even hers is inexplicable, but true.

My heart is both overflowing with the love of and for my six children as well as the aching love for children yet to join our family and for their birth mothers. I have unceasingly longed for more children for five years.

We didn’t plan on having six kiddos. Our plan was four but the amazingness of parenting, the glorious display of unconditional love, the awesomeness of watching a life grow from conception to young adulthood, and the spectacular beauty of watching individuals become a family that evolves as each new member joins, well… we fell in love with the entire gig. Hook, line, and sinker.

Sure, our crazy love has looked, well, crazy to people at different points in our parenting road. Like the day we announced we were foster parenting a former deaf student of mine, though we had just become parents for the first time nine weeks earlier.

Or that all of my babies have arrived via cesarean section. While my dream was to have all water births at home, my hereditary bone disorder doesn’t permit me to deliver naturally. I am incredibly grateful for a surgery that allows me to be alive and a mother to multiple children.

Our friends and family would definitely say we are crazy, but they would say so because of our unrelenting love.

Our lives radiate love for children and always have. Paul and I met at a camp for children with physical disabilities, I taught in the public school deaf education program, we lived in a boys’ home for fifteen years, we have been in special needs camping since adulthood, and Paul is the children’s ministry director at church.

Our full time crazy love is manifested in our present lives also: I homeschool all 6 of our kids, kinder through twelfth grade, and Paul runs a camp for children on the autism spectrum.

We love fiercely and children are one of the main targets.

We have waited five years, the love and ache growing month by month in my heart. We have waited for financial stability, for our new plans to shape, and for God’s timing.

I am beyond grateful that He has led us to start the process. I am grateful that my love and my prayers will soon have a landing place.

To say that my heart goes out to a woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy is an understatement. My heart aches for her physically, just as much as my heart aches for another child.

My heartache is real. I was that woman, twenty-four years ago. I was the one facing a decision that would affect the rest of my life. I didn’t make the choice for adoption, I chose abortion instead.

I’ve regretted that for twenty-four years. While I fully believe that my six children have proven to me the gift of mothering and family, I just as fully believe that my first pregnancy proved to me the gift of life. The preciousness of life. The preciousness of the woman deciding.

That is why my heart is for domestic adoption in my area.

I want to reach out to the amazing woman who will choose life for her child, even if not life with her child.

I will love her forever and the baby she places with us. With a depth that can’t be described, with a fierceness that is mind boggling, and with an inexplicable love.

A crazy love.

I am praying for a woman I don’t know yet. And her child.”

Rafflecopter form in the event Paypal does not redirect you ;)

a Rafflecopter giveaway