We Reached our $10,000 Goal!!!!

Week 9 Puzzle Update

We’ve Reached our $10,000 Goal!!!

We are so grateful for each of you. Many of you donated, many of you shared our link, many of you kept us in your thoughts and prayers, and each of you played a role in becoming a “piece(s)” of our puzzle. We have reached yet another milestone in our adoption journey and it feels incredible to know that so many of you support us. When we began this fundraiser, I never in my wildest dreams thought we would actually reach our goal. NEVER thought the puzzle would be complete. We thought we would be buying the pieces as a family to complete the puzzle. The words “Thank You” don’t feel like enough. Those words can’t ever express the amount of gratitude we feel. For lack of better words, THANK YOU ALL…from the bottom of our heart.

Now that the above (important) information has been shared, it’s time to come clean about another issue. I need to preface this story by letting you all know that I have never been good at math. Yes, I’m a teacher, but the important thing to remember in the story is that I had many math tutors throughout my own educational experience. Now that that’s cleared up, here’s the story. I sat down tonight and began writing the names on puzzle pieces of the families that donated to our puzzle this past week. I was so excited because the names that I added would be the names that fill our puzzle and make it COMPLETE! When I finished writing the names of the last family to donate (The Boni Family), I sat looking at two large empty sections of our puzzle. At first, I was completely stumped. After that, I went into freak out mode. Ryan was sitting on the couch during all of this and got a front row viewing of the madness. I thought, “maybe I forgot to add a week’s worth of names.” I went back and matched every single donation to the matching name on the puzzle. Not the issue. Then I though, “maybe I miscounted the amount of donations we’ve received.” I counted the pieces and they were spot on. At this point I went and grabbed the puzzle box. In my mind, I had been building a 500-piece puzzle (which equals $10K). In tiny writing on the bottom of the box, it says 550-piece puzzle!!! WHaaaaaT!!!!??? Are you kidding me!?!?!!? I started to freak out even more! How am I supposed to post a picture of our completed puzzle that shows that we reached our goal!?!? Keep in mind that Ryan is still watching all of this unfold, while shaking his head and LAUGING at me. I immediately texted my sister and called my best friend because I needed advice as to what to do and Ryan was too busy belly laughing to help. My best friend also laughed at me, but also helped me come up with a few scenarios (make up fake names for the rest (LOL), leave it blank, put a picture on the back…none of these seemed right). Needless to say, because of my poor math skills (and unawareness), we have empty space on our puzzle (pictured below). We do have a few people’s donation that are currently en route in the mail still and one more that came in tonight on paypal (thanks Tuomi family), so those names will be added this week. We have also received a lot of anonymous donations (money on our desks at work, money on our doorstep, etc). We have decided to wait for the remaining donations to arrive throughout this week and then write ANONYMOUS on the remaining puzzle pieces. This will honor the generous souls that wanted to keep themselves a secret.

Seriously, this is absolutely something that would happen to me. I am so embarrassed, but nonetheless this makes for yet another “story” on our journey. My next post will be of a completely filled in puzzle.

Thank you all!!!