GRANT!

God is so good! I said in the first post that if this adoption wasn't meant to be that it wouldn't happen. Luckily, it looks like it was meant to be---just not the way we thought. Isn't that always the case though?
So lets recap, just because I'm loving our story! We heard Gods whispers to us about adoption. We listened, but apparently not to the whole message. We thought Ethiopia was the way to go. We started with an agency that turned out to be ....not the place for us. We switched to another placing agency that forced us to find Bellefaire (our local agency). We got the facts about domestic adoption from them and spent a week agonizing about switching to domestic adoption through Bellefaire and possibly compromising on having a girl. We didn't get a clear call to switch so we stuck with Ethiopia. We still had a doubt or two floating around, but we stayed with the plan. Then every effort we made to finance the adoption fell through. Then Ethiopia changed its policy.
After getting the message loud and clear, we switched to domestic and found the consultants in
Georgia. The day we were going to sign the contract with them, we found out about the potential problems. That night I prayed that if Georgia was meant to be that when I called the courts to get clarification, I would get all the answers I needed and everything would be fine. Clearly that call didn't go as well as I hoped. I forgot about my prayer for a while, but once I remembered it, Jon reminded me that we have to stay true to God and he was telling us Georgia wasn't meant to be.
That brought us to our new agency (the one I wont list by name). They were left with 1 family wanting an AA baby. Because of their desperation to find open families, they are willing to let us select the gender of our baby. They typically don't let you do that. Had we looked into them when we first thought about switching to domestic, I don't know that we would have had the same luck with them.
Then we got news that not only has the tax credit been increased by $1000 and extended for another year, now is refundable. That means we will get a check for the full tax credit amount, not just our tax liability. I felt like things were finally starting to fall into place.
Today I KNOW that we have found our meant to be agency. We applied for their grant and have been approved for the largest possible amount! They just knocked the cost down by half! HALF!!! Between the grant, the tax credit (even though it wont be until next year) and generous friends and family, we are looking really good. We are so close to our girl and we wont be in the poor house when we get her!! It will be a while before I come down from cloud 9. If you need me, thats where we'll be!