Photos In the Park

So excited to have a new adoption pic to share! My sweet friend volunteered at our Photos in the Park event and edited this amazing pic from our session! I just love it! :)

So what is Photos in the Park you ask? Well, this was an idea formed from the combination of a friend, some internet research, and a whole lot of God's leading.

THE BASICS. Over the course of two weekends we had 7 photographers volunteer their time and services to take 30 minute mini sessions of families. We ended up scheduling over 70 families for this event and were able to sponsor two other adopting families from the area!

I was a bit nervous putting this event on in the beginning as I knew that it was going to be big and take a lot of time and effort to fill all the open slots we had. But God had other plans and thanks to him we ended up selling out in the matter of hours! YOU READ THAT RIGHT, HOURS!

THE SCOOP. After sending out some flyers and creating door hangers to put out, I began Facebook chatting with a friend of one of our photographers that wanted to get her family's photos taken. She then referred three other friends and I jokingly told her she was hired! :) After contacting me again to schedule a fourth family, she informed me that her friend worked for the local news channel. She went on to ask for more information about our family and our adoption as well as the event. I shared the short version and a link to our flyer for the event, which she passed on to her friend who had offered to perhaps put a post on their Facebook page. I prayed that God would bless us and boy did he!

The next morning we got up early to head to my family's for our annual trip to the beach. 9 am hit and all of a sudden my phone began to ding relentlessly notifying me of incoming emails. I had no clue what was going on until I began to read through them and realized that not only had this awesome lady posted about us on her Facebook page, she had actually written an article about our event and had it on the news website front and center!

By 5pm that night I had over 400 email conversations completed and 7 photographers fully booked! It was amazing and I was so humbled and joyful, I could hardly contain it!

God is so good and, as I have mentioned before, we feel so blessed that he has given us the opportunity to be walking this journey with him. I love that he is giving me jobs to do as I wait as I am not sure I would stay sane if I were sitting here idle! Although we are very aware of the fact that he does not need us to provide the money we or the other families need to finish our adoptions, I love that he cares enough about us to let us be helpers! :)