Adoption classes

Yesterday, Ross & I attended a full day of adoption training classes. They went over everything from prenatal drug & alcohol exposure, to trans-racial parenting, to openness. My favorite part was having the panels of people come in and talk about their stories. It was very uplifting to listen to real adoption stories and hear how positive they turned out. It was also nice spending the day with other couples who are going through the same things we are. Tomorrow is our home visit. Looking forward to having that done and getting the homestudy complete!

Pictures for our profile book

A few weeks ago Ross and I went and got our pictures taken for our profile book. We wanted a few recent pictures of us. Now that we have kids, we never take any pictures of us in them! Our photographer did an amazing job, especially since it was super cold and windy that day! We had so much fun!

Interviews complete!

Ross & I are all done with our individual interviews with our social worker! They were pretty easy, basically just going through and asking questions about our self studies we had to do and confirming that our answers were the same as what we wrote. A week from today, our social worker will be coming to our house to do our home visit, talking with Ross & I some more, and talking with the boys. After that, she will be writting up our homestudy and we will be approved. We are so close, I can taste it!!!

Homestudy

Last night, Ross & I met our social worker who I will call "B" for the first time! We felt an intense connection with her and are excited to get to know her better. We scheduled the rest of our meetings and should be done with paperwork and meetings with her by the middle of May. It will then take her approximately a month to write up our homestudy report and then we will be officially waiting!

Super excited but also left there a little uneasy. She told us that families with children already wait much longer than people who have never had children. She has a few families who have been waiting over 2.5 years. This is by far the hardest part for us. Going into this and not knowing what the outcome will be. It's so scary but we are really relying on God to lead us and so far, we still feel 100% led that this is the path he wants us to take. B said that this first year will be the biggest test of our faith we will probably ever experience. We are more than ready to take on that challenge!!!

Fingerprinting:Complete!

This morning, Ross & I got our fingerprinting done! We also sent in our background check forms. We finally feel like we are making some progress! We are supposed to be finding out our social worker this week. Excited to meet her!

Waiting for a social worker

Well, the agency contacted us this week and said we would probably be waiting another week to hear from our social worker. They are doing some re-arranging in the offices and re-assigning cases. We should know by next Wednesday and be able to meet her and get the next step going! They did tell us to get physicals for the rest of the family members in the family to get started on that step. My physical is already completed and Nolan got his 3 year physical done in February so he is done too! I faxed his doctor the paperwork to complete yesterday and she had it back to me by days end. Amazing! Ross and Ian have their physicals at the end of the month and then we can check that step off!!

Thinking now that we won't be "officially" waiting until around the beginning of June. It seems the agency is extremely busy and maybe possibly short staffed so the process is not going as fast as other adoptions I know have. Trying to keep reminding myself that this is all part of God's plan and that he is teaching us to be patient and wait for Him!

God's timing is always good!

We have been formally approved!!!! We received the letter today and are more than happy to move on to the next step which will consist of some essay questions, referrals, doctor appointment for Ross, fingerprinting, background checks, and then..the home study!!!

Some other good news is that we just did our taxes today and had a really good tax year. I have been stressing out so much lately knowing that some larger agency fees were due soon and wondering how we were going to pay them but as we know, God always provides and he showed through today when we received a very nice tax return. Enough to help us through a few more stages in the adoption!!

We are excited that we will be announcing our adoption soon too!!! We wanted to make sure we were formally approved with the agency and also that my health concerns were taken care of. I didn't want to tell everyone we were doing this and then find out we were denied because of something. So if you are reading this now....we have announced it!