A new look

Hello out there in blogger world. It has been a long time and now we have a new look, but don't you worry it is still about the same great adoption. Things have been fairly quiet in our adoption world, which we are very grateful for. We finished our interviews for the homestudy and it has been turned in to the agency. The next big milestone is our class which is coming up in two weeks.

There has been a lot of talk about the class and we are really looking forward to it. First, we will meet other prospective adoptive parents in our area. It has been amazing connecting with all of the bloggers out there. We love being part of a community even though we don't see you face to face (just screen to screen)! It will be equally amazing to meet some folks in person at our class.

In addition to meeting new folks, we also are looking forward to hearing the panels...adoptive parents, adopted children, adopted children from a transracial adoption, the list goes on. Hearing the stories will be amazing. We also are reading books that are required by our agency. Here is our reading list:

Making Room in our Hearts by Micky Duxbury

Inside Transracial Adoption by Gail Steinberg and Beth Hall

20 Things Adopted Children Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew by Sherrie Eldridge

Family of Adoption by Joyce Pavao Maguire

All great books!

We have been enjoying sunshine and dry summer weather here in Oregon and haven't had much time inside. Our vegetable and flower beds are producing copious amounts of food and beauty and we just couldn't be happier right now.

Must run outside and pull more weeds before the sun goes down. Pictures of new crafts soon!

We are in...let the crafts begin!

Yesterday we had our final interview with the social worker and officially got the approval that we are now done with the home study! Great news and so relieving that that part is over. We already finished our family book as you all have seen, so we are just that many steps ahead. Things are moving fast and now we are just busying ourselves to get ready for our garage sale in July to raise some money.

One other thing that has officially begun is my craft season preparing and nesting. Check out the pics below of some of my beginning projects...

Here is the diaper bag made from an old skirt and two retired curtains






Here is the bird mobile for the baby's room...





Here are the collages ready for framing...





More crafts and pictures to come. I will just say this...my knitting is out of control!

Moving on up...

So we finished the darn family book...finally! We ordered our first copy a few days ago and are waiting to see the copy before we order all of the others for the agency to start showing families. They already have a brief letter and a few pictures of us that they printed out to show a birth mom, but now we will soon have a real family book. It feels good to have that done.

When thinking about all of the things that we had to do for the adoption (so far at least) the family book really didn't rise to the top as something that I thought would be so hard, boy was I wrong. Trying to encapsulate your life in 20 pages or less, mostly pictures, is really hard. Especially if you are trying to find pictures that make you look like you will be a good parent. I can tell you that all of the pictures I have taken over the years, not once did I ever think, "hmm, will this picture be good for my family book? Do I look like I would be a good parent?" It was hard, but I must say, the book is one fine album and I am quite happy with it. Once we approve it, I will share a link to the online version (in Shutterfly). However, I will warn you, when I do share it with you, they will all be printed and handed out, so if you notice something funny...don't mention it!

In other paperwork, my background and criminal history are all cleared (whew...) and David passed his medical physical (whew again).

We jumped another hurdle

It was a busy weekend for us and we are finally able to take a deep breath and write a blog post about completing another big step in the adoption process. Last Friday we became "officially" enrolled in the adoption program with Journeys of the Heart Adoption Services. We had our first in-person meeting/interview with the executive director and a program coordinator and they were wonderful.

The interview was a great opportunity for us to learn more about the adoption process with Journeys and to ask some of our burning questions. The thing that we learned during the interview that overwhelms us was not how much it was going to cost (which is a lot) or even the piles and piles of paperwork we need to complete (which is a lot) - it was how quickly the adoption could happen.

We are already a few months into the process and once we finish this next pile of paperwork and the homestudy (approximately 2-3 months) we will be in the midst of the matching process, which happens anywhere from 1 week to 6 months. This means that we could be bringing our new child home by the end of this year. Over and over we have been preparing ourselves for how long this is going to take, but I think we have been focusing so much on the waiting we didn't seem to notice the time going by.

Of course, we could be waiting much longer, so who really knows.

Anyways, we are full-on in the process and we are so excited. We know now more than ever this is the perfect way for our family to grow. The meeting was such a great first introductions to the staff at Journeys and we couldn't be happier to be working with them. Their devotion to children and placing them in loving homes was so apparent.

We are getting our physicals, fingerpints, FBI background checks, writing our biographies, taking pictures and getting our friends to be our references...you know who you are! Looking forward to our many hours of paperwork over the next month and of course updating you all on our journey.

First Step: Interviewing Agencies

The first step of this journey is finding the right adoption agency to work with. There are so many agencies out there it was a bit overwhelming to even decide what agencies to interview! So we focused on agencies based here in the Northwest and were open to all kinds of families. That helped us narrow it down to four agencies to interview and thanks to our very organized friends we were armed with a litany of questions to help us find the best match.

Just in these first few weeks we know way more about what it means to grow a family through adoption, and we have just begun to dive below the surface. We are getting more familiar with the language and jargon and learning about the different approaches and philosophies employed by different agencies. We can now can talk about disruption rates (cases where a birthmother changes her mind about parenting her baby), last minute placements versus planned placements, and so much more. While the learning curve is steep we feel that we've already come a long way.

All the agencies we spoke with gave us information that is helping us in our decision. Let's just put it this way...we were able to eliminate one agency before we hung up with them - not a good match. But that is why we did the interviews. What it will really comes down to is who do we feel we will be most comfortable with. All of the agencies had experience, were legit and could get us a baby in the end, but we want to work with an agency that will participate in this experience with us.

Anyhow, we are pretty close to making our choice and hope to submit our initial application early next week to the chosen agency!

Did I mention that we are now on the fast-track, if there is such a thing, for our adoption? We found out in our adoption tax credit research that there is a chance the $12,000 tax credit could go away at the end of this year. Yikes! Please call your Congressperson today! So we decided we didn't want to take that chance and are trying to get through the paperwork and homestudy process as soon as we can. Wish us luck!