now we wait

As of November 21, 2016 we are officially licensed to adopt!!!! 

[insert squeals and deep sighs of relief here] 

It has been quite the journey to get here and it's truly surreal that we have finally arrived at this point. I have thought and dreamed about this for 16 years, literally half my life, and for the past 6 months it's been my main project. Whatever will I do with my time, she muttered to herself, chuckling and remembering her 2 year old......Truly though, except for meeting my husband and marrying him, there is nothing in my life I've thought about, studied, prayed over and anticipated like adoption. On certain levels I feel like a pro but on other levels I know I have so so so so much to learn and that the learning will continue as long as the parenting does, so I'll be learning as a grandparent too. Stay tuned to see if I become a regular blogger and to experience all that we learn about parenting adopted kiddos. The next step is to wait, and pray. Pray a lot.

So I’m going to play a little catch up…ok a LOT of catch up. Back in May we sent out this info to our family and some very close friends.  Now we want to share it a bit more publicly to keep everyone up to date on our adoption progress.

Hello Family and Friends!

Matt and I wanted to give you a little update on our family and how we are hoping to grow it next!  

Now if you've known us for even the shortest amount of time you've most likely heard us talk about adoption.  Most of you have probably heard us talk about it a lot.  If you've never heard where our heart for adoption comes from please ask us, we'd love to share!  Right now though I just want to fill you in on what the past few years have looked like for us as we've prayerfully considered growing our family this way.  

We started filling out paperwork for foster and adoption training in January of 2014 then we got the best surprise ever and we found out we were pregnant in late March.  We decided it was best to put pursuing adoption on hold until our little guy arrived.  It was important for us to focus on and care for the child that God had already blessed us with and get to know his little personality before we would decide to bring other children into our home, especially children from hard places.  This was how we could best love Jac. 

Fast forward to last fall and we started talking details again, talking with friends who have adopted and researching agencies etc.  We narrowed down some details and made some big decisions.  Then life happened and we pressed pause (or more aptly God did) to grieve; as our family and me directly lost two family members and one of my very close friends all in the past 6 months.   

Fast forward again to now and a couple weeks ago I met with the social worker who will walk through the lengthy process of the Home study and hopefully eventually see us come to adopt a child! Yay! [insert my squeal of joy here]

Some details about what we are hoping for this adoption and our agency choice:

After a lot of prayer, research, and consideration of our current family situation we have chosen a small local agency. They specialize in domestic, birth parent driven infant adoptions and offer life long counseling to the birth parents whether they choose to parent or give the child up for adoption. They support the birth mothers and we love this fact about them.  If you've known us and our desires to adopt this could come as a surprise as we've talked a whole lot more about international adoption and even adopting out of foster care then ever adopting an infant.  While we still love both those options they just aren't right for our family at this time, we are hopeful they might become options again in the future. 

We will now begin the process of compiling documents for the home study and start some intense educational training. Yay! We are excited to put feet to our faith and walk forward in what has been a dream for years.  We want to ask for you all to join us in prayer for our family and the family we seek to build.  There are so many unknowns and this is a journey that we know will be hard, we don't take that lightly.  Going forward our goal is to keep everyone updated as best we can via my blog. www.shewalksalong.com right now there is only one post...from September of last year.  We hope to post there as we make progress so people can pray specifically.

[Obviously I’ve done a crappy job at that, I really do plan to do better. Please forgive my lack of updates!]

Again, thank you all for your support, love, and friendship in the process thus far (raising us, loving us, praying for us, laughing with us, crying with us, teaching us, mentoring us and SO much more) we are here because of all of you.  If you have any questions or want more details, please don't hesitate to ask and check out the blog!  

I plan to post an update on where we are NOW in the process in the next couple of days so check back!

We ARE adopting!

There it's on paper (well sorta). I told Matt that I needed to put our names on paper work. I needed it to be official. Well this isn't that exactly but it's something.

I guess I figured I had this beautifully designed blog that's been sitting there begging to be written in for close to 2 years (more on that later) and it was a blank canvas to write those "official" words on.  This would be at least something IN writing, even if it's not the documents I was hoping for (yet!).

And it says we "ARE" adopting. Not, "we're considering adoption" or "we're praying about adopting", which of course is still true and we are praying even more now, but this word "are" is bold, this is sure.

I don't have any answers or timelines and I have just as many questions as before but we ARE adopting. 15 years of adoption being on my heart, 7 years of actually researching and learning, 2 + years of praying with Matt and this is the teeny tiny baby step that we needed to take today.