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!
