Let the Journey Begin

It's been awhile since we've been able to post an update with any major progress about what's been going on with our adoption journey. We now have more exciting news to share with everyone since mid-April when we finished our Pre-Adoption education program and outreach training!

• Our background checks came back! Usually this takes 4-6 weeks or more to complete, but ours only took one week!
• We completed our giant stack of paperwork necessary to complete the application and got it all submitted.
• We've officially signed up for the home study to take place!

So, what's this all mean? The home study process usually takes a two to three months and involves the adoption agency sending us an assigned adoption councilor to better get to know us through interviews and visits at our home. This way they can ensure we have represented ourselves accurately and make sure that our home is a safe, secure, and supportive one for our future child!

We're even farther in the process now and are extremely excited to get through with the home study and prepare for the next steps in the process. In the meantime, we'll be putting our outreach training to good use and determining how best we can reach out to let people know about us and how excited we are to adopt a child of our own. Hopefully with hard work and determination, we'll be able to find our perfect match as we wait to get into the family book! It can't happen soon enough!

Training and Outreach

Let's be honest.. Who is ever excited to go to training? I WAS! We met some great people and learned so much in the last two days. 

Yesterday was our adoption education training. We went in depth of the feelings of all parties involved in the adoption process: birth parents, child, and adoptive parents. We even had two families that had finished their adoption process within the last two years come and speak to us about their journey. We had a lot of questions answered. Both of these families' adoption plans are pretty open. One child gets to see her birth mother once a month and is even in her birth mother's wedding as a flower girl! 

We hope one day we will have that great relationship with our child's birth mother!

Our beloved name tags! There is a story behind these... 

On both days we got to know the other families in the training with us. It was so nice to meet people that are going through the same adventures as us! We all actually have each other's contact information and hope to keep in touch to watch each other go through the journey of growing their family through adoption.

This is us with Matt and Beth, our table mates! 

We had to fight to keep these name tags! Yesterday our educators had told us to leave them  for today's training and  we were crushed to find out that they had thrown them away! Matt had them reprint them for keepsakes!

Today was our outreach training. Waiting families reach out to their friends/community/professional lives and ask them to spread the word that they are in search of an expecting couple and child to embrace through open adoption. We enjoyed learning about the unique ideas some families used to find their expecting couple. One family found their match by wearing t-shirts to the state fair stating "Hopeful Adoptive Parent."

These were some examples of outreach families had done!

We have so many ideas for outreach and we are so excited to get started! Just think, 

you may be the one that finds us the greatest gift of our lives! 

No procrastination!

So we are a week into working on our application and we have accomplished SOO much.
No procrastination in this household! Our huge stack of paperwork is down to only two items!

 WOOOHOOOO

 This week we both had our physicals, had our fingerprints taken, notarized documents, and filled out endless amounts of papers. We are turning in our background check paperwork tomorrow, which unless our identities were stolen we have zero worries about. The background study check takes about 8-10 weeks by itself.

Here is our completed stack of paperwork:

Our next step is the adoption education training and outreach workshop - a 2 day event - which the only openings they had were in June. God must want us to be ready for our future expecting mother a little earlier, though, because we just got notification that a spot opened in the April 11th and 12th training:)

So while we are working on the application we are also working on our adoption online training which is required to be completed before the in person training. We have 3 of the 5 completed so far!

Things are falling perfectly into place right now, which makes us know we are down the right path.

How are we feeling?

We are feeling EXCITED, scared, HOPEFUL, worried, nervous etc.

We are beyond happy to be heading down this path, but on the other end we are extremely nervous. How are we going to explain in an online profile why an expecting mom should choose us to raise her child? We can only express so much in words. We just hope and pray we can write the right story and paint the right picture for our child to find us. Also, how do we express gratitude to the selfless expecting mother? We know what is meant to be, will be. <3333333333333333

XOXO future mommy and daddy!

And the Journey Begins!!

Today has been a super day! We have been impatiently waiting for April 1st to find out where we were on the registration hold list. We assumed our registration wouldn't be considered until May.

We were a bit worried about our registration for two reasons: 

1. Our age--They had a minimum age requirement of 25 and we are both under 25

2. Fertility Treatments- We had to disclose that we were going through fertility treatments and we were worried that would be looked at badly. 

We did talk to the social worker that was there when we turned in our registration and she stated that exceptions are made based off of income, stability, maturity, etc. We were praying they would look past our age. 

Well GUESS WHAT!! They made the exception and today they ACCEPTED us into the Domestic Infant Adoption Program!!!! We just received the application, and let's say we have a lot of work ahead of us, which in the end will be so worth it that we will forget all about it! :) 

Next Steps:

1. Complete the Application Checklist (I'll give us 2 weeks)  Includes: Income Check, Background Check, Physical, Medical records, reference letters,  documents (birth cert, marriage cert etc), photographs! ( I already have half of this completed haha!)

2. Hand in Application

3. Complete the Education Seminars

4. Complete the Home Study 

5. Enter Family Profile Book

6. Wait for the perfect mother to find us! 

This becomes more real every day! :)

What is meant to be will be!:) 

We can not wait for the day we bring our child home<33

 for he or she will be blessed with double the love

Update

Last week we received an email with updated numbers for March! We are now officially in the single digits. 

7!  

They accepted 6 families into the program last month, and hopefully they invite at least 7 into the program this month! Otherwise we will be waiting until April or May! 

We picked out the bedroom that will be the nursery. We chose the wood-floored bedroom:) We were wondering if we were crazy for putting together the nursery so early, but it really occupies our minds during this waiting game. After learning that we could be called at anytime after our application is accepted, we thought we'd rather be more prepared than not prepared at all. There are a couple things we could hear on the other end of that phone call: either a mom just had a baby in the hospital and just made their decision, or there is an expecting mom that hasn't had their baby yet that chose us. 

We haven't started working on it yet, but here is the before picture:

More updates will come as we get them!