On the road again

The changes a week can bring. We've dedicated ourselves to a path and now the sea of paperwork begins. Our home study team is onboard and is scheduled to meet with us in the next couple weeks.  We're quickly compiling the documents we can on our own, and kicking off the things we need others to do for us (references, employment letters, medical reviews,...).  The pile of home study and dossier paperwork on the official "work table" is quickly growing.

With a child identified at the end of this journey, this feels so different then our last two adoptions.  Then we didn't know if the child we were to adopt was even born yet, so the pace was a little less frantic.  This time there is a little girl out there that has been in an institution for too long, so every day we have to wait is one too many.

We know this process is in God's hands, and there is no guarantee she will still be there when we get there, but we are hopeful.  We can't wait until we are official enough to share her adorable little face with you.


In the meantime, we hope, we pray, we photocopy, we notarize, we fill in more forms and we wait.  What a complicated process.  And it is all different then when we did it all less then two years ago, partly because it is a different country, partly because US and international adoption requirements have just gotten that much tougher.

Keep us in your prayers - we sure can use them!

To adopt or not to adopt, that is the question...

Adoption #3 began in the strangest of ways as you might surmise from our Adoption Timeline.  We started with a concern for children in eastern European orphanages, and a desire for a little girl based on our family makeup and bedroom logistics.  We found a girl, then lost a girl and had to regroup.  We considered a different country because of concerns of travel requirements and other country restrictions.  We considered a boy since demand is so much higher for girls.  We found a little boy and began reviewing his case in detail.  When certain facts came to light about the program and additional medical conditions, we had to reconsider. 

At this point we thought, we wondered, we prayed.  Are we supposed to do this at all?  Where and when?  Our hearts were drawn  back to eastern Europe where we had begun.  But what about this two trip requirement.  Could we really get that much time off from work?  Could we afford it?  Two little girls faces came into view.  One was getting close to aging out of her orphanage and needs to be brought home soon.  The way became clearer.  We figured out a way to deal with the two trips we hadn't considered before.

We stepped forward and said "Yes, we will do this, with the Lord's help".  There is peace.  The destination seems clearer tonight then it has in a long while.  We know who our angel is, we just have to get to her, and hopefully soon.

This has been in a mother's heart for a long time.  We've been seriously engaged in searching this out for just about a month, but it seems like so much longer, like it was always the plan.  I think in fact it was - just His plan and we didn't know it yet.  We are at the beginning of this journey.  There will be crazy fingerprinting, document preparation, signing, copying, certifying, mailing again and again to get it all together, but it will get done.  Who knows, if all goes well, by Christmas we could have the best blessing ever, another child beside us in front of the manger at the feet of Jesus.  But now we are really getting ahead of ourselves.  Back to the paperwork!