Home Study Visit #1

Thursday was our first meeting with our Adoption Specialist, Kimber and she was a hoot! We had a blast just getting to know each other as she asked us questions about what brought us to adopt, how we met, what school was like, how we were planning on disciplining our children, and each others strengths. She walked around our house for a bit commenting on our decor and the nursery while asking us questions about baby safety. She even cracked on Derek because he kept calling her "ma'am", making her feel old.

We were worried about our animals getting in the way, so we had our prayer warriors pray that they would be freakishly calm. When she was leaving she bent down to pet one of the three kitties sleeping on the couch and she asked if they were always this calm. Why yes, yes they are. It was so nice to know that God listened to our silly prayer!

She gave us some questions to think about- are we open to a legal risk adoption, do we want to be put on the website for out of state adoptions, and gave us some options about race. We decided to celebrate surviving our first home study meeting and chat about our next one over a chinese buffet :o)

Our second meeting with her is this Tuesday where we will have our individual interviews. Eeep. I always do better with this kind of thing when Derek is sitting next to me, but it's all part of the process. Our third and final home study meeting will be on the 20th. She said that once those are finished, it usually takes her about 2 weeks to complete the 20 page paper (yeah, no joke) and then she'll send it off to the Bethany office where it takes about 2 more weeks to be approved. All in all, we're looking at about 6 weeks until we're approved or around the end of July.

We have a pre-placement meeting up in Indy on the 28th of this month that is required before you can complete the home study. This meeting will give us all the information we need about getting matched with a tummy mommy, picking up the child from the hospital, and the finalization process. I can't believe that we're already talking about this! Just a month ago we turned in our preliminary adoption paperwork. Wow!

How can you capture this in a photo book?! lol

During our home study we've been busy bees. We're working on completing the nursery so we can show that we are baby-ready in our profile all while trying to keep the house clean for our next home study meeting. It's kind of like the stress you feel while trying to show your house to sell it. We also need to build our family profile which is the book that Bethany will show birth mothers. I'm sure you can imagine how important this book needs to be, so we'd love to have your prayers about that. We're looking for unique ways to show our personalities while staying true to who we are. We've decided to make it ourselves, so I'll be writing it and Derek will be designing it. This book needs to be completed by the time our home study is approved because they will immediately begin showing it to mommas, so we're feeling the rush.

On top of that, we're doing all we can to raise extra money and research adoption as much as possible. Just this week I've watched 12 different children, all under the age of 6, so my brain kind of hurts.  Did I mention that we've never been happier?