Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Psychological Interview done

Our psych interview/exam is over. The letter is written and he's just proofing it. We're in a conundrum on where to go from here. Since our timeline has been pushed back, dependent on our finances, it's hard to know when we'll actually be approved for 3/4 siblings. That is very frustrating, not knowing how long it will take. We can work the numbers on paper, but the reality is that there's a whole lot of life that's going to happen in the meantime. It's so hard to know how things will look come next fall, which is when we're expecting to be approved for the 3 or 4.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Homestudy 2

Our last homestudy was today. It will be nice to get it finished! It also is a marker in my mind. Now we "just" have the dossier left.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

So what do we have to do?

I like to think of it in three phases:
Homestudy
Dossier
Waiting/Travel

The Homestudy is the part where we are determined to be acceptible parents for children. Every aspect of our life is evaluated. The goal isn't to find every thing that could be wrong; but rather to understand our strengths and weaknesses and how we handle them and would handle them with children. So, it ends up being a lot less scary than what the "paper" makes it out to be. (The checklists and so on)

The Dossier is a compilation of all the legal paperwork. There is a lot! The homestudy write up is included as well as pictures of us and our house and family and friends. It's all official. This dossier is what Colombia will look at and use to match us to children. (They match us to children; not children to us.)

The waiting is just that. :) Waiting to hear back from Colombia if we've been approved, and then who our children will be! As soon as we get a referral, we will make arrangements to travel to Colombia (about a month later). We will then be in Colombia for about 4 weeks and be with the children from about day 2 in the country.

So that's it in a nutshell. All tidied up like that, it looks pretty easy, huh!? This paperwork is pretty straightforward, but there can be some hitches since we're dealing with protocol and all. But Colombia has a stable program, and our agency is excellent.

But in reality, our lives will radically change at the end of this process. For that will be when these children, become our own precious sons and daughters. Our home will ring with laughter and tears, swell with love and hope, and embrace risk and trust. We greatly look forward to that day!

Our adoption blog

We are in the process of adopting siblings from Colombia. We're finishing up our homestudy right now. It's looking like we would travel to Colombia sometime in the late spring/early summer to get our children.

It's very exciting to be trusting God with such a huge decision. He certainly has been working in our lives and will continue to. We don't know any specifics of how old our children will be, or even how many, but we know that God is in control and is working to create our family.