Getting Closer

It's been awhile since our last update and we've been busy working on completing the requirements to finish our home study. We are excited to share that we submitted the final home study requirements last night and should receive a draft of the social worker's report this weekend! Hooray! Tomorrow morning, we are going to apply for our passports, which will take 4-6 weeks to process. Please pray this does not delay our goal to submit our dossier by the end of June!! We did not anticipate such a long wait just for passports or we would have done it sooner. With so much to do, sometimes it's hard to know what to do first!

After the home study is finalized, we will complete and notarize a few remaining forms that must be dated after the home study and the paper chase will be complete! But, we will have to wait for our passports to arrive before we will be able to submit everything. The signature page must be printed and notarized first. Once we have all required documentation in our hands, we will then need to take everything to the the county clerk to certify each notary's official capicity and then to the state to be apostilled. THEN we will finally be ready to submit our dossier for translation and submission to the Russian Federation and the wait begins! We are getting excited!! :)

The wait for Russia is approximately 9-14 months. A portion of our agency fee will be due with our dossier, but the big expenses are yet to come. While we are waiting, we will be applying for various adoption grants and loans and raising support to help offset the larger portion of our expenses. The largest amount will be due at referral, which is when we receive a photograph, medical history and background information on a child to be reviewed by us and by the international adoption experts at Children's Hospital. Upon acceptance of the referral, we will have to travel to Russia for trip #1 to meet her in person and make our acceptance official. Additional agency fees, travel expenses, international fees, in-country transportation, interpreter/representative expenses, and fees resulting from Russia accreditation requirements for FTIA (our agency) will all be due before we travel. We really need some grant money to help with these costs! Please pray for favor as we apply for grants and loans and that God will continue to provide for us, as He has already, as we continue on this journey.

We are so excited to be so close to getting on the waiting list! Thank you for all of your continued prayers, encouragement and excitement as well as those of you who have supported us financially through this process! We are so blessed to have you on this journey with us!!

Thank you!

We just wanted to send out a great big *THANK YOU!* to everyone who helped us over the last few weeks by donating items for sale, tents, tarps, telling your friends, posting on Facebook, and coming by in person to offer your support for our garage sale/adoption fundraiser!! Because of you, we reached (and exceeded) our goal of $1,000 to cover our home study expenses. We raised a grand total of $1,103.20 in just three days! Thank you, Lord, you always give us more than enough!!

Here are some pictures from our big event ...

Garage/Bake Sale Fundraiser This Weekend

Thanks to the generous help of our many friends, neighbors, church and family, we have collected a houseful of items and baked goods to sell in our garage/bake sale fundraiser this weekend. We hope to have a good turnout of buyers and people who want to help support our adoption efforts. We have lots of baby clothes, maternity clothes, baby supplies, household items, furniture, toys and more!!!!

Here's a link to a more complete listing and photos on Craig's List:
http://cincinnati.craigslist.org/gms/1168864929.html

Our final meeting with the social worker was this past Monday, so we are almost finished with the home study. We are getting fingerprinted tomorrow and have our appointment with the CIS on Tuesday. Then it's just a few last requirements to fulfill and the social worker will be able to finish her reports.

It is/was our goal to use the garage/bake sale money to pay for the home study fees so we can get started applying for grants and loans to fund the next step, which will be submitting our dossier for translation and submission to the Russian adoption officials for consideration. We still have quite a few requirements to complete before we will be ready for this next step. In the meantime, please pray that God will continue to bless our efforts and provide the funding needed to complete this phase of the adoption process.

For any visitors to this site generated from the fundraiser or cards we have given out recently, please click here to learn more about our story and how we started on the Journey to Hope. Thank you for supporting us in this incredible adventure to bring Hope home!

The Home Study Continues ...

Last night was our second visit from the social worker. I wasn't as nervous this time around. It just felt like a visit from a friend! Part of her role will be to help us make the adjustment when we bring our child home and to be a support through the process. She spent some time reviewing and explaining various medical and emotional issues that are typically associated with children adopted internationally and discussed some adjustment issues we can expect after we return with our child. We'll be starting our training this week, so we'll get a little more in depth look at some of the issues we may be facing. She also focused on my interview. I completed a 14 page questionnaire (my homework) since her last visit and we reviewed my answers together. Chad's interview begins when she returns on Monday (he'll do his homweork over the weekend).

We have already completed many of the required forms and collected much of the required documentation for the home study, which should be finished by mid-May. So far, we have been able to pay cash for everything, which has been such a gift! We already had some money in savings and a few people have donated to help us pay for our 'startup' expenses. We are so grateful! Our goal is to stay as debt-free as possible during the early stages of the adoption ... at least until we can begin applying for grants and loans, which are not available until the home study is complete. All of the organizations that we have found providing grants and loans for adoption will require that we submit a copy of the completed home study with our application. So getting through this first step is crucial to funding the rest.

This week, we'll be sending our application to the CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services), which is a division of Homeland Security. We'll also be fingerprinted and get our passports. Then we'll turn our attention back to compliling the various documents required for our dossier. Thankfully, the home study fee is not due until it has been completed by the social worker, which will be sometime in May. These are pretty big expenses, but we know the Lord will continue to provide for everything. He has already provided so much!

Thanks to everyone who has prayed for us, listened to us, encouraged us and supported us up to this point. It has been an amazing process so far and we are amazed at how quickly everything has been moving along. Stay tuned for more updates. We'll keep you posted!!

The Home Study Has Begun

Tonight was the first of four visits from the social worker for our home study. Chad was his usual calm, cool and collected self, but I have to admit -- I was a ball of nerves!!

Benjamin gave her the tour of the house, starting with the bedrooms. He was so proud to have such an important part in the process! He showed her his room, then Abby's, then ours. She took notes as she scanned each room and thanked Benjamin for his help. It was strange to bring a total stranger into Abby's room just seconds after greeting her and have it be so non-chalant and clinical. But at the same time, it was a relief to have it over with at the beginning. After all, in a year or so, it is going to be "Hope's" room! It was nice to acknowledge that and make it a reality in her presence. We finished touring the rest of the house: upstairs bathroom, living room, kitchen, play room, laundry, storage, downstairs bathroom, garage. And we were done. That fast. All that cleaning and the tour was over in less than 10 minutes!

After the tour was complete, we sat at the kitchen table and began the introductory interview. We skipped all the small talk and went straight for some pretty heavy topics, but, thankfully, Chad's humor and Benjamin's frequent interruptions kept giving us small breaks just when they were needed. I could see tears well up in her eyes a few times as we shared our story and I felt my nerves begin to relax in the comfort of her kindness. She asked a few questions and continued with her notetaking before finally interjecting some really important thoughts ...

One that we had already considered and that she realized after hearing our story, is how we have been uniquely equipped to be adoptive parents. Bittersweet, but true. Losing Abby will help us understand both the loss experienced by the birth parents and the grief experienced by our child. There was a chapter on it in a book we read about adoption a few months ago. Experts call it a "psychological presence" or "the symbolic existence of an individual in the perception of other family members in a way that influences thoughts, emotions, behavior, identity or unity of remaining family members." To put it in simple terms, someone is missing and life is different than it would have been and there are marked moments where that loss is experienced physically and emotionally. Having experienced such a significant loss ourselves, we will be able to relate with her loss and allow her to express grief in healthy ways she grows up and begins to understand the full extent of what it means to be adopted and losing her birth family.

At times, she will feel that someone is missing from her life. We know and understand how that feels. At times she will want to know if her birth parents think about her and may wonder what life would have been like with them. We know what it's like to wonder what would have been. We also know that you cannot give birth to a child, lose that child, and not stop thinking or wondering about them. She may be triggered emotionally by anniversaries or special days. There are anniversaries and special days that trigger our emotions, too. We understand grief on this level and it amazes me to see how God has already intertwined our lives in such a way that He has already begun to mold us into the parents she will need. And just like expecting a baby through pregnancy, we already feel so much love for her. It seems that as we complete each step and get closer to the day we will finally see her, our love for her just continues to grow and grow!

After about an hour of deep discussion, we went over some forms, discussed the steps in the process and she gave us a homework assignment to complete before her next visit. Next week, she will come back and do one-on-one interviews with each of us, separately. In the meantime, we need to complete some questionnaires and continue compiling documents for our dossier, CIS and home study.

It was such a wonderful, amazing experience tonight. I still can't believe this is really happening! Each step brings more confirmation that this is God's path for us and a renewed faith that He will continnue to provide everything we need. I know I will be much more relaxed for the next visit, now that we know what to expect. And I think we've made a new friend in the process, too!!

Hurry Up and Wait

We had our orientation this morning and spoke with the social worker today. We are already scheduled for four visits to take place over the next four to five weeks to complete the interviews that are required as part of our Home Study. Everything seems to be moving quickly!

Lets see. So far we've compeleted the application, been accepted, read and reviewed all of the requirements from the agency and both governments, completed the orientation call, connected with the social worker, scheduled our home study, ordered our 10 hour educational course on DVD and tomorrow I plan to complete the forms to request approval from the CIS and begin working on our dossier. It's hard to believe we've done all this in just the last week and a half! And yet there is a paper mountain still to be climbed ... birth certificates, marriage certificates, employment letters, physician's letters, reference letters, copies of our deed, passports, financial statements, fingerprinting, police clearance reports, photographs and a myriad of other questionnaires, applications and forms required by various state, federal and international agencies. Thank God for checklists! =)

I know it's hurry up and wait, but there is much to be done so we can get our place in line and I can't wait! Have you ever been at the bank and you are rushing to fill out your deposit slip so you can get a spot in line before it gets too long? It feels just like that. While we are busy collecting everything for our dossier, those who have already completed theirs are taking their place in line. The sooner we get done, the sooner we can get in line and ... wait!!

The Big Brother

Every night before Benjamin goes to bed, we read a page from his preschool devotional. The topic last night was 'blessings.' As we were reading, we began to name blessings in our lives like food, a house, a bed, blankets and then he added'a mommy and daddy' which led us into a conversation about adoption. He has known we have been planning to adopt pretty much from the beginning. We had already received the news that we had been accepted to the Russia program and we celebrated with him earlier in the evening, so it was fresh on his mind. We explained that the little girl we were adopting didn't have a mommy or daddy and he got a really sad expression on his face. Then he said, "That makes me really sad for her. I will take care of her. I will teach her not to go into the street if there's a car and protect her." It just melted both of our hearts. He was so tender and sincere in the way he was describing how he felt. I can already see a compassion in his heart towards his new sister. I am so proud of him and I know he is going to be a wonderful big brother.