Updates..

I promised that I would share updates on our process when I could.
So, this is where we are. Now, we are talking to our SW about twice a week due to the events taking place. She called us mid week to ask us could we bring in 2 copies of our profile this coming week because our profile will be shown to a potential family with a due date coming up soon. I did not panic and I did not become excited because "it is what it is" until everything is final. I did not even ask what the gender was! I listened to the information that she had and I agreed to bring it in.

Being that I was sick last week, we did not have an opportunity to get it printed and we were not able to send the final product to the agency last week. She was unaware that I was severely ill until she called because she did not talk to me towards the end of last week. So, I told her that I would bring in the copies this week in person since I am home all of this week. They will be showing the birth family profiles at the end of this coming week or the early portion of the following week.
This forced us to get it out of our hands this week since we have been preoccupied with designing the pages and making sure that everything is in there that needs to be.

We have also been in contact with another agency that has a lot of placements regularly with much shorter wait periods and with more situations. They came highly recommended as well by other AP's who went with them.
We will move forward with them if these particular situations do not work out with our current agency. We felt like we have given ourselves a fair amount of time with our current agency. So, we established a particular time that we would move forward with someone else if things did not work out or they did not have more situations.

A close friend of mine told me on Friday when we were talking about what is going on and she said, " It's already done". God has chosen the child for us, and now we just have to wait and see which child it is by going through these final processes. We are truly practicing discernment with this and not attaching ourselves to any situation due to being anxious and impatient, until we know and feel that it is the child that God wants for us. I believe that we will truly know and feel a sense of peace and fulfillment when it is the right situation.

This is all that I am able to share at this point regarding our potential placements.
I will try to update what I can when I can on our process that we are going through now.

Updates and Thank you for your prayers

Thank you all for your prayers and support during this time. 

It is indeed still a difficult time, but only God can help us all get through and try to understand a situation like this. I am still soaking things in myself and dealing with it in my own way and preparing myself for their home going service. It is family, and our family is close. We may not see each other all of the time due to everyone living different places, but we support one another.  

Arrangements have been made for my 2 cousins who are brothers and the other four persons ( 2 family members included) are still missing. The missing family members are the uncle of my cousins, and another cousin.  The coast guard has stopped the search and private divers are supposed to be hired to search for the missing. 

We are in prayer for their parents, spouse, fiance and young children at this time for we know that their pain and sorrow is deeper than ours. 

I just wanted to let you all know that your comments and emails have not gone unnoticed. Many have stayed abreast through the news stories and interviews and I appreciate all of the prayers that have gone up and that are still going up during this time. 

Updates

Monday evening we had a phone conference with our Social Worker to update our service plan. A service plan is something that our agency goes over with each prospective adoptive family to verbally discuss and write down a time line with dates in terms of meeting and completing particular goals.

We initially filled out this service plan in November and it lasts for 90 days. I can not believe that it has been 3 months already since we officially began the process with our agency. We had to do a new service plan since the 90 days was up. We had almost met most of our goals that we set to accomplish within 90 days. The only that we did not have completed was the homestudy. We only have one more visit and thats it.

So, this is where we are with the process:

• We have one more home study visit where our SW will come to our home
• We have to receive the 911 call records from the two counties that we have lived in since we moved here via mail to make sure that we did not have any 911 calls within our residence (takes 3 weeks or so to return)
• Drug tests for both of us
• Physical with my urinanalyis (my pcp's office forgot to run this when I had my physical in November so I have to have this done so they can send in paperwork to the agency)
• Family history background sheet for hubby and I (this is a form that is filled out where you give complexion, hair color, eye color, special characteristics and data of birth date, date of death and cause of death, grandparents, great grand parents and aunts and uncles)

The items that we have left are minor and not time consuming. We plan on having the final visit within the next couple of weeks. Our SW advised us that she would bring us copies of profile books so that we will have an idea of what to put in the book. We are trying to begin pulling the profile book together next week.

We asked our SW how many AA families are waiting for babies. She advised us that there is one parent that is waiting for the birth of the child and the other family is in the waiting process. So, therefore there is one more family waiting ahead of us. Actually, it would just the two of us waiting because the birth families have a choice because they are typically shown profiles of a couple of different families.

We have decided on nursery furniture items that we are going to order. We plan on ordering this coming weekend since it takes 8-10 weeks for most of the items to return. We are dealing with two different places for our furniture, but we are placing the order for the crib and a couple of other items on Saturday. I will feel much more comfortable knowing that we at least have the crib and some major pieces if something occurs quicker than expected. The bedding can always be purchased later. My initial fear was being caught out there with an empty nursery and having to settle for something that I really did not want because we did not have time to wait for an order.

However, we did find a really nice "emergency" set at BCF that stays in stock in the event that we didn't have anything with an early arrival. It was an expresso set that we found a little while back. This set was our back up plan if the baby came before the furniture that we really wanted to order returned.

We are going ahead and moving forward with ordering the crib that we decided on and we will have to wait for it to return.