Our adoption story so far.

Hi friends and family!

Jennifer and I have created this blog to help keep you all posted on our growing family. As you all know we have embraced adoption as God's plan for us and we are moving forward with the process. We are going to keep this blog to help document the process for you all and for our future son or daughter. :)

Both Jennifer and I will post here, but I am going to get it started with a summary of what we have done so far.

Jennifer and I have been talking about adoption for a couple of years. I personally knew I wanted to adopt for years. My mom spent some time in the foster care system as a child and my step-dad was adopted. Additional, my family had several foster kids stay with us as I was growing up, so you could say that I "have a heart for adoption." Jennifer is going to be such a good mom. Anyone who really knows her, knows that fact and I am so happy that we have chosen this path.

So here is how we got where we are. We kicked off this process on 3/20/08 when we met with our adoption agency, Adoption and Beyond (A&B.) We picked this agency based on our research and the recommendations of friends who have worked with them in the past. When we first looked into adoption about two years ago, we had also singled out A&B so it seems that our path keeps coming back to them.

We went to a meeting with Steffany, the executive director and talked about our adoption plans. We briefly talked about our goals and quickly focused on domestic adoption. (We have nothing against international adoption, but with plenty of children needing homes here in the U.S. this seemed to be the logical answer to us. )

Some families are very specific in their adoption requests. The may specify a race or gender or may even be more specific in their plan to build a family. Those kinds of distinctions never came into our mind. We believe that God has already matched us to our child and the process will work as it was intended. This is good for us on two fronts. First, it takes stress off your life when you stop pushing against his plan and second we are more likely to find a good match relativly quickly.

The only stipulation we made is we want a healthy infant. I think we really want the whole childhood experience (please remind us about this when we complain about being up all night with a crying baby.) :) Other than that we are very open and anxious to move forward.

The process starts off with completing a home study application. For those of you who are new to the process, I would describe it is a spiritual and psychological enema. It is intrusive, thought provoking and exhausting. The whole thing was about 50 pages including 2, 10+ page autobiographies and an extensive KBI and FBI background checks. The whole process took us about four weeks to complete and we submitted the document to A&B on 04/18/08, our 5th anniversary!

We also started taking a 10 week class through the state called MAPP. This class is the first step to be approved to become adoptive or foster parents through the state. The classes are every Tuesday night from 04/08/08 - 06/10/08. We decided to go through this process to keep our options open. We are primarily interested in the fost-adopt process. This is where the state places a child in need with a family when they are 90% sure that parental rights will be severed in the future.

I think Jennifer and I both have mixed feelings about the MAPP class. As you can imagine, anything done though the state is bureaucratic and involves even more paperwork. Additionally these classes can be emotionally exhausting as we learn about some of the challenges children in State custody have gone though and how to best help them.

As I hear about these children, I know they need good homes too. It pains me to think about how alone they must feel. I'd like to think at some point our family will be strong enough to be an advocate for these children, so we are keeping an open mind and heart, but we are pretty sure this is not the right option for us today. With that being said, the classes have been very informative so far and we have met several other couples I hope we maintain friendships with. I also have been impressed with the instructors. They have shown me that the people who toil "in the system" are filled with compassion and work diligently to do what is best for these children.

So that about wraps up where we are today. Our next steps are completion of the MAPP classes and the home study for both A&B and MAPP. We actually have home visits scheduled for both groups in the next 10 days. Out MAPP coordinator is scheduled to visit us on 05/02/08 and our A&B visit is scheduled for 05/05/08. These "visits" are designed to help prove that we have a suitable environment for our child and to let the observer ask any questions they may have.

Naturally we are a little anxious about the visits and will be cleaning like crazy for the next few days. Every book we have read said this is silly to do, but I am sure everyone does it. Can you imagine having to go through this level of scrutiny before you had children? The best advice I read on this was from A&B who suggested we just keep a good attitude and accept it as a necessary part of the process. :)

Well - that is the longest blog post I have ever written but that is our story so far. Look for more (and shorter) updates after our home study.

John