News On the Adoption Front

Some of you may have noticed many changes happening to our blog. There is a purpose to these alterations, we're trying to be more "birth mother friendly." Thank you for being patient as our html changed and the blog has been "under construction" quite a bit recently. I imagine there will be more changes organizationally soon.

A lot has happened since we updated everyone on our application status and I am sorry for not keeping everyone informed. The last we heard we were still waiting for our fingerprints to get back, and as it turned out, they have been in since August! LDS Family Services is very busy here in Colorado, so we were just happily waiting for them to start our homestudy when we thought we were still waiting for fingerprints. Back in December we were assigned to a social worker who was specifically in charge of getting our homestudy done. Wendy has been AMAZING and has really worked hard in our behalf so we could get approved sooner! After months of not a whole lot going on, Wendy will have our homestudy write-up ready for approval by the end of January!!!! That means by February we should be eligible for birth parents to choose us!

Let me explain a little bit about what a homestudy consists of. There are four interviews that take place, only two of which actually needs to happen in our home. Those were individual interviews with each of us where we talked about our childhoods and relationships with family members. She made sure we didn't keep knives in the bottom drawer, have a fire extinguisher, and generally live in a safe environment. The other two were joint interviews and held at her office where we talked about our marriage and plans we have when a baby does come. The purpose, I think, for those were mostly to make sure we have an emotionally and spiritually strong home for a baby and to get us thinking about what changes will need to happen when a baby does come. Personally, these interviews were just as helpful to me as they were to LDS Family Services.

We have been working on our on-line profile that birth mothers from all over the country can look at, and once it is actually posted I will be sure to post the link so everyone can look at it. In the meantime, the website where others' sites are is itsaboutlove.org. I like poking around at other couples and seeing how they approach this process.

Thank you again for everyone's love and support, especially those who were our references or took pictures or have listened to either of us talk about our hopes and dreams for our family! We are so happy to be moving forward and will let you all know what happens when it happens.

(We will be printing out some business type card things with our contact information on it soon to pass out to pretty much anyone who will take one. Let us know if you'd like us to send you some.)