Adoption #2

If you're joining from Kelly's Korner, welcome!  I have followed her blog from the beginning of my blog-reading days and this is one of the few link-ups that I regularly participate in. So much fun.

Anyway, onto today's topic- adoption.  Adoption is very close to both mine and Kevin's hearts, for obvious reasons.  We adopted Kate just two years ago, and had the best possible experience through-out her adoption.  We loved our adoption agency and the adoption workers that we met.  We love Kate's birth parents, and continue to have a relationship with them and their families to this day. However, we do realize that not every story is as picture-perfect as this one.  We were very lucky, and are very blessed.  For Kate's entire story, click here. Warning- it is long!

And now, we're doing it again.  We have started Adoption #2, and already this journey is very different from the last one.  Not in a bad way, but just different.  With Kate's adoption, we breezed through the paperwork, the training, the homestudy, and were "officially waiting" just 3 months after we started the whole process.  Now with Adoption #2, we are about 3 months into the process, and have yet to schedule our first homestudy visit.  Some of the delay was our own doing (just dragging our feet over here) and some was out of our control (weeks-long vacations of adoption workers, and just lots of families starting the process at the same time as us).

We got word yesterday that all of our paperwork is in order, and we're just waiting on our adoption worker to give us a call and let us know that she is ready to start on our homestudy, which will consist of 4-5 visits (and more paperwork).  So that's where we are right now.  Just waiting.  Guess we better get used to that part again, huh?

If you've followed along from the very beginning as we waited for Kate, I hope you'll stick around for a second time around.  And if you're new to my little piece of the blog-world, I hope you'll join us.  We would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE for you to pray for us during this time.  It's stressful.  It's not necessarily a FUN time, but it is definitely a faith-building time.  We know that God is in control and are looking forward to seeing how He works.

We would also love it if you would pray for the birth parents that are faced with difficult decisions.  Some of them will choose to parent their children, and some will choose to give a priceless gift to an adoptive family.  Pray that God will give them wisdom, strength and direction for their decision, whether it is to parent or to place for adoption.

PS- Can you tell Kate is a Daddy's girl?  Mommy can't even tuck her in at night anymore because she's yelling "Daddy, rock! Daddy, rock!!"