Pre-Adoption

I am hoping this journal will help everyone to stay as up to date as they wish on our adoption process. I will attempt to summarize our journey thus far as briefly as possible. Once we receive our referral - information on our children - I will journal more often. My real goal for this is to be able to stay in touch with our family and friends while we are in Colombia and to keep everyone up to date.

Long story short...in January 2007 Eric and I, with the help of the Lord :), decided it was time to start our research in our long awaited desire to adopt. We spoke to Emi and Nate about our idea and they were ecstatic. They were even willing to give up the idea of a bigger house and bigger rooms for more siblings. So we took them with us to an adoption information session. we knew almost immediately which agency we wanted to use, Children's Hope International (CHI). It was also clear to us that Colombia, South America was where the rest of our family was from and that we would adopt siblings, two siblings under age 7, open to gender.

We took a month to really think and pray about the adoption, financing the adoption, etc. Then we filled out the initial application and sent it in to CHI. They said it would take at least two weeks for us to know if we were accepted. In two working days, they called us, we were in! CHI then sent us information to get us started on the loads of paperwork. We went to work getting everything together. Passports, FBI checks, Fingerprints, Child Abuse records, water testing, home fire inspection, more fingerprints, immigration paperwork, vet records, Dr. records, appointments with a social worker to check out our house and us, and the list goes on, and on, and on. :) There are two major groups of paperwork. One is the Home Study and the other is the Dossier. Once both are complete we can send them to Colombia with the help of CHI and then we wait for our referral. Time is flying by and we are much further along than we anticipated at this point. Very Exciting!

Already May, paperwork more than 1/2 complete, anxious to get on a plane.