Welcome to our new blog! As we begin this journey, we wanted to have a place where we can update our family and friends with where we are in the process of adopting our next child. Our hope is that this will be an easy place to go to see what is going on!
We officially submitted our application to start the process of adopting from China last week, on February 23rd. We were so excited to mail off the application, and even more excited to get a call this week from the agency, saying they received it! The agency we will be working with is a Christian agency called Lifeline and it is based in Birmingham, Alabama. The application was very detailed and took a lot of time to fill out, so we were glad to even have just that very first, little, step behind us.
I'll explain more about the process and timelines soon, but will give just a brief overview here. Our desire is to adopt a child from China through the Waiting Child, or special needs, program. The timeline for the whole process is about 12-15 months. In order to adopt from China, there are several qualifications, one being that both parents must be 30 years old. Because I don't turn 30 until August 24, we had to wait until 6 months ahead of that to submit our application. Completing our home study and preparing our dossier takes 6 months, and then we can officially send it off to China at the end of August!
The next 6 months will be spent completing our home study and gathering all the documents we will need to complete the dossier. When that is sent to China, we will be given a log-in identification, which will allow us to access the shared file of children available for adoption. It is possible that we could receive a referral for a child in only a month or two after China receives our dossier. From there, we would submit a letter of intent saying that we are choosing to adopt our child, and then we would have about 5-6 months before we can travel to pick him or her up. Only one trip is required, and both Randy and I will go together. The trip is usually 10 days to 2 weeks. We are thankful only one trip is required!
Because the agency we chose to use as our placing agency is out of state, we will need to find an agency in Texas to complete the home study part of the process. Lifeline said that our social worker will be calling us this week or early next week to talk over the documents they sent (policies, agreements, manuals, etc), and then they would help us in selecting an agency here to get the home study process started. From the research I've done, this looks like a very major ordeal and will involve a lot of work and many interviews! We are ready, though!!
I want this blog to be a place where I can document the latest news from our journey, but also a place where I can tell stories and write things I want our little one to be able to read someday. I plan on printing this blog out just as I do Kendall's and Cooper's blogs each year. So in the next few days, I'll try to update with some posts about how this desire started in us and what has led us to this point. Even though we are "beginning" the journey, we both feel like we have been walking this road for a long time to get to where we are now!
Thanks for joining us and for praying for us as we take steps closer each day to meeting the little one God has for us. Randy and I were talking last night about how, because we will probably get a child who is over a year, and probably closer to 18 months, our child is most likely already born! We are already praying for him or her, that God would hold them close and protect them when we aren't able. We pray that our sweet little baby would feel the love of their heavenly Father and would be safe and secure because of the hope we have in Him. Thanks for joining us in those prayers!
