Home Study Documents - Sent!

These are terrible pictures, and I'm not really sure what my hair was doing, but it doesn't matter because...

our home study documents have been mailed! Yesterday we took them to the post office and $5(!) later, they should arrive at the IFS office today! I made copies and went ahead and sent some of the documents on to Lifeline as well, because we will need some of them in our dossier.

I'm sure I looked like an absolute goof taking my own picture holding up the envelope in the post office, but you have to celebrate this stuff, right? :) 

When I called my friend Kim at IFS to tell her the documents were on their way and to be looking for them today, she said, "Oh wow - you were fast!" Yes! Two weeks and one day. Score.

So now we wait to hear from them about scheduling our home visits! And in the meantime we can begin working on our education hours that are required. More about that soon.

Thanks for celebrating with us!

A Piece of Our Puzzle

When you adopt a child into your family there are a lot of pieces that have to come together.  Some pieces you can plan for and some pieces you cannot.  Adoption is a journey of faith full of tons of details and experiences that sometimes leave you puzzled.  We are on the very first part of this journey and we have already experienced many of these moments.  Sometimes you are puzzled, wondering how this will all come together.  How will our home study go?  How will we come up with the necessary funds?  How will life be different with three children?  And then, sometimes you are puzzled, wondering how this miracle is already taking place.  How did God know we needed courage?  How can people be so generous to us?  How can we not share all of the love and opportunities that we have been blessed with?

The pieces of our puzzle are coming together!  Some just according to plan, and for some there is not a plan.

We know that we are not the only ones adopting this child - choosing this child.  Our friends and family will choose her too.  You will choose to generously love and support her just like you do us.  We want you to be a piece of our puzzle - her puzzle.

There are many ways that we know you will shape her life once she is in our family, but there is a specific way you can help us now. We are doing a puzzle fundraiser - here is how it works:

1. We bought a puzzle that has 1,000 pieces and are selling each piece for $5.00. When you buy one or more pieces to the puzzle, we will write your name on the back of the puzzle piece. You are also welcome to sign your name yourself!
2. As the pieces begin to come together, we will work the puzzle, and eventually we will frame it with the back showing and all the names of the friends and family who helped bring our little girl home.
3. We will hang the framed puzzle in our daughter's room as an altar - we want this to be a reminder to us and to her of God's faithfulness. God often had the Israelites build altars after big events so they would always remember. We want to always be moving forward in our walk with God, but also remembering all He has already done for us!

If you would like to be a piece of our puzzle, you can send the money to our home address. If you don't know our address, email us at ashleydane6@hotmail.com.

It is going to be so much fun to watch this puzzle come together!

Update: 4-1-12
The puzzle is framed in! We are so thankful for all who have already bought pieces of our puzzle. Let us know if you want to be a piece!

Home Study Update

I just wanted to give a quick update as to where we are in the home study process. Randy and I have been working hard on completing the (huge!) autobiographies, as well as gathering all of the necessary documents to send to International Family Services. As of today, I only lack two things to be finished: a report from our doctor and Randy's autobiography. Randy preached last weekend and will be preaching again this weekend, so he's had two messages to write in the midst of going to Galveston with our students for a Spring Break mission trip this week! He is close to being finished, though, so I anticipate being able to send off our whole packet early next week.

For those who are curious about what we have to compile and turn in, here is a list:
- birth certificates (all 4 of us)
- marriage certificate
- local police check for both Randy and me
- high school or college transcript or diploma
- medical clearance letter for us and for the girls
- tax return
- copies of Social Security cards
- monthly budget
- net worth spreadsheet
- statement from our mortgage company that we are current on our mortgage
- latest pay stub
- copies of our passports
- copies of our insurance cards
- statement from our insurance company that our child will be covered under our insurance from time of placement.
- sketch of our house floor plan with dimensions and use of each room
- photos of the outside of our home
- veterinarian letter saying that Molly is current on vaccinations and not a threat to children
- signed fee schedule
- signed adoption placement agreement
- signed Prohibition Against Child Buying
- signed Duty to Disclose
- application completed and notarized
- AND our two autobiographies. Believe it or not, these autobiographies have taken more time than gathering all the other documents. They are SO detailed!

Once we get all of this paperwork turned in, IFS will begin scheduling our interviews and home visits!! That whole process and them writing up the report should take about 4-6 weeks.

Hopefully next week I will have a post saying that we have turned everything in to them! It will be a relief to get all of this mailed off. I have also been brainstorming ways to raise extra money to pay for the home study and our next agency fee. I have a fun, creative idea, so check back soon for that!

Home Study Agency

This ball is rolling and we are excited!! Since we chose an out of state agency to complete our adoption through (Lifeline = Alabama), we needed to find an agency in Texas that is Hague Acredited to do our home study for us. I did some research and found that there is only one in the Houston area and it is called International Family Services. I was a little unsure of just choosing an agency without a recommendation, though, so I asked some friends from church who recently adopted who they used for their home study. They completed an independent adoption from Ghana, so their agency didn't have to be a Hague agency, but she told me they also used IFS! I was very excited to hear about their experience and to hear that they didn't have any trouble with them.

Yesterday I called IFS and asked them about having a contract home study done. This is what it is called when you are not using an agency as your placing agency, but only for the home study portion of the adoption. The lady I spoke with, Kim, was very nice and helpful and had all the information I needed. She sent me an email right away with the autobiography we each have to complete and mailed me a packet of information with applications and lists of all the other documents we need to begin collecting.

So here's what this process will look like: We can begin working on the autobiographies and gathering all the documents now. She said it usually takes people 3-4 weeks to do this, but that if we really work we can probably get it all completed in 2 weeks. Once we submit all our paperwork to them, they will assign us a caseworker and begin scheduling our home visits and interviews. I believe there will be 4-5 of these. Kim said that from the time they get our paperwork, it will take them 4-6 weeks to complete all the visits and write the report. So all total we are looking at the home study taking roughly 6-8 weeks, depending on how fast we can do our part!

I began working on my autobiography last night. The form is the same for each of us, but we have to fill it out individually. The word Kim used to describe it was "nasty" and she was right - it is 17 pages long, with just questions one right after the other on each page. I have started filling it in, probably spent about 3-4 hours total on it so far, and I am only about halfway finished! If you can think of a question to ask us about anything in our lives, it is on there. It's crazy detailed.

We had our orientation interview today with our caseworker from Lifeline, Logan. Randy and I both enjoyed talking with her and getting to share our hearts for adoption and what has led us to this point. She asked us questions and then she shared the timeline in a more detailed way with us. We were able to ask her some questions and we ended up being on the phone with her for about an hour. She clarified a little for us on how this partnership with our home study agency works and what we need to do with Lifeline while we are working with IFS. She is really great and we are thankful to have such a helpful, encouraging person walking us through each step of the process!

So that's where we are now! Time to start hunting down all the documents we need to submit and making copies of paperwork we already have here at home. And filling out the autobiographies. Yikes! Lots of work but we are excited to have work to do towards our ultimate goal!

Why are we here?

Mine and Randy's desire to adopt began when we were newly married (engaged maybe?) and began talking about our plans for a family. We both desired to have biological children, probably two, and then we each said that we thought we would be interested in learning more about adoption as a possibility.

As we continued to study Scripture, we saw in many places how we are commanded to show love to others - not just say that we love, but accompany our faith with actions. James 2:15-17 says "What good is it my brothers if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, 'Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."

And again, in Matthew 25, we read that by showing love to "the least of these," that we are showing love to God himself.

This can look like many different things, but our hearts have been drawn to orphans. James 1:27 says "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep yourself from being polluted by the world."

So we began to consider adopting as one way of showing love to others, showing love to God, and giving a child a chance to be loved in a family and hear the Gospel, when otherwise they might grow up alone and not knowing the love of God. What an honor that would be!

As we began working at Brazos Pointe and began making trips to Cambodia to visit the orphanage our church sponsors there, our hearts fell in love with the people of SE Asia. Randy has been back multiple times now, and I was able to go once in 2010. We decided that if possible, we would adopt a child from that part of the world, where the risk of trafficking for young boys and girls is so high, slavery is prevalent, and most countries are predominantly Buddhist.

Through lots of research, we learned that Cambodia is a currently a closed country for adoption. The international laws on adoption are called the Hague agreement, and Cambodia just did not have good enough laws in place to be recognized as a safe place for adoption. The US has not recognized or allowed adoptions from there for several years now. Their government, as well as ours, is working to open it back up again, but we don't know how long that will take.

After we had Cooper, and she was about to turn a year old, we began feeling like we were ready to begin this journey. We knew international adoption takes quite a bit of time, so we felt like the sooner we started, the better. We started researching other countries in SE Asia that may be open to adoption. What we learned is that basically only Thailand and the Philippines are open currently, and for various reasons we didn't qualify to adopt from those countries.

As those doors seemed to be shutting, we wondered if maybe God was pointing us towards domestic adoption. So we took awhile to start doing research on that, including both the foster-to-adopt option and adopting domestically through an agency. We even got as far as to research some agencies we might adopt from here in Texas. Because domestic adoption is much faster than international adoption, we slowed down just a little.

While we continued to wait, Randy was able to attend the Secret Church simulcast at our church that was taught by David Platt. The one he attended (in November, I believe?) was about marriage and family. At one point, Platt taught about adoption. As he spoke, Randy said he felt like God was saying that maybe we didn't fight hard enough for what our original dream was - to adopt from an Asian country, where there are few opportunities for girls in particular, and where there is low access to the Gospel.

We talked this over, because we don't feel like domestic adoption is better than international, or vice versa. We just knew that adopting internationally was what had been in our hearts for a long time, and maybe we needed to fight harder for that for a reason. So, back to the drawing board.

The countries in SE Asia that we had researched still had the same barriers as before. But, then I read something that opened our eyes to China being a possibility. We knew that you had to be 30 to adopt from China, which Randy is already, but I am not until August 24th of this year. But I read that you are able to begin the process when you are 29.5 because the home study and dossier prep and all of the initial paperwork takes about 6 months. So, we saw that we could begin working on that in February, with the goal of submitting everything as soon as I turn 30 in August!

So that is where we are and why we are here now. We learned through the whole research process that international adoption has changed in the past few years to being more for adopting special needs children. For example, the wait in China for a normally-developing child is 6-8 years. The entire process for adopting a child with special needs (Waiting Children) is 12-15 months. We are in this Waiting Children program. I will post more soon about what this means - this is a super long post already!

If you have stuck with me this far, thanks! Mostly this is for us - to have a record of our journey, thoughts, feelings, motivations, and our hearts. But we are thankful for family and friends who love us and already love the sweet little child we will bring home someday. I hope through reading this that you were able to see a little bit of why we have been looking forward to this for so long!

And, one more reason we want to adopt: because we know what it means to be adopted!
"For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will - to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves." Ephesians 1:4-6
He has freely given us grace, and chose us to be adopted...and we are thankful!!