I've not had the desire to blog for a while on our adoption process because there has either been no news or not great news and I just got tired of repeating it. Like if I put it in writing, it somehow solidifies the truth of it more than if we kept it silent.
There has been so much fun/busy stuff happening in our everyday life and I will get around to catching up on all of that soon. I have so many pictures to post that it might take a while before I get up to speed on all of it.
However, this post is specifically an update on where our new journey lies in adding to our family.
If any of you remember from 2 years ago, we said we would NEVER, EVER, NOT-IN-A-MILLION-YEARS, EVER, EVER, EVER do foster care again. So..... yeah..... ummmm...... I guess the best I can do is relate this to giving birth (from what I've heard). The journey is full of unpleasantness, you are at times miserable and the pain is excruciating. And then you hold your baby and you forget about all of that. And then you decide to do it again. And then you remember again how unpleasant it was the first time.
So, you guessed it, we are currently back in the "system". For about a year, Missouri Baptist Children's Home has been pursuing us to get us to come back and work with them. MBCH is the foster care organization that we received Eli through. They are not directly the State, so things are done a little differently. Theoretically, working with them instead of DFS will be better for us. The caseworker that helped us finalize Eli's adoption is now the director of the Joplin branch, so that is a huge plus for us.
Due to the fact that our foster/adoption license has expired, we are having to redo all of it. We have already started our training classes again, every Thursday night for 3 hours each for 5 weeks. Paperwork by the stacks, fingerprints, doctors visits, well water tests and home studies.
We are already running into a few "obstacles". Financially, while foster care is "free", there are expenses that they will not cover, some of those things listed above. Also, our home study specialist is being a "stickler" (I'm really trying to be nice here) and he is forcing us to do some updates on our house that seem unrealistic and ridiculous.
It's going to take us a few months to finish all of the items we have to do to finish our licensing, but optimistically, we are hoping to be ready to accept children by late January or February 2015. We are requesting one child at a time, age 2 years or younger, boy or girl.
Eli is very excited to be a big brother and we are working to help him understand what this is going to be like, especially for him, if we have kids coming and going from our home.
From our California adoption process: things haven't changed in a long time. We are still only getting updates once per month. Supposedly birth moms are looking at us and our online profile is going well, but we continue to be "not the right fit". Our contract has 2 years and 7 months left. We've been waiting so long with their agency that we are needing to update all of our paperwork/home study for them also, and we are in the process of simultaneously updating it while finishing paperwork for MBCH. Updating our home study/paperwork for California will be around $300 or so. They know that we are now working with another adoption avenue and they are fine with that and it shouldn't affect our chances any with them.
Well, now it's out there and you know where we are. Please pray for us and our journey often. Specifically for "extra grace" for our MBCH trainer/home study specialist. He is one of those people that you need extra doses of patience to deal with.
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| This is only the beginning of the paperwork. (Week one) |
