6 Month Update

It's hard to believe that tomorrow will bring us into the last month of 2013! This year has gone by so fast! This past month was pretty quiet adoption-wise, so this update will be short-ish. :)

The past 2 years now for the month of November, I've tried to do "30-days of thanks" on Facebook. I know that some people think it's cheesy, but for me, I love how it makes me more conscious of all the many, many things I have to be thankful for. And with the adoption news being next to nothing for close to a month, sharing something(s) that I'm thankful for daily was great for helping keep a right perspective. It's easy, at least in my case, sometimes to get tunnel vision with adoption, and keeping an attitude of thankfulness, helped to widen my vision. :)

November 1st- 6 months ago we contracted with our agency.

November 13th- Go to the clinic to pick-up my ear tube letter. Everything looked great, except it was not on clinic letterhead. It needs to be re-done on clinic letterhead, so I'm waiting for a copy of my letter on clinic letterhead.

November 19th- Decide to email our social worker to find out if there's any news. Hear back that she's just waiting on background checks to come in, the new ones we just did in October and my step-mom-in-laws.
E and I call her to find out if she thinks it'd be a good idea to call our local sheriff's department to see if we can speed things up, she says, yes.
I call our sheriff's department and get transferred to the lady who is doing the background checks. I asked her if she could give me any kind of timeline as to how soon she might be able to get to them. She looks through her pile and ours were the 2nd stack of papers on her pile. She told me that she'd have them finished in the next 15 min. and would email the results to our social worker as soon as she finished (Yay!!).
I also get an email from the woman who takes care of a lot of the background check stuff at the agency our social worker, works at, saying she had just received the final bit of information on my step-mom-in-law (out-of-state background check), and everything is clear and good to go. She'll get the information to our social worker the next day.

November 21st- We get an email from our social worker saying she had just sent an updated copy of our home study to our adoption agency to look over.
I emailed the lady who reads over all the home studies for China at our agency asking her if she could give me an idea of how long it might take before we'd hear anything. She emailed me back within 10 minutes letting me know that she was actually reading through our home study when my email came through, and she'd be finished in the next 30 min. and would let me know. Within the hour she let me know our agency had officially approved our home study and that she'd given our social worker the go-ahead to finalize our home study (Hooray!).
An hour or so later we got an email from our social worker saying she'd gotten approval from our agency. She sent our home study to her supervisor for approval and once her supervisor approves it, she'll send the home study to the state for approval. Once the state approves things we'll get the hard copy of our home study.

The 21st was very exciting for us! Our home study is so close to being finished now. After almost a month of hearing nothing, we finally received news, exciting news! The most time consuming portion of our dossier is so close to being complete. I'm not sure when we'll be holding the hard copies in our hands, but we're hoping it's really, really soon! Up next (after we get our hard copies) we apply for Immigration Approval, which unfortunately can take 2-3 months to get. So the sooner we get our hard copies the better. :)

Heading into December as much as I wish we were further along in the process, I am thankful for how God is teaching us through all of this. I'm thankful that even on the hardest days, He's teaching me to be thankful even when there's pain. If you think of us please pray for us, we still have a long way to go, and while we would like for things to be moving along quicker, we also don't want to get a head of God's timing. Pray for patience for us, and that we continue to trust Him no matter what things may look like from day to day.

If you have been praying, thank you! Thank you so much!

Happy Thanksgiving!