Adoption Update

As we are approaching the new year, I wanted to add one more post regarding the adoption. Our caseworker, Vickie, sent us a copy of the Home Study for us to review. After reading it over, and talking it over with Mark, she submitted a final copy to the agency last week. Once Christian Adoption Services looks it over and had the final approval, we will be one step closer.

Now, the big question.....what's next? I know that Mark and I have to complete come on-line courses and we must work on the photo book for the perspective birth parents to look through. Other than that.....WAITING is the name of the game. It seems like this whole process is just a lot of waiting. It is, but we are doing our best to be patient. I am not sure when CAS will post our family album on their web-site, but I am sure it will be soon.

Thank you again for all of your prayers and support through all of this. We are leaving on Tuesday night to go to Nashville for the Music City Bowl. Cheer on the Comodores! We wish everyone a happy and healthy new year.

Mom is out of hospital and at home

Hello everyone! Sorry it has been so long since the last post. After returning home from Wisconsin we had our adoption home visit and then we left on Sunday to attend the Denver Broncos vs. Carolina Panthers game and then off to the Biltmore for a night. It was very beautiful by the way....I will post pictures later!

Mom is out of the hospital and doing very well. She stayed with my sister for a few days, but then was very anxious to get back to her house and sleep in her own bed. They moved her bed down to the main floor so she would not have to climb any stairs. She gets tired very quickly, but so far she is listening to the doctors and trying to take it easy. Which, if any of you know my mother...this is extremely hard for her to do.

Adoption meeting went well. She came to the house and sat and visited with us for about an hour and half. Took a tour of the house..which did not take long..small house! Then we sat down and she documented a lot of our finances and then it was over. She wants to have the final copy for us to review by this week, and then she will submit it to the agency. Once that goes into effect, then we can get this ball really rolling.

Mark and I would like to thank everyone for their prayers and thoughts over the last few weeks while my mom was sick. God truely had a hand in her recovery and we feel very luck to have so many people that love us. Thanks again.

Hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas!

P.S. In case you didn't know....Vanderbilt football is going to a bowl game for the first time since 1984....and we will be there! They are playing in the Music City Bowl on Dec. 31. GO DORES!

Mom is out of ICU

God is so wonderful! My mom moved out of the Intensive Care Unit today and into a regular room. I am so thankful for all of the prayers and good wishes. Her heart is doing fine, her lungs are clearing up, and her mental status is improving every day.

When I left the hospital tonight, she was getting ready to sleep a little...(very hard to sleep in the ICU...to many bells and whistles!) so she needs to rest. I will be back up there all day Monday and Tuesday. I fly out Tuesday afternoon, if the snow is not to bad. We are supposed to get 6-12 inches of snow in the next two days. Please pray for my safe travel.

Please continue to keep mom in your prayers, as she is not out of the woods yet. She still has a long road ahead of her, but this is so much better than it was.

Mom's Status

I am writing to continue to ask for your prayers for my mom. She is still in the ICU and they are not sure when they will move her out. Her heart is doing as expected and her lungs are clearing up slowly. She is not in a lot of pain other than when she coughs. She is still very disoriented and confused. She continues to see people in her room who are not there and tells us stories every morning about what happened the night before, which are all false.

My sister's fiance was reading up on some of the drugs she was on for the sedation and some of the side effects are hallucinations, and dementia. Not sure to what degree mom has these, but they also said that even though she is not on the medication anymore, it could take up to weeks to fully recover from the side effects.

It is very frustrating to sit in there with her and tell her that those are stories and it did not happen, because she gets so frustrated with me and gets mad. I know she does not mean it, but it is so hard. Yesterday was a long day. I think it was a combination of lack of sleep and just overall stressed out over everything that has happened. My sister and I are going in there today and we are going to bring her a St. Nick present since last night was St. Nick night. She would always give us an ornament growing up for St. Night night.

Please keep her in your prayers and lets hope by Tuesday she is moved up to a regular room. It is also snowing here, 4 inches Wednesday and another 6 coming today....oh what fun!

Mom Update

Just wanted to write an update on my mom. She is still struggling through recovery. Today she got up in a chair (with lots of help) and sat up for an hour and got a bath and her hair washed. Her heart is doing better, but her lungs are not so good. They think she has gotten an infection and she has phnemonia now. She had a fever tonight and trouble breathing. They were bringing in a specialist to see where the infection was coming from. I have not heard back to see what they think, lets keep our fingers crossed it is good news.

I will be back up there tomorrow all day. I am so glad I am by her side to help her through this, because i could not imagine being alone.

Please keep my mom in your prayers. She is a strong woman, but this has really gotten her down.

God Bless....

Visit Update

Well, our second visit is today. this is our second meeting and we are meeting separately. This morning was my visit, and this evening is Marks. My visit went just great. It was hard being in there by yourself, and answering all of those questions, but it is just answering questions about your life and growing up and things like that.

Mark will meet her tonight and go through the same thing. Our home visit will most likely be sometime late next week. So we are moving along. Once they come into the home, they are just making sure that the home is a good and safe environment to raise children. She told us it was by no means a home white glove inspection. So, I am thankful for that.

I will post more late next week. I am flying home to Wisconsin to be with my mom. She had open heart surgery last Wednesday and she is having a hard time with recovery. My sister called this morning and she is a bit scared and I am too. So, I booked a flight to fly home tomorrow. I will be gone for a week....so please keep my mom in your prayers...she needs all of them.

Hope everyone had a good thanksgiving. I will update the blog when I get home next Tuesday. Keep praying....!

Getting Ready

Well, as some of you may know, we live in a small 1200 square foot house. Which is fine for Mark and I, but with two dogs, and now getting ready for the addition of a little one.....I am realizing just how small that is. So, we are in the process of taking our third bedroom and making it into a nursery. Which means making our guest bedroom a bedroom/office. Our house is a little messy at this time, with both closets and rooms torn apart, but we are making progress. I have condensed about all I can at this point, so now it is just a matter of taking things off the wall and picking a paint color. I have four samples on the wall, and Mark is trying to help best he can, but he is a tad bit color blind, so he does not see the same color as everyone else....but he tries.

When the family comes over for Thanksgiving, I will have to get more opinions of what color to go with. Then I will paint over the holidays and hopefully have the room ready for our home visit.

Be on the lookout, I may even post a picture of the colors on here to get everyone's help. I am trying to stay neutral with a green, but I went to Lowes and realized that there are like 100 shades of green.

Hope everyone is having a great week. Looking forward to seeing the family at Thanksgiving. We miss the rest of the family that we will not see. Miss you Mom and Dad!

Secoond Visit

We heard from our case worker, Vickie, and we have scheduled our second visit. We will be meeting with her on December 1. We both have to meet with her separately, so this one is a little more nerve racking. It is much easier to go through these meetings with your best friend sitting by your side, but when you are alone it will be much harder.

We are already anxious to get the second meeting. The third meeting will be at our house. Over the holidays when I have a little more down time, Mark and I are going to work on changing the guest bedroom into a bedroom/office and turn the current office into a nursery. We don't necessarily need to get it totally completed by the home visit, but it would be nice to show the case worker a finished product.

We hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and we miss all of you!

One down, two to go!

Well we had our first visit today. It lasted about 2 hours and we made it through just fine. They don't think we are crazy yet, so we are still good to go! ha! We really enjoyed talking with our case worker, Vickie, she is very nice. She did ask a lot of questions and write a lot of information down. We had to go through everything in detail. It was kind of exhausting, but well worth it.

Our next meeting will be after Thanksgiving. That meeting will be with us individually. She is going to try and do that visit with us individually, but on the same day. I am anxious to do all of the the visits and get on with the rest of the process, but this all takes time. She is very understanding through, because she and her husband adopted a little girl from China, so she has sat on the other side of the table and knows how it feels to be on this side. That is extremely comforting.

We had lots of phone calls and messages wishing us good luck, and we just wanted to say thank you so very much. Having all of this support definitely makes this process easier.

It was also a special day because it was our first meeting, on Marks birthday! Mark turned 28 today. He got his Dale and Thomas Popcorn that he wanted this morning along with his Vanderbilt car flags. Tonight we are celebrating by cooking fondue at home. Our favorite restaurant is the Melting Pot, but it is even more fun to cook your own fondue at home...cheaper too! ha! Hope everyone enjoys the weekend.

First Visit!!!

Hey! Well, we got a call yesterday from our case worker, Vickie. She was calling to set up our first meeting. We scheduled it for November 7, which is next Friday...also Marks birthday! She explained that the first meeting was about hour and half too two hours long. She only comes to the house on the third meeting. The first meeting will be a joint meeting with both Mark and I.

She will meet with us in a conference room here at Elon. We are nervous and excited at the same time. She told us that the interviews will be very in depth and that they can be stressful. But, that we should be fine. We are anxious to get this started. After our meeting we will write another post to let everyone know how it went. Have a great week everyone!

NEWS! NEWS! NEWS!

Well, I know some of you are visiting the site often looking for new news. This is a slow process and it is a lot of waiting. But, we did get an e-mail from our case worker today! She received all of our paperwork yesterday and she will be contacting us early next week to schedule our first visit.

How exciting!!!! We are very anxious to get this ball rolling. So, thank you to all of you who visit the site often and for being patient with us. We promise to post news as we hear it. We love and miss all of you!

Hope everyone enjoys the weekend. We will write soon!

Home Study Bound!

We received an e-mail yesterday from the adoption agency stating that they were just waiting on 1 more reference letter and once it was received that we would be assigned a caseworker. WOW! We are getting closer. The home study date will be determined when we are assigned a case worker. We are anxious to get this process started since this is the first "big" step to getting all of this underway.

We hope all of you are doing well, and when we are assigned our caseworker we will post again! Have a great weekend!

Adoption Update!

Hello everyone! We received a letter yesterday from CAS telling us that they received our paperwork. They mailed letters to our references requesting letters from them with some information about Mark and I. They told us that once they receive all of the letters that we would be assigned a social worker and then the home study process would begin. Once it was started we would be looking at 6-8 weeks before completion.

So, the next step is really waiting. We will wait to be contacted by a social worker to set up our home study. As we hear more information we will let you know.

Mark and I want to give a special thank you to our family members who have helped us with every aspect of this adoption process. Without a loving family like ours, this would not be possible. Each of you has a special place in our hearts and our lives and we will forever be grateful for all you have done. Mark and I could not travel along this journey without our family, and we just want to say thank you and we love you!

Adoption Application Mailed and Vandy's ranked!

Well, we finally mailed off the formal adoption application today! Wow, it was so exciting to mail all of the forms, and it was a big packet. After reading all of the paperwork last night getting it ready to mail, I realized that I had made a mistake. The only thing we needed to mail in with the formal application was about 4-5 forms. I thought we needed to have all of the supporting paperwork together, like bank statements, background checks, and a ton more. Upon calling the agency this morning, the women sounded shocked that I had completed all of the other tasks of getting all of the supporting documents. She said I was way on top of things and that most people take a month to get all of those together. I wasn't about to tell her that I just simply miss read the directions.....she thought I was smart, so I was going to go with that...ha!

Anyway, all is mailed now we just wait for them to contact us within the next 14 days and they have a few other items to finish then we will be assigned a social worker to start conducting our home study. The home study can take anywhere from 2-4 months. We will let you know as we continue the process. We thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers during all of this. We love our family and friends very much and it means the world to us.

Also.....as all of you may know Mark is a HUGE Vanderbilt fan....and VANDY IS RANKED for the first time since 1984! Wow..that is a long time. He is super excited. He was listening to the game the other night on the computer, and he was pacing the house in nervousness until they won. I told him he was scaring the dogs! Anyway, they are 4-0 on the season and we hope they continue to win. GO VANDY!

We will let you know when we hear something from the agency. Have a great week!

We have entered the Blogging world!

Hello everyone! Well, we have finally entered the blogging world. Mark and I have set up this blog to try and stay connected with family and keep all of our loved ones up to date with our adoption process.

For those of you who do not know, Mark and I went to a domestic adoption meeting in August and decided to sign on with an agency in North Carolina. The agency is Christian Adoption Services in Matthews, NC (CAS). We have thought alot about all of our options and felt that domestic adoption was the right fit for us.

We have completed the pre-application, and we received a letter and a formal application about two weeks ago. They only accept 30 couples into the program at one time. We were excited to hear that we were one of the couples accepted. The formal application is one of the longest processes I have ever seen. We have had to get letters from our bank, our employers, our background checks from each state we have lived in, physicals, and we even had to answer a 4 page autobiography questionnaire about ourselves. We have decided that they know more about us then we do.

It has taken us two weeks to get all of the paperwork together and we are finally sending it all in Monday. Once they receive the application they have 14 days to assign us a social worker to start working on our home study. The home study takes anywhere from 2-3 months to complete. They meet with us 3 times. Once together, and then once with each of us separate.

So we are hoping that by Christmas our home study will be completed. After completion of the home study, we have several training session, on-line courses, and meetings to attend. Along with getting certified in infant CPR prior to placement.

The biggest question we get is how long until we are able to be placed with a child? As best we know right now is that we should have our child 12-18 months after the home study is completed. We were told that with our wide variety of the child's ethnicity that we should just expect the normal wait time. We must complete a photo book as well as an on-line profile for mothers to look at when choosing an adoptive family. When we have our child it will be an newborn, most likely just a few hours old.

We decided that the blog was the best way for family and friends to keep up with the latest news with the adoption. We are very excited and anxious to get this process moving. As we hear new information and updates from CAS, we will make new posts and keep everyone updated.