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.