New Year and New Adventures

January 2, 2017

I haven't blogged in a bit because things have been a bit busy. I wanted to hop on for the new year and keep everyone up to date.

We finalized the album that the expected parents get to see and sent them to the agency. They loved them and have sent them to the different offices located in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Now what will happen with them? When an expected mother reaches the point where she is ready to start considering future parents for her child she along with whom ever she choices will sit down with her counselor. At that time she will be provided the profile albums for hopeful adoptive parents that fit her requirements. An example is Jeff and I are Caucasian, large extended family, and live in the country. Other things that could be my work with the youth group, Jeff's love of the outdoors, or the fact we have a dog. She will be provide a stack of books to look through and then she will say I want to meet these couples or this is the couple I like. This process can happen dozens of times before an expected mother wants to meet us. It is 100% in her control and Jeff and I love this fact.

The other thing we had to do is make our third payment. Money is one thing that everyone knows adoptions take a lot of but no one talks about. The reason because people word their questions so it makes it sound like we are purchasing a child. It really isn't much different then the money it cost to give birth to a child except we don't have insurance to cover it. I will discuss that in an other blog but for now we are in the waiting period. We have paid out just under 1/2 of the money that will need to be paid. We still have money in the savings account, are able to still do a few weekend getaways, so it didn't hurt to much!

So now here we are in the waiting stage. We know our book hasn't been viewed yet so we decided that we are going to count January 1st as our start date. Paperwork, albums, and payments all got completed during the holidays so we aren't counting them just for that fact. The 1st of each month will be our count and just as someone who is pregnant I will mark the month marks with a blog(no pictures of my belly sorry).

We also don't want anyone to be afraid about asking questions. If you have one please ask us either on here or privately. There is never a stupid question, and we would rather you get the answer from us not from someone else. Questions can be about our personal journey or a general adoption question. We can't speak for the expected parents or the point of view of someone who has been adopted but we can tell you what we have learned.

For now Happy New Year!