Completing the Home Study and many profiles

We're all done on our part.  We've finished the classes.  Our caseworker came almost two weeks ago and did the in-home interviews and the walk through.  And it went great!  She was wonderful to talk to and we had a really enjoyable time.

I just got an email from her saying she'll finish writing our Home Study up this weekend and get it reviewed Monday and then we'll have it early next week!  So amazingly exciting!  This process all took a bit longer than we anticipated but the end is in sight.

So, during the interviews with the caseworker, she brought THE BLIND SIDE up several times.  And I've seen the movie before, but it's been a long time, so I didn't really remember a whole lot of details.  So after she left I ordered it on Amazon and it came a few days later.  We'd talked about having the kids watch it too, but I couldn't remember if there were inappropriate things they shouldn't see at their age.

Justin and I watched it a few nights ago.  I warned him that I was probably going to cry.  And boy did I.  There would be something that would come up and I just thought of our son being in similar circumstances and the tears sprang forth!  The part where Michael sees his bedroom in their house for the first time and says, "I've never had one of these before."  "What, your own room?" she asks.  "No, a bed."  I just lost it, turned to Justin and said, "let's go buy him a bed!"  The movie certainly did get to me on many, many levels.

Since learning that we would be adopting an African-American son, we've both been paying a lot more attention to racial issues that surround us.  We've read discussions on social media, especially ones that pertain to white families adopting children of other races.  And it scares me to death.  It intimidates me.  Because I'm not a heavily opinionated person.  I'm non-confrontational.  It's easy for me to let things go and to try to focus on positive issues instead.

This change that is coming has forced me to look at things a lot differently.

A discussion that comes up a lot in transracial adoption circles is white privilege.  I won't go into that, because I really don't want to.  But it was interesting to have a different view while watching THE BLIND SIDE.  It was easy to look at it as the rich white family taking in the poor black kid.  Hollywood makes everything look very pretty and perfect.  There's going to be issues.  There's going to be problems.  I mean, that's not what I hope for, but it's what I have to mentally prepare myself for. I'm going to be in a lot of uncomfortable situations and I'm going to flounder sometimes.  But in the end I just have to remember: I'm going to love this child.  And I'm going to have his back.  And we're going to be a family and we need to keep that as our focus.

The last update that I'll close with is that we DO have a few children we want to start inquiring on.  The other day we went throughly through the profiles of the children on adoptuskids.org that fit the criteria.  Searching for 12-13 year old African-American boys in the us brings up over 160 results.  That is so many children who need families.  We went through and anyone who generally fit what I remembered, we read their profile and determined if they might fit.  There were a lot of factors to this--if they could live with other children, or younger children in the house.  If they had to stay in a certain state.  Their own biological siblings.  My gut feeling.  And then we printed off 20 something profiles.

Our biological children came in while we were doing this and wanted to be a part of the process.  Liam wanted me to print every single boy and take them all in.  He's a lover.  And Makenzie would get so excited when a boy had similar interests to hers.  It was amazing seeing them get emotionally involved in the process, long before they ever meet their brother face to face.

Right now, we have 4 children we want to start off with.  Maybe none of them will work.  Maybe we won't work for them.  Maybe our son is one of those 4.  I don't know yet.  But it's a start.

So, pretty soon we'll be able to move forward and learning more about these wonderful boys!

Home Study and Updates

I figured it was time for an update since it's been almost a month since I've last posted.

Where are we at now?

We are almost done with our home study.  We've done all the background checks (passed, yes! lol), completed all the many, many forms and statements.  We're currently working on all the training--we are required to take 10 hours of adoption related training.  Right now we're doing online classes, and they've been interesting, though nothing yet has been a shock.  We also had the opportunity the other day to go to a panel of birth parents.  I was surprised at how many adoptions are open and how often the birth parents get to see the children.  Everyone had a different story and different feelings on adoption.  It was very interesting and I'm glad we got the chance to go.

So, right now we're working on finishing the classes, we have 3 hours left to go, which we should wrap up the beginning of next week.  I'm speaking at a conference this weekend, so we'll have to take a few days break.  Next, our caseworker will come to our house and we'll do joint and individual interviews.  She'll walk through the house.  And then she'll write up our home study and we'll be ready to move forward!

Move forward.  Even though this process has gone by fast, it doesn't feel real to get to the point that we can look for our son.  It's just one of those things that looms everlastingly in the future, you know?

It's the part I'm most worried about: finding him.  Because I don't know if he's just going to be dropped in our laps and it will be like "HERE HE IS."  Where the moon and stars will just perfectly line up and he'll be there at the end of the tunnel, very obvious that it's him.

Or if it's just that we are supposed to find SOMEONE that fits the dream I had.  I don't want to just search the thousands of kids (which breaks my heart every time) and wonder "is HE the one?  Or is HE the one?"  The uncertainty of picking the right child is scary to me.  Maybe that sounds terrible, but it's the honest truth.

Needless to say, our family has been doing a LOT of praying lately.  Praying that we'll find him.  Praying that he will be watched over and protected.  Praying that he can start to be prepared to be a member of our family.

We keep talking that we hope we will find him and be able to have him in our home by Christmas.  That would be so wonderful.  So amazing.  But I'm not optimistic that it will happen that fast.  I keep telling myself that the timeframe is in the Lord's hands and that we can only do as much as we can on our part, the rest we need his help with.

One day, one step at a time.  We're almost there.

Disneyland and Home Study Progress

Our family got back from Disneyland on Thursday.  We spent 4 days in the parks and stayed at a hotel just a block away.

We had a blast.  Meeting Micky Mouse, riding Tower of Terror and Indiana Jones.  I had a hard time not going full ride monster (I love roller coasters and want to do all the scariest ones a thousand times) and had to remind myself that my kids are still not ready for all the intensity of The Matterhorn or Space Mountain.  It was a great trip.

But I did keep thinking, through the entire time, that someone was missing.  And oh man, that was hard.  Wherever our future son is out there, I really, really wanted him there with us.

Justin and I kept talking the entire time about the next time we go to Disneyland as a family, and we're certain it will be with a third child.  We'll be driving next time.  We'll probably do fewer days in the park, and we'll be sure to hit the beach for a few days.  I can't wait to have him experience the trip with us.


Today I worked on a bunch of the home study stuff.  Gathering copies of important documents.  Filling out FBI fingerprint checks, criminal background stuff, etc.  As soon as Justin gets back from WA on Wednesday we'll go down and get our fingerprints done.  Then we'll mail all that stuff out and write a bunch of checks.

It sure was nice to see a bunch more stuff checked off on our list.  Getting closer, one baby step at a time!

Where the adoption journey begins

It started with a dream.

No seriously.

As cliche as it sounds, as embarrassed as I sometimes feel to say it it, this whole journey began with a dream.  Well, the reality of moving forward with adoption began with a dream.

Sometime in the spring of 2015, I don't remember what month exactly, maybe April, I had a dream.  Our family had adopted a 13 year old, african-american, son.  I don't remember a ton of details, just that suddenly we had this son, I was feeling very overwhelmed, but I knew that this child needed a family and that we were supposed to be that family.  And his face.  My new son.  It was so vivid and distinct that when I woke, I knew that if I were to see a picture of him, I would have recognized him.

After waking, all of my emotions centered around the dream were still so intense.  I don't know that I've ever had such a vivid dream in my life.

I told my husband about the dream and we both went "how crazy would that be?!"  I mean, our oldest is only 7.  What do we know about parenting a teenager?  And rearranging the oldest sibling order?

Yep.  Pretty crazy felt right.

We laughed it off and over the next few months we'd bring it up here and there, but never seriously and never really discussing actually doing it.

But over the summer, I kept feeling very unsettled.

My husband and I had decided that we wouldn't be having any more children.  Well, mostly it was me that decided this I suppose.  I always figured that if we were meant to have more kids, the desire to have another baby would come.  And here my youngest is, five years old, and it never came.

But as I said, I felt unsettled.  Because I kept having these weird feelings that our family wasn't complete yet.  But I didn't feel like were supposed to have another baby.  And this didn't make sense to me because that's how you get more members of your family, right?

We came back to Utah for the school year, got them settled in for the first few days of school.  But I kept feeling unsettled.  See, over the summer, I never forgot about the dream I'd had.  It stayed front and center and never went away.

So one Sunday, I prayed.  I prayed really hard to know what to do about this dream that wouldn't leave me alone.  I had considered it more and more seriously over the last few weeks, but the seriousness and all the implications that came with adopting an older son were so heavy.  So I prayed.  That Sunday was Ward Conference at our church and I prayed that I would hear SOMETHING from the speakers.  Just something to give me guidance or advice about what to do with these feelings I was going through.

We walked to church.  Sat down.  Sang the opening song.  Then our Bishop got up and began speaking and as soon as he started, I felt disappointed, because I knew it wasn't going to be anything about what I had been praying for.

But up next went one of the men from the stake.  And what he said blew me away.

He said how he was asked to talk on a completely different topic, but he felt strongly inspired that he needed to speak about something else.

"Sometimes, God speaks to us through dreams."

And he went on for about five minutes, about how God spoke to prophets in the scriptures through dreams.  How sometimes, that's the way he tells us what we are supposed to do.

My eyes welled.  My heart started racing.  I couldn't look at anyone because I knew the second I did, I would start sobbing.

I'd gotten my answer.

I told my husband about this experience a while later, after I'd had some time to process and pray some more.  And he said "where do we start?"

We've always talked about adopting someday.  Or maybe fostering older children, way down the road when our kids were older.  So adoption wasn't something that had never been thought of.  Cause it had.  But our timeframe was just pushed up, way, way ahead of what we ever expected.

It's not an easy process to begin with, but it's made all the more difficult by the fact that we live in two different states.  We are in Washington 2 1/2 months out of the year for my husband's business, and that's where our residency is, but we come to Utah for the entire school year.  And it's unlikely that we will be adopting from the state of UT or WA in my mind.

But we're praying a whole lot these days.  We're making a lot of phone calls and getting answers here and there.

And today we turned in our application to begin the home study process.

I don't know where our other son is right now.  I don't know how soon he will come into our family.  But we're doing everything we can to prepare.  And I can't wait to meet him for the first time.