Patience

“The keys to patience are acceptance and faith. Accept things as they are, and look realistically at the world around you. Have faith in yourself and in the direction you have chosen.”

This is definitely something I need to work on. I always have. I am a doer...tell me the steps to get what I want and I will do them, no matter how difficult. But waiting...that is another story. This process is really going to help me develop some patience. I heard from my social worker today and the good news is that the Program Supervisor liked my profile and loved our Photo Profile. The bad news is the next step to get approval from the panel can take up to 50 business days.  So we wait... and that is ok, I am just going to have to go with it. 

On another positive note Alex from Portrait Art For Pets and Their People was here today and got started. She is so talented!  Here are a few pictures of the sketches on the wall that she is doing freehand!

She will be coming back tomorrow to start painting!!!!

Hurry Up And Wait

MAPP classes are done, 101 pages of essay questions done, CPR done, home study done,fire inspection done, 2 sets of finger prints done, background checks done, photo profile done...just getting the last of our references together. They get turned in Tuesday and Friday my social worker sits down with the head of CHS to get everything finalized. Once that is done, everything comes back for us to sign and then gets sent up for approval to the state.
After the approval we can start getting bios and go to match events. I am praying we are good to go for the match event on June 11th.
I am feeling pretty good about how quickly our process has gone. So many in our class had started back in the fall and still haven't gotten as far as we have. And there are others who have not even been assigned a social worker. Alot of the process depends on how quickly and thoroughly we complete our parts.
Cris & I have been on top of everything. The family that came in to talk to us took 2 years to complete the process, but they were slow with getting things back and also they wanted a young child, they ended up with 2 young children.

I am glad to have my Saturdays back, but I will miss getting to see Leigh Ann, Jerel, Michelle & Mark. OK, not too much since we are getting together Friday for dinner. It will be interesting to see how all of our searches go. Both couples are interested in out of state adoption. We are not. It will be hard enough on the child to start with move to a new family and school. There is a good chance that the child will have siblings and I would really like to maintain a relationship between our child and any siblings as best we can.
I know it is healthier for the child that way.

Cris was talking to someone at a wedding last night and told them that we would be adopting 1 or 2 children. That is cool to know he is open to a second child down the road.Cris says the next year or two. Sometimes of the biological family has another child that gets relinquished to Foster Care they will try to get the adoptive family of the one sibling to adopt the second child. That would be great too!

Well, I probably won't have much to write for a little bit...but then things will be popping!!!!

Tying Up Loose Ends

This has been a super busy week! Tuesday night we did our finger prints again, this time it was done the old school way. Last night we had our fire inspection. We are collecting of references now. I printed up our adoption profile scrapbook. Since I couldn't put the originals on here I took pictures. I am very pleased with how they turned out.

So we have just 2 more classes and then we play the wait game for our approval to come through! I am sure it will go smoothly, everything else has.
Then it is on for the really hard part, finding our daughter. We are going to our first Matching Event on June 11th up on Lake Norman. They bring children that are eligible for adoption to these events once a month. This one we will be learning to water ski! That should be fun! It will also be cool to see how the kids react to a challenge. I love the things that Children's Home Society does. Anyone interested in adopting I highly recommend them :)

Busy, Busy and More Busy

So, I am almost done with my 35 pages of questions. They definitely get into to every little detail of your life, past and present. Cris is in Ecuador until Monday. Once he is back we need to get working on his. That will be fun :)
I finished the rough draft of the adoption profile scrapbook. I am pretty happy with it. It needs some tweaking but it is looking good.
I did it in Microsoft word. I am extremely versed at that program.  I was able to do some cool stuff with it.
The only bad thing is I can't put any of that on here because of the format. Sorry :)

I had a nice dinner with my friend Kasia tonight. I love that girl! She has the biggest heart and she is the kind of mom I want to be. She really has her stuff together and her daughter Kelsey is awesome because of it. I am so fortunate to have some really awesome friends. I have really spent a lot of time thinking about the people in my life and who is a positive and who is a negative. I am at a point in my life where I only have room for positive. I have to consider who and what will be best for our child. It is amazing how quickly the mothering instinct kicks in. I know I am not a parent yet, but I am already willing to put the child's needs first. I have made so many decisions differently because of it. It is amazing how differently decisions are made when they are made with an unselfish heart. Cris & I were going to finally take our honeymoon in September cruising from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas, St. Marteen, St. Martin, St. Lucia and Barbados.  However the trip became very costly and it looks as if we may be parents by summer so we decided it would be best to cancel. If we do have "Her" by September it would be so hurtful to "Her" if we were to leave her.
Since we would be losing our deposit we decided to use it on a long weekend over memorial day to go to the Bahamas. It may not be the honeymoon we dreamed of but it made me feel so much better once we made the decision. So that would be our first Selfless act as parents.

I walk through stores and see so many cute things I want to buy for "Her", but not knowing how old she will be I hold off. It will be so hard not to spoil "Her" when she first comes. I will have of this built up inside me.
I find myself thinking that this coming Halloween we will be looking at costumes and about celebrating our first Christmas together. Will she be young enough to believe in Santa? And how awesome it will be to experience the holidays as a family! What will she want to call us Mommy & Daddy, Jenny & Cris? What other things could she call us? Will she like my cooking? While she like to read to at night, does she need a nightlight. What color will her eyes be, her hair? The stream of thought is so hard to turn off.  However, it is the end of a very busy week and I need to go to bed and sleep :)

Questions, Questions and more questions

We received our next stack of paperwork. This is the everything there is to know about us packet. 35 pages of essay style questions for each of us. Questioning everything from our childhoods, to our plans for daycare, to how we plan on dealing with nudity. Now there is something I never thought of.

We were also asked to start working on our Adoption Profile Scrapbook. So I am going through my thousands of pictures trying to find the ones that best represent us, our family & friends. I love this part.
I like the idea behind it to. Unlike private adoption where this is used for the birth mother to pick the family she wants the child to go to; they use it for the foster child to get to know their new family. Even if they can't read they can look at the pictures and the foster parents can read it to them. From the research I have done, this book becomes something that they continue to look at once they come to live with the adoptive parent.
Since I enjoy scrap booking so much this will be very enjoyable for me to do.

So things seem to be moving right along. And time is going quickly. Cris is going to Ecuador this week and then I am throwing a Bachelorette party for my good friend Nikki. The week after that I am off to Asheville to visit Krysha. The weekend after that my parents are coming. And I am hoping to start painting "Her" room. Speaking of "Her" room, we were able to find a bed fame for the mattress and box spring we already have. I am going to make a headboard out of pickets and paint a picket fence on the wall that the bed will be on. I am then going to see if my friend Alex can paint Hunter, Darling and Oakley in front of the fence.
I am going to paint the wall behind the fence Sky Blue and paint clouds and grass and some flowers.
I am going to ask Alex to help me do a big tree in the corner with birds and then a pond with lily pads and frogs under the window, with pussy willows on both sides of the window and dragon flies flying around and above the window.
I hope that it is not too much. The rest of the room I am going to leave blank and get input from "Her" on what she wants.

Back to our crazy busy schedule. We will start our M.A.P.P. training the weekend after my parents leave. 2 weeks after that ends we are going on our Honeymoon Cruise. That will be the peace before the real  fun starts :)