Our home study has been approved!!

That's right people our home study has finally been read and approved. WooHoo!!! We should have our completed home study in our hands next week. Then we will be sending it to USCIS for their approval and when they send us our I171-H our dossier will be complete to get state certified and then to get certified in Washington D.C. then off to Ethiopia to be registered and then we are a waiting family. Wow there are a lot of steps to International Adoption! Hopefully it doesn't take that long to receive our i171-h but with the holidays coming up I'm not holding my breath on a quick receival of documents, but maybe we will finally get lucky and have paperwork come back to us at a reasonable time, we shall see.

Matt and I have also began discussing what our situation will be once the babies come home and we have decided that I am going to work just part-time at my job now. My boss is ready to have me work part-time as well so it works for everyone. We haven't gone through the logistics of it all yet, we will do that once we receive our referral and things are a bit closer, but it is still exciting to think about. I think I will also be selling Pampered Chef for extra money, this way I can bring in a little extra money but do it on my own time not somebody elses. This way too I won't have to work on the weekends unless I decide to. Hopefully it works well for us. We are going to have to make a budget to make sure we don't go broke but it is all worth it, it wouldn't hurt for us to stop spending money on stupid stuff anyways.

Well that is all for now. I will post again once we actually have our home study in our hands.

New Agency

Well we have decided to go through a different agency for our adoption. This will in no way stall our progress so far. We only changed our placement agency and since we haven't gotten our home study completely finished we are still on the same timeline as before. We have also decided to request for two children, siblings, a boy and a girl, 0-6 months old, in other words twins. We feel this is way that God wants us to go. This is the only new news we have right now, as soon as something else happens I will let you know.

we have another home study meeting

I just found out we have our 2nd home study meeting on Tuesday April 7th. YEAH!!! Prayers that everything goes well. We will be having at our house again, so my weekend will consist in cleaning and more cleaning. Atleast this time they will not be walking around our house. So I only have to clean what they will see, which won't be that bad. The only hard thing is keeping things cleaned with two black dirty dogs and white carpet and tile. It is worth all the scrubbing and vacuuming though.

1st Home Study Meeting

We had our first home study meeting a couple of weeks ago and it went great. Much better than we anticipated actually. We didn't think it was going to go badly, we were just nervous about the whole thing. It is a little unnerving to have someone come to your home and to know that the future of your family is in their hands. It ended up that Connie, our for now social worker-she is retiring in about 20 days, was great.

For those of you that don't know what a home study pertains here is a little explanation. A home study is to a series of meetings and paperwork to be approved to adopt a child. In Illinois we also must be a licensed foster home. The meeting we had the other night was to start this paperwork. The home study makes you think about things that you might not have even considered about life with an adopted child From the sounds of there are around 4 meetings all together. So 1 down 3 to go. Hopefully we will have finished everything for the Home Study by the end of July. Which we will then be able to send in our dossier to our placement agency. Once that is approved by everyone involved we will be officially a waiting family, which means we wait for our referral of our child. So exciting!!! But one step at a time. First the Home Study.