November 3, 2007 - We had both been considering adoption for a few months but neither of us were very serious about it. This was mainly because of lack of knowledge and fear. Irving Bible Church has an adoption ministry that put on a conference on adoption that we attended called Tapestry. We learned so much there but more importantly this was our first chance to be surrounded by people and talk to people who had either adopted or were interested in adoption. God opened our hearts so much that day but we were still both terrified and were not anywhere near sure this was God's plan for us.
End of November 2007 - We didn't really have a moment of decision. We never sat down and said ok God wants us to adopt so we are adopting. When discussing it we just gradually moved from if to when. Yet both of us were sure this is exactly how we were meant to become parents. It is incredible to both of us that in a year God changed our hearts so much.
November 27, 2007 - Dad, Kara, & Matt come over for Chili and we told them our news. It was such a blessing to hear their reactions. After being so excited ourselves but also still scared it was good to see people respond with just as much joy as we were feeling.
December & January - The whole months of December and January we were trying to choose an agency. We had narrowed it down to two agencies that were recommended by our church. One of them we just didn't feel comfortable with and the other was way too expensive. We just couldn't choose between the two because we really didn't want to use one and the other we felt irresponsible spending that much money. In the end we decided on the expensive one because we knew we would love them and we didn't want money to be the deciding factor because we were trusting God to provide since we knew adoption was His plan for us. We didn't really have a peace about it though.
December 7, 2007 - We attended the Lake Pointe adoption ministry Christmas party. It was so fun to meet people in our church family who we knew would be there to support us in our journey and give us advice along the way.
December 26, 2007 - Before we left to come home from our Christmas visit we told John's family about our decision to adopt. We were surprised yet thrilled at how happy they were. We were so relieved that both of our families are going to be supporting us through this because our families are so important to us.
January 27, 2008 - We started attending an adoption hot topics class our church is offering for six weeks. We have learned so much in this class from other people's first hand experience.
February 6, 2008 - After weeks of filling out paperwork and hours of answering essay questions we finally felt our application to the expensive agency was almost finished. We were down to deciding who our references would be. When we called Ashleigh Kelso to ask her to be a reference she mentioned to us that Brad Cardwell and his wife have two kids that they adopted as domestic newborns.
February 11, 2008 - We decide it's worth a shot to call Brad and see what agency they used and he tells me about Generations in Waco and how much they loved them. We had heard about them before but never considered them since they were in Waco. We did some research about them and they sounded good and they were affordable but we still had questions we needed answered.
February 12, 2008 - John called Generations to ask the questions we had and he ended up talking to the lady there for a long time. He said he felt really comfortable with this place. It was incredible what a peace we had about choosing this agency so soon after learning about them. That night we downloaded the pre-application off their site and began filling it out.
February 14, 2008 - We got our pre-application finished and mailed.
February 18, 2008 - We both took off work to get the office cleaned out so it could be turned into a kid's room. I know it seems early for that but believe me it is definitely going to be a long-term project. We started by cleaning out the closet that had boxes all the way to the ceiling so maybe some of the sewing stuff in the room could be put in the closet. About an hour later we had boxes all over the house and piles everywhere. After we threw away a ton of stuff and sorted out everything we wanted to keep we decided we needed to clean out the closet in the other spare room so we could fit some of the boxes in there. That meant taking out all the boxes from that closet to see what we could get rid of in order to make more room which resulted in more piles and boxes all over the house. At the end of the day I couldn't really tell we had gotten much accomplished except turning our house into a disaster area but we did get rid of our desk and Christmas tree. I guess that's one step forward because getting rid of things is hard for me.
February 20, 2008 - We got an email from the Generations that they received our pre-application and would like to meet with us for an orientation at their office to get to know each other better.
No comments:
Post a Comment