Prepping for a {bigger} Family

Bryce and I are a family. :) I love our little family.

It's my favorite.

And we can't wait to make it BIGGER!

So we don't have any huge news .... at least maybe not huge to other people but for us we've taken some big steps and we're happy about them.

I won't go into detail but we had a couple of experiences close together recently that helped us know what steps we wanted to take.

We've been praying about when/where/how we would start the adoption process since March. I've researched and talked to friends with adoption experiences and we finally felt pushed to do some extra research into having a Home Study done.

I ended up finding an agency here in Texas about 30 mins from where we live that does Home Studies. They don't do placement or anything. But that's the good part actually--- since they only do the legal side of things that is required before having a child placed in your home, they're REALLY good at what they do. And they're small. So when I call, they don't have receptionists or anything. I get to speak directly to the case workers that actually do the Home Studies. They've known the answer to every question I've had about the process and legal questions for certain situations (Domestic Adoption, Interstate Adoption and International Adoption).

Honestly, as soon as I found their website it was like a breath of fresh air. It was informative and easy to navigate and didn't have all the extra crap crowding the helpful information. (So many adoption websites give me anxiety when I get one them!)

Because I was in such a hurry that day to get info I needed, I enlisted the help of my sister, Jana (bless her) to make some phone calls for me since I was at work. She called and asked them my millions of questions and she kept telling me how helpful and awesome they were. So the next day when they called me back, I fell in love with how prompt and helpful they were.

They sent me all the paperwork and instructions we would need to get a home study done. So we jumped right in.

Pages and pages and pages of questions. 10 documents, all different lengths. One is 14 pages of questions, one is three pages of questions that have to make up your autobiographies etc...

It's craziness but I've actually enjoyed it. Which is a really good sign to me. I usually don't get cut and dry answers to my prayers-- instead I just have feelings one way or another when I begin to make decisions. For example, all those other adoption websites.....they all made me feel awful for no real specific reasons. But then with this one...it just feels good! That's answer enough for me.

So far in the last week we've:

*Finished the 14 page Application
*Finished the Background Check Application for Bryce and for me. (this includes every address we've lived at for the last 10 years! We even had to have an address for when Bryce was in Madagascar. It's a good things he has an amazing memory! He knew all my addresses.....bahaha! He remembers them from writing me letters every week while he was on his mission.)
*I got my physical!! Bryce will get his soon. He has to get an FAA physical anyway.
*I finished my Autobiography (5 1/2 pages typed) and Bryce is about halfway through his.
*We asked 5 people to be our references and I've sent each of them the reference form. :)

Here I am with my official signed physical exam form!

We still have to actually go get our fingerprints done and send them out for our background checks and then about a million papers to sign. And I have to make copies of just about every document that proves we are human. ;)

I'm loving it.

It seems crazy that I'm loving it since it's not even for an agency that does placements. They'll refer us to one of our choosing or we can use it to adopt privately if that ever happens.  But it just feels right.

I don't feel a huge urgency in the timing. (at least--not like I need to finish it this week) But I do feel like I'm supposed to be working on it. So we are!

Happy days. :) And happier days to come!