Our new journey part 1

It has been a long time since I have blogged and it's not for lack of things to blog about, that's for sure!  Let me share a bit with you about the new journey we are on.  Back in early March we decided that we were interested in adopting again.  I called a friend who is a social worker and told her that we wanted to do a domestic adoption.  She informed us that there is a big need in our area right now for foster parents for medically fragile children.  I told her absolutely not.  We were not at all interested in that.  One of our many reasons was that we did not have the childcare or time to do the 30 hours of training required that we had already done in Arkansas.We did some research and decided that we would do a private domestic adoption of a child with Down Syndrome.  We called our social worker to tell her that we wanted her to update our home study and she said they have a policy that you can not update until your child has been home a year.  We were not thrilled.  We prayed and ended up deciding to ask that they make an exception for us.  Whatever their answer, we would be content that it was what God wanted for us.  After talking to her supervisor, our social worker said we could start again in 9 months, which would be July.  So we setteled in for a wait.

In the meantime, foster care came up over and over and over again.  Everywhere I looked, and every conversation I had seemed to point to foster care.  It eventually got so crazy that I said "FINE GOD!  I will talk to Larry about it!"  Larry was not 100% on board but was certainly willing to pray about it.  A bit later he told me to go ahead and just call and get info.  We both knew that with the speed the state works at we likely wouldn't have a placement for a year or so.  Our plan was to foster, knowing that at some point a child would become available in our care and we would be open to adopting at that point. 

I called the agency we are working with and on March 26th they returned our call.  As we talked she told me she was pretty sure that the training in AR and in MO are the same.  If that was the case we wouldn't need to go to training.  She was right, and we were in shock and overjoyed.  We saw this as an open door to move forward.  So we skipped a pretty large part of the process and went right into the next step.  We were assigned a licensing worker.  She talked to us briefly, sent us some paperwork, and set up a time to meet.

One month later, on April 25th we met our licensing worker for the first time.  By the time she came to our home we had already taken CPR training and done 90% of the massive packet of paperwork she sent us.  By the end of that visit our checklist for becoming licensed was almost complete but she still needed to do 3 more visits with us and there were lots of loose ends to tie up.

At that first visit she told us that there was a child who needed a pre adoptive placement and they were interested in telling us more about this child.  We were shocked.  A pre adoptive placement?  Despite our surprise we were willing to learn more.  The first thing we wanted to know was is this child a boy or a girl.  The only room space we have now is to share with Anya.  That's fine for a boy temporarily but knowing this was going to be a permanent placement we likely would not be able to take a boy. 

To be continued.................