Guess What We Officially Are…

I have to be honest, I sat down about six times over the past two days to try and write a post for World Breastfeeding Week. However, there’s just too much excitement going on in our own lives for me to write about that, and I keep getting distracted. So instead, for a whole series of fantastically written and thought-provoking articles on breastfeeding, please stop by Knocked Up Knocked Over. Molly is a true “Lactavist,” and I admire her encouragement and support for nursing. I’m hoping to write an article soon about breastfeeding the adopted baby, but tonight I was just too distracted and I was about to burst, so I’ll say this instead:

We’re a Waiting Family!!!!

We finished our profile on Friday, and it truly looks FABULOUS. I’m so proud of it. Of course I have a beautiful family, so picking out fantastic pictures wasn’t hard. I turned it in and the director of the agency called to discuss it with me.

{By the way, the new director who we’re working with is AH-MAZING! She’s so good, and so thorough and so personable. She was texting me last night at 10:30 when I had questions about my dear birthmother letter. I mean, really…She’s great. There are no office hours for this woman, and that, my friends, is what you want and need in this very emotionally unstable and frighteningly unpredictable journey.}

So she called me, and we talked about it. She said that they passed it around the office and all the other social workers LOVED it! She said it was beautiful and the suggestions she made were incredibly minor and touched on things I never would have taken into consideration.

I made the changes and then Travis and I wrote our “Dear Birthmother” letters. She held my hand through the process and when it was done (as I said, at 10:30 last night), she said, “I love your letters. Don’t change a single word.” So it was done. We went to Kinko’s today and ordered 20 copies of our profile and then put it in the overnight box at the agency. Done.

So we’re official. When I was on the phone with her Friday afternoon going over our profile, I asked her, “It says in the family homestudy packet that you don’t complete the homestudy report or have it all ready to go on file until at least 30 days after the interview… But ours was ready to review only seven days after our interview. Are you rushing us for some reason?”

She said, “Well, I would have liked to have had you ‘Dear Birthmother’ letters like yesterday. We have several young women here right now who are considering adoption and we think there may be one here that could be just right for you. I want to show her your profile as soon as possible. That’s why there’s the rush.”

It’s funny, because I’ve always heard that if your agency seems to really be “pushing” you or rushing the normally slow paperwork process of things along, then it could be because they’re hoping they already have a match for you. Now, I have no idea if any of these women that she’s wanting to show us to this next week are OUR matches or not. But I’m really not anxious or worried about it if they aren’t.

Travis and I pray every single night that our adoption will go according to God’s plan for us, and that our baby will be healthy and just the perfect fit for our family. In my deepest heart of hearts, when we pray, I don’t feel like our wait will be long. I continue to pray to God that if our wait is going to be long, that He prepares us for that so we don’t grow discouraged or frustrated. But again, I don’t feel like it will be. That feeling is what propelled me to start buying baby clothes even before our homestudy was approved. There has been this sense of urgency, a feeling that once we’re officially a waiting family, things will happen FAST.

Could our birthmother already be there now? Maybe. Will I feel discouraged if she’s not? No. Most families wait between 6 months to a year for an adoption, so I’m certainly not going to grow discouraged if we aren’t chosen the first week our profile is active! That would be ridiculous! I just have very strong faith that God’s hand is guiding all of this. There’s no doubt in my mind that it is through God we have gotten this far in the process, and through God that we will in the end hold our baby. I trust that His timing is perfect and feel very grateful that I don’t have to be the one responsible for all of the decisions and moves. There’s definitely some divine behind-the-scenes work at hand here, and honestly I’m not sure which excites me more: Seeing how God’s hand moved everything in place after all is said and done or actually getting that call. Right now I’m just excited to know that He’s placed us exactly where He wants us.

So that call could come any day now. That’s the thrilling part of being a waiting family. The work on our end is done. Think of all we’ve been through since April! All of the mounds of paperwork, the notarized documents, the doctor letters, the multiple vet trips, the {many} visits to the bank to get everything financially rolling, the tears, doubts, prayers, interviews, home inspection, the picture-sorting, profile building, letter writing, and now here. Whew! I’m exhausted. I really do feel like we’ve already run a marathon.

Part of me used to think it was awful that adoptive parents have to prove themselves so much just to become parents- something other couples often fall upon unintentionally {and without ANY skill}. But you know, now that we’re here, and I can look on the other side of the hill and see what all we went through just to get to this point, I feel really proud of myself. Of us.

How many times in your life do you get to ask your very closest friends in the world to write letters that talk about how they REALLY feel about you? The beautiful things we read from our personal references were the words unfortunately often left for someone’s funeral! “They are a highly respected couple with an admirable marriage.” “I unreservedly recommend them for adoption.” “They are a fun couple with an outstanding reputation.” “They hold true to their convictions about their faith and serve as excellent examples of a godly couple.” I hold those words so close to my heart.

How many times in your life do you get to sit down and make a book that shows how amazing your family is? I truly had a blast making our profile! I chose my absolute favorite pictures, talked about the neatest traditions we share, told them about our favorite holidays, and included pictures of our beloved pets. It made me happy putting it together because I just kept thinking, “A. We rock. and B. We’re so blessed.”

How often do you choose to dive face-first into an obstacle, praying that God creates a net for you at some point before you hit the ground? I’ll confess this: When we began this process in April, we had no idea how we were going to fund it. But speaking beforehand to many adoptive parents and adoption professionals, the main theme was clear: Most parents do not know how they’ll get the money, but it comes when they need it if they act on faith. Adoption is not for the rich! If you feel like God is calling you to adopt, pray about it and then dive in. Money will always be in issue if you allow it to be. Sometimes we just have to act on faith, and magically, a net forms right before you hit the ground.

There are just too many cool things in this adoption process for me to say, “All of that was incredibly stressful.” Don’t get me wrong. It was incredibly stressful, but not all of it. There were tiny flickers of hope in there that kept us going, and kept us believing that we were supposed to be here.

So now here we are. Approved and waiting. The rest is in God’s hands. I trust that that’s the best place to be.

Kat