Bringing Home Charlie Brown

Our next big event is tomorrow! It's our big home-study and interview process. The room painting is done! The bed is ready to go. Are we 100% ready, heck no! We won't be until we get that life changing call. All of our technical stuff is done though, medicine locked up, bed ready and waiting, water heater turned down. Make that waaaaaay down! I am personally hoping that the water heater has been turned down too far, because I am not a fan of cold to lukewarm showers. What's the point of that? It is FREEZING!  Showering with the water this way reminds me of a trip I took to the Dominican Republic where the water for the shower sat in huge barrels on top of the roof. The only way it was warmed was through the sun. As hot as the Dominican was, it wasn't hot enough to raise that water temperature by much. At least not with everyone using the showers everyday. The benefit of being in the Dominican though was that you were so hot and nasty that you CRAVED the cold water. An...

You get to a point where all you do is hurry up and wait. Then it's rush rush rush and hurry up and wait. Go go go... and, you guessed it, hurry up and wait.  I learned a long time ago never to pray and ask for patience. Why? Because then the Lord gives you opportunities to be patient. No Thank You! Well, it seems like the Lord wants to instill that quality in me any way.  We know that this process will take quite a while from start to finish. The part we are in now is easy, it's a completely predefined amount of time. It's after this part that it gets crazy.  We knew it would take nine weeks to complete our classes. We have three classes left. We knew that during that time certain things would have to be done. Easy. After that then it's like an anything goes type of game.  We could get a placement instantly, or we could wait a few months. Most people do not think we will wait very long at all, but there is a small part of me that is doubtful we will ever get pl...

This blog post is at the request of my husband. Poor guy, he has done so much work that no one will know about. His request wasn't for me to talk about him in any way, he's not that kind of guy. It was however to talk about how much work and preparation we have done to our house, and to thank everyone who has helped us or will help us out along the way! It has been quite a list and we aren't finished yet.  We have two extra bedrooms in our house, however even with just the two of us we had managed to fill them up. One we used as a craft/computer room. The other was more of a guest room with our extra t.v, futon bed, things like that. Well those things all had to go somewhere.... Hello basement re-do! The front part of our basement had been redone with paneling put up, carpeting put down, and a hot tub. Yes, you read that right, a hot tub in the basement. Now if the thing still worked, I would have been in heaven. Unfortunately it didn't, and no one could fix it. We fi...

When my husband and I got married, my brother kept asking "when's charlie coming, when's charlie coming." One, because he thinks he's funny and two because he swore he was going to call our kid Charlie Brown. As I was thinking about this blog and a title a few different names went through my head. I settled on this because for one, we can't use any names or pictures until an adoption is final, and two because for us it will just fit in with our inside joke.  We don't know what our child will look like, if our child will be a boy or a girl, or what age our child will be. We have specified for under two years old, and we have complete control over what we will and will not accept into our home, as awful as that sounds. However we may get called with a sibling set and have more than one child come into our home at a time. We have been licensed to accept five children. (YIKES) Again, we get to set the parameters, but when you are thinking about this, and wan...

In my last post I talked about hating thinking about the fact that our children could be reunited with their birth families. This is still an issue I go back and forth on, however we are getting lots of training in this area and lots of perspective. No matter what, I know that if that happens it will be brutal! Here are the thoughts that get me through it, sometimes just barely! If these families TRULY get their lives together and clean up their acts, and get on the right track, then we have helped them care for their greatest possessions until they were ready to care for them themselves. If we can be loving, patient, and caring with them perhaps they will ask why. If they ask why, there is only one reason, Jesus. I am not a compassionate person when it comes to giving people multiple chances after they have made the bed they now lie in. I have no patience with people who cause their own problems and want everyone else to fix them. I know that in order to have a good, kind relationsh...

I love our classes, and I hate them with a bloody passion sometimes! (Thank you Ron from Harry Potter) They give me so so much to think about and I find that all day Wednesday I am processing and obsessing and not able to focus on much else for long periods of time.  Let's start with the positive; 1. We learn something new every time we go.  2. We get to ask all of the questions we want 3. We learn from the experiences of our trainer and the others in our class 4. We get a deeper sense of what will be expected of us and what we are getting into 5. Each week we go we feel a litter bit closer to our goal of getting a child in our home Now the downside, which really only seems to be a downside for me and not for my husband... 1. I HATE the fact of being faced with some of the harsh realities that these children go through 2. I hate thinking about the length of time this process could potentially take us 3. I hate thinking about that fact that we will get super attache...

I've said in  an earlier post about how we are certain we are in the center of God's will for our lives. I feel the need to record some of the "little things" that have happened, because together they add up to some pretty "big things." Simple things like hearing a new song on the radio that links directly with adoption. Having a nurse do our physicals that adopted all three of her children. Finding out people that you know or work with have been adopted but never talk about it because they didn't think anyone would understand. It seems that the deeper we go the more we realize God is so into the details!  1. For example our class. We finished class number five tonight and are half way through our sessions. Woo Hoo!! Not that I don't love attending because I do. However it means we are one week closer to our child/children. When I first talked with our social worker about getting started with this process she was very "by the book." She g...

We were first confronted about adoption by a young girl who was facing an unwanted pregnancy. She contacted us wanting to talk about us possibly adopting her child. We, of course, were ecstatic. We were coming to the end of fertility options that we were comfortable with, but we weren't quite sure what the next step was.  Through a chain of events I had heard that she was interested in placing her child up for adoption, and I mentioned our names. That afternoon I received a phone call. She wanted a meeting, the very next afternoon. Hallelujah!!!! Or so we thought.  I talked with our social worker at school to get an idea of an agency to use. I was smart enough to know that we would need to do this legally, by the book, no loop holes. After talking with several agencies who refused to take our case we found one.  When she arrived at my house I knew something had changed. Her demeanor was no longer calm, optimistic, and cheerful. It was as if something dark had taken ...

I'm reminded of a song that says "Let's start at the beginning, it's a very good place to start." What is our beginning? Could be our marriage, beginning of a new life together, the beginning of our fertility journey, trying to bring a new life into the world, or our adoption journey, where we are now. All of these things are so closely related that pinpointing our beginning means weaving them all together. I'm creating this blog for all of our family, and friends who want to know about our story and journey, but may not know the questions to ask. I'm also hoping that someday others will find this blog who are searching for information on adoption, foster care, fertility, or other information they can gleam from our journey. This first post is a mix matched glob of information about us, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. To give all of the current information would take a lot longer to type than you are probably willing to read! I promise, more ...