First Home Study Visit!

We have our first Home Study Visit tomorrow! 

We sent in our application to adopt in January and received our approval letter soon after. We were assigned a social worker for the home study process and an adoption worker who will see us through the whole adoption process. Exciting! 

It is amazing the paperwork and interviews and everything that is required during this process! We have been working on paperwork it seems like in most of our free time for weeks already! For the Home Study process, there will be 5 different interviews, as well as video classes, books, a seminar, and a TON of paperwork. We have gone and gotten physicals and other tests, a couple sets of fingerprints, are doing background checks in all states we have lived in, writing detailed autobiographies, getting documents together, etc right now. 

We had our first interview about 2 weeks ago. This one was a phone interview that lasted about an hour. Four interviews to go, each of which will be in person. The next one is tomorrow. They will come check out our house for safety, space, etc, meet the babies, and have a 2-3 hour interview with us together. It is moving along!! 

We did find out some disappointing news. Most of the documents we have seen say that babies are available at 6 months of age at the youngest - so we were requesting this age. Then we read in our manual that the youngest age is 8 months, so we asked about this. We were told that recently the youngest babies that they have seen come home have been about 18 months old. They said that if we were willing to wait a little longer, 12-18 months is possible but rare; but under 12 months is unrealistic. We are big proponents of adopting older children for sure, but for our family we were hoping to adopt as young as possible and also to have a little bit bigger of an age difference between Myah and our new baby. It breaks our hearts to think of our sweet baby sitting over in an orphanage for 18 months when we want to be loving on her from as young an age as possible! So this took some adjustment in our expectations. BUT, God is in control of every part of this process!!! We just pray that our little one will be LOVED on and taken care of and nurtured for those sweet little months, and we grieve the loss of knowing her during that time, but look forward to meeting her and welcoming her into our family at whatever age the Lord gives her to us!! And please continue to pray with us that we will be able to be matched with her at as young an age as possible.