Where we are at in the process

We are still working on the home study, which is the first step.  We had our home visit on Monday.  It was much more pleasant than I had expected.  Thankfully we were able to get our house clean, especially considering Jay and I had only a few days notice that the case worker was coming on Monday and we were going out of town on a rockhounding trip together leaving the kids at home for Friday and Saturday!  We gave the kids strict orders to keep the house clean.

On our trip Jay and I almost became stuck in mud on a dirt road while searching for agate because it began to rain!  It rained so much that we came home early and cleaned most of Saturday.  Of course, the case worker was more interested in our parenting skills than our housekeeping skills.  Thankfully we both come from good families and have great children.  It was easy to answer her questions.  I don't have the results back but she seemed to be fine with us.

It may be another two weeks before the home study is complete because we are waiting to receive our insurance card.  We have had accident insurance and insurance for things like heart attacks, strokes, etc.  We've known that we need to get "real" health insurance, but it is expensive and we've been waiting until getting out of debt.  We are close on that goal.  But we need real health insurance to adopt and it is a good thing for us to have.

I had wanted to complete our home study by the end of October because several grants have October 31st as a deadline for applying.  I'll have the grant applications all filled out and ready to send so as soon as the home study is complete we can apply.

We are also in the fundraising stage.  We probably won't leave that stage until we go to Ukraine to get the girls.  We have raised about 1/10th of what we need.  We are more thankful than we can ever express for the people who have donated to help get the girls home.  Every contribution, large or small, excites us and is helpful.  If you have the means, please help our three girls come home.  You will make a big difference in their lives and their future children's lives.

I continue working on the blog and facebook page.  I plan to write up our story about how we found these girls and came to decide to adopt them.  I don't normally give my spiritual experiences, but in this case I will because those experiences explain a big part of why we are adopting the girls.  I'll put our story up in it's own page titled something like, "How We Decided to Adopt" on the blog soon.