Home visits

This weekend we are scheduled to have two home visits.  The first one Saturday afternoon and the second Sunday afternoon.  The social worker we are working with is really kind and gracious so the interviews and home inspection should be good.  Our prayer for this time would be that our family would be a blessing and that we would get done the things that need to be done around the house before the inspection.

Homestudy Process

We are continuing the work toward completing our homestudy requirements and are beginning to look into crisis pregnancy situations we may be allowed to work with.  We need wisdom in knowing how to proceed since our homestudy agency told us the method we used to find Blake is no longer common and she would not recommend it.  Our desire was to find a need here in the US, and there are many needs. We can go to our homestudy agency for legal information, but we may have to do the work of finding this kind of situation on our own this time.  God is good and He has a perfect plan for us, we just want to use wisdom and diligence and we follow His leading.

We are starting again!!

After a year of much prayer and seeking God's wisdom we have started another adoption process!! We are so excited and eager to see what God has in store for our family this year!  All the children are thrilled and very involved this time.  It is fun to have such happy helpers as we begin this process.

This time around we are planning to do a domestic infant adoption like we had with Blake.  We are requesting a girl in a crisis situation with possible special needs.  We are considering a private adoption where we would go through a lawyer.  One of our friends from church is getting us connected with a local crisis pregnancy center and we are looking into some out of state crisis situations as well.  Right now we are starting our homestudy with the agency we used for homestudy and post placement with Blake.  They were really great to work with and we loved our social worker. The homestudy process involves getting fingerprints, medical forms signed, family book made, home visits, lots of paperwork, background checks done, and many other things we are plowing through as quickly as possible.  This should take 4-6 weeks to complete, Lord willing.  Once the homestudy is complete we will be ready for placement and begin looking more seriously for a situation.  We would appreciate prayers for safety for our baby girl and grace/wisdom in the preparations and process.

As a preparation for baby we were looking into some names and let the children give their thoughts. We wanted a name ending in 'a' like Lana and Kayla.  Here are a few of the suggestions the kids came up with - Tiana, Stara, Winona, Godzilla, and Santa to name a few.  After that very helpful evening Gary and I decided we would take over and choose the name, keeping the suggestions on the very back burner.

July 4th BBQ

We had a great July 4th celebrating with friends and family!