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.