Some news

It is time to make our baby girl name official!  After much consideration, and lots of ridiculous suggestions, we have all decided to name our baby girl Tessa.  The kids are happy with the name even if Banana or Santa or Godzilla might have been top of their list.

Here is the latest.  On Thursday our agency here let us know about an agency in Georgia that has a program for babies abandoned in local medical facilities.  They are looking for adoptive parents for these cases and also for other situations that may be difficult to place.  I contacted the agency yesterday and was told that there are several situations that may be a fit for us.  I do not have any specifics, but we are filling out paperwork to begin the pre-application process with this agency.  We do not know if this is where we will find baby Tessa, but we are eager to find out more and see if this is where God is leading us.  As always, we appreciate your prayers for wisdom.

Where we are now

I spoke with our home study agency today and all our paperwork is in and all that is left is for the home study to be written up.  Our wonderful social worker will complete this process for us so we are just going to wait for now.

Here is the family picture we plan to send out to agencies and adoption lawyers once the home study is complete and we are ready for placement.  A dear friend took this picture for us while our families were at the park last evening.

This summer the Denver zoo had Lego sculptures up as exhibits.  The kids loved looking for them as we made our way around the zoo.

Museum and Farm

Change in plans

Our final home visit has now been bumped out 2 weeks, but it sounds like the home study should still be written up soon since the final visit is more of a formality.  The training has also been postponed, but we found out it is not required until finalization which means we could bring a baby home and still have plenty of time to do the training if necessary.  It looks like we will hopefully be wrapped up in a couple weeks and ready to start looking for a baby.  We are excited!

Home Study and Nana

The latest on the home study is that we will have our final home visit this Wednesday evening.  The last of our paperwork should be ready by the end of the week and our part of the home study should be completed.  The Colorado training class we need to take is scheduled for mid September, but it is not required to complete the home study.  We are rejoicing that this has been so quick and a relatively easy process so far.


We had visit from Nana this week and she gave each of the older children some basic piano lessons.  It was a fun visit and we miss her!

Home visits update

We had a wonderful visit with our social worker last weekend!  She was so kind and fun the kids were eager to show her the house and share all the details of our lives.  She will come for one more visit in two weeks and then she will be able to write up our home study.  We are getting closer to wrapping up the home study
and are praying that it will come together soon so we can start the search for placement.  Thank you for your prayers, God is really giving so much grace for this process!

Family visiting

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!

Geography Feast and an Art Class

 After a fun year of Geography classes with friends we finished up with an international feast where the families were to dress the part of their continent of choice.  Our family chose Africa and the children did a presentation on what they learned in our study of Ethiopia.  The outfits/scarves on the younger children were bought during our trip to bring Kayla home.

The little ones were so cute I just had to get pictures of them doing their art projects.

Blake loves babies and he enjoys holding them.