Moving Forward

Our next set of pictures is in and they have been approved. We should be up online on three additional websites by the end of next week! This will allow more birth mothers to potentially see us and make a match. The links to those sites will be posted here as soon as we get them.
Our current profile has 180 hits for the month of July. I am thinking that this is largely due to the fact that we have shown just about everyone we know our profile! August should give us a better picture of how many people that we don't know are looking at us.
Our home study is nearly complete. It's just the last few bits of paper that are taking the longest. We hope to have everything turned in by the time we leave for California next week.
As soon as everything is in and we are fully up online it will just be a waiting game (which we are very good at!).

WE ARE LIVE!!

We are live and online. This means that we are now searchable for birthmothers looking for permanent homes for their babies. They can look online now and see our cute little faces! We now wait for "the call." As soon as someone picks our profile we will have our first meeting. After the first meeting we (us and the birthmother) each get to decide if we like each other. If everything goes well we will be officially matched and will wait for the baby to be born.
http://www.adoptionnetwork.com/waitingfamilies/show.html/8193
This is our link to our first profile. We sent in more pics so we should be on other sites in the next month or so.

Trying to catch up...

A brief rundown of the process...

1- Choose place to handle adoption. Done: Adoption Network Law Center

2- Send in "pre-approval" paperwork (and one photo-I guess so they know we are not weirdos!!) Done: They said we were "Oh so cute" and would have no trouble finding a match.

3- Apply for loan to fund this super cheap project. Done: Now if the magic loan fairy would come and pay it off...

4- Send in official legal paperwork and promise to pay them. STOP!! This is where we got to a few years ago and then I lost my job and we were not able to continue. So we waited and waited for the right time and now we are here!! So.... Done: We signed on the dotted line and got the process rolling.

5- Home Study- The process where you are interviewed for hours and they come to your house and ask you lots more questions and then write a report that says if you are fit to be parents or not. It's a federal regulation so we have to do it. Pretty much done. The social worker came to our house and we chatted for a while. We are both working on finishing our autobiographies and the other paper work that goes along with it.

6- Gather pictures for our profile that have:

     NO sunglasses, NO hats, NO alcoholic beverages, NO swimsuits....Hmmm....well that eliminated almost all of our good action shots. So thankfully we have a few really good friends and family that agreed to do photo shoots with us so we could get the required number of pics. Done.

7- WAIT, and wait and wait. We are now waiting for our profile to be put up online so that we can be matched.

Let's start at the very beginning... A very good place to start.

Erik and I have always wanted to have kids. I'm almost positive that we talked about it on our 4 hour first date at Applebee's. We just assumed that after we dated, got engaged and then were married, that kids would naturally be the next step. We found in February 2008, due to medical reasons, we would not be biological parents. However this did not stop us from continuing our dream of becoming parents. We quickly discussed all of our options from not having kids, to adoption and everything in between. Together we decided that adoption was the best way for us to expand our family and bring a child into our lives.

We sought out information on several different agencies and law offices, private adoption vs. foster care, open adoption vs. closed, domestic vs. international. Whew!! Who knew there were so many choices before we even began?

We ended up choosing a Law Center based out of California but operating nationally. We chose Domestic Infant Adoption, in hopes that we will get to bring our newborn baby home from the hospital.