Everything is Done... Except the Waiting.

   We got word on Wednesday of last week that our agency had finally made contact with the last of our references and all the paperwork was then forwarded upstream.  What that means for us I'm not exactly sure.  Does that mean that our file has not yet been sent to, and reviewed by, the folks in Columbus who will, ultimately, have to issue our new foster home license?  Is Columbus already done and now we are only waiting on our agency to dot the "i"'s and cross the "t"'s?  Does that mean we will have our license this month or a month from now?  Honestly, I am utterly clueless.  All I know is that we will continue waiting.

   When we finally decided that the time was right to begin the process of another adoption from foster care, we knew that it would require classes and training, a new homestudy and all that goes with it.  We've been down that road before and much of it is familiar territory.  The weird part of this was, and is, how messed up the whole thing became when we found out we were moving.  Don't get me wrong, this had been a great move for us.  We love where we are, the church where I serve, the school that our kids attend, and the people that we live and work with.  We just never expected that transferring our homestudy to a new house (which is what we thought was going to happen) would take as long as it has.  Here we are, eight months later, and we still don't even have our license, let alone a placement.  Heck, without the license, we can't even be too serious about looking through the listings on AdoptUSkids.org. 

    I'm not blaming anyone.  It wasn't any one person's (or agency's) fault.  I know that the delays are an accumulation of choices that we made, as well as the choices of our new county and our new agency.  Moving delayed things.  Deciding we didn't like the county agency in out new residence delayed things.  Moving to a new agency and upgrading our license delayed things.  And on top of that, we lived through the loss of our Aunt Gladys who, generously, left us an inheritance.  Her gift to us is a fabulous blessing (of that I have no doubt) but the time we have needed, and will need for the next several months, to handle her estate, home and belongings, makes it somewhere between difficult and impossible to accept a placement right now, even if one were available.

We're hoping that life will calm down toward the end of summer and we will be ready for a placement.  Will one be available?  Will our agency need us to do respite care for someone amidst the chaos that is our summer?  Will a placement be available when we're finally ready?  To these questions, and others, my only answer is, "Who knows?"  In truth, we will do as we have always done.  We will continue to lean on, and trust, the wisdom and love that God has for us.  It's our lives, but it's his plan.

Meanwhile... we wait.

Did Advertising Influence our Decsion to Adopt?

    For some time now I have been following the Twitter feed of AdoptUSKids and before that I would occasionally drift back to their website (www.adoptuskids.org) and page through the photo listings of the children who were available for adoption and who are just waiting for a family to call their own.  The state of Ohio (and most other states) has a similar list (http://www.adoptionphotolistingohio.org) that I also have spent time paging through.  In both of these lists I have been overcome by the sheer number of children.  When looking at photographs and biographies of these children I have just had to stop when I realized that there were 260 pages to look at, each with 15 photographs and some of those were sibling groups and not just one child.  To get my hands around these numbers I made regular use of the search tools to filter the search results using all sorts of criteria.  I’ve searched by state, by gender, by race, by age, and I would have searched using other criteria if could.  For obvious reasons of safety and privacy the general public cannot search using religion or other personal information.  Once our homestudy is complete and in our hands (which should be any day now), we can register with AdoptUSKids and gain access to additional information about the children we are interested in.  At this point, I am uncertain just how much information will be made available to us when that happens.

    This week Adopt US Kids tweeted this question, “Did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?” and asked folks to share their stories through www.humaninterestfilms.com.  As I explained in my blog post, Why Now?, we always thought we’d have more children but, for a variety of reasons, the time was never right, until now.  For some time, years in fact, whenever things would begin to look like our lives might be making a way for us to think about kids again, I would find myself returning to the photo listings and imagining what it would be like to add another child to our family or what sort of child would fit our already quirky collective.  When we finally made the decision to get serious about adopting again, we were still looking at the photo lists and each week when AdoptUSKids would tweet a new pair of featured children, I would click on the link and have a look.

    So did a TV, radio or print ad influence our decision to adopt?  Well, it probably wasn’t TV or radio, and we didn’t see too many ads in the newspaper, but the Internet had a lot to do with keeping us connected and sustaining our interest in adoption.  It hasn’t happened yet of course.  We expect to receive our completed homestudy in the next two weeks (and then get it revised after we move) and then we will see where the road takes us.   Whatever happens, the State of Ohio, AdoptUSKids, Twitter, and others have certainly had some influence on getting us to this place.