Dear friends,

First of all, thank you each for all of your encouragement regarding our decision to adopt. Brandon and I were truly overwhelmed by the response from family and friends. You are each such a wonderful part of this process. Thank you.

In the past 2 weeks, we have had our first two interviews of our home study. In these meetings we have discussed everything from our reasons for adopting, to our plans for discipline (eep!) to our own families of origin. We’ve learned a lot more about the journey ahead of us and have learned a lot of stuff about ourselves.

After our first interview we learned that Brandon and I are incapable of having a meeting that is less than 2 hours. This should come as no surprise to those that know us well. Our caseworker didn’t know that asking us open-ended questions wasn’t going to keep our meeting to the project hour (at most hour & a half) meeting! 🙂 In our second visit we really tried to keep it short, but still 2 hours later we were done! But, seriously we ended up having a wonderful time in each interview and we weren’t the only ones talking. At several points the 3 of us were just having a great conversation about various topics. So now we have just admitted that our interviews last 2 hours… and that’s okay! 🙂

Our caseworker, Laura, has been such a blessing. It’s been great to journey with her in conversation. She’s young, so in a lot of ways we’re learning together about this. But in other ways, she has helped us think through some great things.

A huge part of this process is education. We have been reading through a book called “Letters from Birthmoms” in order to help us start thinking about open adoption (which is what our agency practices). This has been hugely challenging as look toward the relationship we will have not only with our child, but with their birthmom as well.

We have also been required to take a series of 5 online courses on topics from Attachment to talking about adoption to grief to how to make a good Profile Book. Needless to say, we’ve learned a ton but have also been challenged by the different ideas.

And I have some good news! On Monday we found out that we will have our final in-office interview this coming Tuesday. Later in the week, we will have our home-visit and then we will be done with the home study process. This means that as soon as we finish our profile book we will be officially waiting for our child. Whew! I don’t think either of us knew it would go this quickly, but it’s great.

So stay tuned for more info. In the coming days and weeks we will discuss the different ideas we have encountered through training. Oh, and the picture above is of us on our very first interview! The picture on our previous post was just before our second visit.

We welcome your thoughts, comments, wonderings… whatever!

(Oh, and our plan is to update this blog every other day… feel free to nag us if we don’t seem to be keeping to that schedule!)

Till two days from now…

Amy