First Homestudy Meeting

We had our first Home Study orientation meeting today with our Home Study agent Donna from AAA Partners in Adoption. She was great and very flexible. She let us bring our kids and just camp out for an hour or so at her house. She gave us our checklist and went over all the many forms that we need to fill out and return to her as soon as we get them done. Wow! I am not going to lie, it is a little overwhelming! Dee seems excited and he is very willing to take on a lot of the load with me! All this government stuff is right up his alley, being an attorney.

We discussed what it means to adopt internationally and what all that entails. Donna was informing us that it can be really hard to adopt internationally for many reasons. We think we are going over to this country to "rescue" this child, but often these children are happy where they are and they do not want to be "rescued" (especially older children). It is often a hard road to adopt internationally. Many of these children have attachment issues and never really attach to the parents because they were neglected or abandoned. Donna was informing us and letting us know upfront that it is not an easy road. We told her we were thinking about adopting a 10-18 month old little boy, because it might be easier to have the Ugandan child and Mary Taylor closer together than far apart in age. She advised us to adopt a child as young as we could, because children in orphanages always have some sort of developmental delay. It is also best to have all of our children a little bit apart in age, so they will have their place in the family. I think there are always exceptions to these rules, but these are great points to think about.

We told her, we know that adopting can never be easy, especially internationally, but we feel that God is calling us to adopt. The child that we adopt, is our child, always has been our child, and always will be our child, even if the child ends up having emotional and physical problems. Yes, that will be very challenging, but we are trusting that God knows what we need, knows what we can handle, and ultimately what is best for us.

Precious little children that God created and he has picked out one especially for our family.

We had a great meeting! Now, I need to start doing all this paper work!