Happy New Year!

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year.  We were busy, traveling to Duluth for some skiing/snowboarding and water park fun the week before Christmas.  Then we were home for Christmas with the Ecklunds on Christmas Eve, at our house Christmas Day with Kev's parents, then up to Akeley to celebrate our sweet God Son, Noah's 5th birthday on New Year's Eve.  We celebrated Christmas with the Kramers on January 2nd, so we really stretched out the party! We had lots of fun, but it's going to take me a while to get this house back in order!

On the adoption front, we are now an active "waiting family" with our agency.  We got a call on Dec. 16th that our Home Study had been approved, so that next Monday the 19th, we went into the waiting pool.

I'll try to explain what happens now...when a birth mother (sometimes the birth father/birth grandparents) goes to our agency, they fill out some general health & social history.  She has her own social worker who she will meet with several times (hopefully-this is the ideal, but it depends on how far along in her pregnancy she is-sometimes it may just be 1 or 2 meetings.) and during that time she answers questions regarding what type of communication/openness she would like, if she has preferences about siblings, if the mom stays home, if the family is Christian, etc.  This info, along with due date, sex of the baby, any birth father info, and the health and social history are compiled into a form called a Request For Summary.  RSF.
When she is ready to look at Adoptive Family Profile books,  her social worker contacts the adoptive parent social workers to see if there are families matching her criteria.  If we match, our social worker contacts us, and sends us the RSF.  We receive it by email and are given a certain amount of time to look it over and decide if we want this birth mother to see our book.  We are able to call our social worker to talk about question/concerns.  Some reasons we may decline to be shown would be a known medical problem, drug and alcohol use, or a known special need the baby would have.
If we say yes, the birth mother has a meeting with her social worker where she is shown profiles.  She usually looks at more than one.  If she thinks we'd be a good match, our social worker will contact us to set up a face to face meeting.  (With both social workers present.)

So, that is where we are...we actually received one RSF on the first day we were active, but had to decline.  Our social worker made a small mistake and forgot the one thing that we are not open to as far as ethnicity.  Native American children who are placed for adoption have to go through one extra step, which is a Termination of Parental Rights meeting with the tribe they are from.  It can be unpredictable and we feel like it is one extra set of "what ifs" that we want to avoid.  In the case of the RSF we turned down, both parents identified as Caucasian, but the mother had a small amount of Native American heritage. Even though she doesn't consider herself Native American, the tribe would have the final say in where her baby is placed. It was so exciting to get the RSF, but we knew we had to say no and stick with our original decision.

We really don't have any idea how long this will all take, but we're praying that God has a baby chosen for us, and that he will help orchestrate a smooth, problem free adoption.  And of course, I pray that it happens quickly, but we all know that God has his own timeline!  :)  I'll try not to rush him!

Happy New Year!!!