Impatient

I usually consider myself a very patient person. I don't think I could work as a nurse without an above average level of patience. I also consider myself pretty good with kids who test your patience like nothing else! But, during this adoption process I have become very impatient! My impatience seems to grow over time. We are soooo close to getting our finalized home study and our paperwork ready to submit overseas. But, it feels like this past week has just dragged on. Why is this taking so long? So, that's where we are. Just waiting for other people to do what they need to do. The amusing part is after we get our paperwork submitted, we will be waiting again. For our referral and travel date. The hardest part about waiting is that we know that this child is getting older by the day. Each week that goes by is another week that she is living without a family. This is why the waiting is so hard. I've already backtracked in my mind how we could have sped up this process to where we are now. It's almost been 3 months since we started, but looking back I think, well if we did this again how can we make this move along faster? But, we didn't know at the time. I tend to optimistically estimate everything anyway. I think I assume everyone is on my time schedule. Well, don't we all? It's time to send some emails and make some phone calls.

Home study draft done, thanks, and 3 years!

I've been waiting to write a new post because I was hoping there would be some news on the adoption front! There is, but first I would like to thank everyone for the donations we have received! We truly appreciate it! I'm crunching some numbers and trying to figure out how much everything is really going to cost. It's very difficult because the travel costs are so variable depending on the time of year. And we might be able to use some frequent flier miles I've accumulated for at least part of our flying. But, that will depend on how far in advance we get our travel dates. It looks like we will be doing most of our travel in the winter months. This will be very interesting because I'm not a cold weather person. Snow and I don't get along except for when I'm inside looking outside noticing how pretty it looks. I don't even have a really warm jacket. Hmmm....this will be interesting. The upside of snow and freezing cold is that nobody travels to Eastern Europe during this time! This means cheaper airfare, yay!

So, we finally got our home study draft back from our social worker. The social worker had to send it to the main office and then they go over it to make sure everything complies with the State of CA and then we read it over to verify that everything is correct. Then it is sent to our child placing agency and they read it over and then it travels by email across the ocean and the facilitator in Eastern Europe reads it to make sure it says what it should say according to their standards, and then it goes back to our CA agency for finalization. Yes, there are a lot of people reading this! Hopefully it will be as perfect as possible when it is done.

The reason the home study is so important is because it is the document that approves us adopt a child. Once it's finalized we can get it apostilled along with all our other notarized dossier documents and send it all overseas. This will allow us to receive our child referral and our date to travel!

The last thing I would like to say is Happy 3rd Anniversary to us! Justin and I talk about everything we've been through in our 3 short years of marriage and we can't believe it's only been 3 years! But, like I said on my Facebook post. Having a wonderful partner in life is truly a blessing. And we are very blessed.

What a great day! September 12, 2009, Edgewood Golf Course, South Lake Tahoe, Nevada