So blessed

Wow...  I am so blessed. So blessed by the response to our adoption announcement.  So very grateful for everyone who took a moment to send well wishes, encouragement, support and love.  I want to print out all the facebook messages, blog comments and other notes I've received then tuck them away in our Sweet Child's lifebook.

The lifebook will be their story - the story of us waiting, the story of their waiting, and ultimately the joining of family. Our homestudy social worker encouraged us to start the lifebook now and I think it's a great idea! We have been blessed by an amazing social worker in our homestudy process. She actually goes to our church - I am amazed at how God puts people together. We go to a fairly large church and so there are many people whom we have never met. We had never met M.B. before our first homestudy visit, but now we have run into her every Sunday since at church. She has made the process so easy for us so far. The homestudy visits are exhausting though....so many questions and of course I want the house to be clean and tidy each time she comes over. Not an easy task for a family of eight, but we can pull it together when we need to!

We are finished now with our homestudy visits.  China requires four.... Some countries only require one! So now we wait for our social worker to type it all up - it's supposed to be about 25 pages all together. wow.  Then she sends it to us to review before it gets all finalized and approved.  In the meantime, we work on our Hague education requirement.  There's an all day training we will need to attend.  I feel like if I can just do a little something everyday to move forward, whether it's sending an email to our agency, filling out a forms....oh, so many forms to fill out, or say a prayer on our Sweet Child's behalf, then we are making progress.

I'm reading The Connected Child right now.  Anything we can do to prepare ourselves and our child for the road ahead - it may be bumpy, but it will always be full of love and compassion.  Someone once said that adoption is not for the faint of heart. There are hard times.  So far, the waiting hasn't been too hard, but I think it's because I've had so much peace over our decision to move forward. God doesn't give us a task without equipping us for the challenge and I think knowing His hand is in this completely provides us with the peace and understanding we need.  I bet it will be harder to wait though once we see our child's face and know we can't bring them home right away!  We may be months off before that happens. Can't wait for it to happen though!