It's Official!!

Hello wonderful blogger family, friends, and followers! We wanted to share the most exciting news with all of you! Today, we received a call from the case worker to let us know we have officially been APPROVED!!! She will be sending us an *official* letter next week to inform us of our approval and we will then be transferred to a new case worker, R. (Sorry, I can't disclose this person's name due to privacy reasons.) R. is great because she is the one who works directly with children and adoptive parents!! We are being placed into the state adoption database now, so the case workers who are responsible for the children in state care can see that we are potential adoptive parents.

What happens now? When a potential match is found, R. will contact us with as many details about the child (or children) as they have. If we decide to proceed, then we meet with R., the child's case worker, the child's foster parents (if they are in foster care), and several managers from the local DFCS to discuss this further. If we still decide to proceed with meeting the child (or children), we will meet the child and spend hour-long visits with them. The hour-long visits then turn in to an afternoon, then overnight, then a weekend, and then possibly a week-long stay. If all of the above visits are successful, then the child (or children) will move in with us and then we will begin the process of finalizing the adoption and the child (or children) will be legally ours!!!

When is all this going to happen, you ask? Well, we're not really sure. Our current case worker told us we could get a call as early as next week, or 6-8 months from now (or even longer). For now, we have decided not to make any long-term plans and to take everything one day at a time. We don't know what's going to happen, so taking it one day at a time is all we can do.

We are soooo happy!! We have waited so long to become parents and we know that we have just a small amount of time left. This is the beginning of the end of the process!

We will post again soon!

Approval Process Update!

Hello! Just a very quick update in the middle of a very busy week! Russell spoke with our case worker on Monday and we should have our approval from the state by Friday! We need you all to cross your fingers, think about us, pray for us, and everything else you can do to keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we hope so desperately to be approved by Friday!

Have a great week everyone! Will blog again when we know more!