So...Now What?

Many friends and loved ones have been asking for updates on our adoption journey. It usually goes something like this:

Friend: "So...um...how is the adoption...like...going?"

My answers have probably been very underwhelming, but I just want you all to know that we welcome people to ask about our journey. So please don't ever hesitate to ask us about it. :)

With that said, I just want to prepare you for our typical answer when you do ask:

Me: "Good...we're just still waiting..."

That's pretty much all we're going to be doing for a while. And that's okay - we're prepared for that and are very used to waiting. The difference between our current "waiting" and our previous "waiting" is that there is an extremely high chance of a baby at the end of this waiting.

Over the past 4 years with infertility, the waiting was very uncertain with no guarantee whatsoever of a baby through pregnancy. That's what made it so difficult. There was no due date, no deadline, and no approximate timeline. Just the month-to-month cyclical agony of "Maybe?" and then "No."

But with adoption -- especially how God so clearly opened our hearts to even consider adopting in the first place -- we are very confident that a baby is on the way to joining our family. It may take a year or more for that to actually happen, but it feels more like a really lengthy pregnancy than the complete uncertainty that comes with infertility.

So...Now What?

If you are at all unfamiliar with the adoption process (like I once was), I'm happy to share what's been happening with our journey since getting approved.

First, you can see that more than 2 months have passed since we were officially approved. That's crazy to me how fast the time has gone, but in a good way. Our lives have been really busy during that time, but we have made some progress in the adoption process.

After we were approved, our caseworker, B, told us to work on our profiles. It probably varies by agency, but our agency wanted us to create:

1. Printed profile book
2. Agency's website online profile
3. ParentProfiles.com online profile
4. Agency's Facebook page profile (if you are a sneaky super spy and you manage to find our profile on our agency's Facebook page, please do NOT comment or "like" it in any way; we do not want our personal Facebook account with our full names associated with our adoption profile.)

Thank God we had already started working on our printed profile book months ago! It took much more time than either one of us had originally thought. Granted, we are both perfectionists, so we spent a ton of time picking out the most appropriate photos, caption text, and organizing the flow of it. But our efforts clearly paid off because B literally had only four comments. Four! And they were so minor that she said we didn't need to run the final version past her before ordering the printed copies. If you're interested in seeing our printed profile book, you can click here to view it.

For the online profiles, we took a selection of photos from the printed book and used a lot of the same text. Having spent so much time and effort on the printed books made it much easier to build the three online profiles. The hardest part was getting familiar with each online profile builder. Again, I don't want to share the Facebook profile in order to avoid it somehow linking up with our personal account, but here are the links to view our profiles on the agency's website and ParentProfiles.com

Now that we're finished with all of our profiles, we've completed all the steps that we have control over, so we are now waiting for the Lord to finish the rest of this story. Essentially we are waiting for a birth mother (whose situation fits with our level of openness) to view our profile and want to meet us. B said that our printed book will probably be shown around months 6-9 (February-May 2015). They only show a small number of books to a birth mother at a time (so as not to overwhelm her with choices) and they first show families' books that have been waiting longer to be fair. But anyone can view our online profiles and so potentially a birth mother could see our profile and contact our agency before our printed book is ever shown. Again, God is the One in control of this process.

During this time of waiting, our agency requests that we take various courses and continue to become educated about adoption. So far, we have taken a Baby Care Basics class and an Infant CPR class, which was where we met this creepy dummy doll:



We have also joined a support group at our church specifically for families that foster or adopt. It's been wonderful meeting other families who have walked this road ahead of us and can offer some wisdom and perspective.

We're so thankful to each of you that continues to pray for us and support us as we wait for God to deliver our baby into our lives!

Webinar About Infertility

My friend, Jocelyn, told me about this webinar. I'll be busy during work that day, but hope to watch it later because I think it would be encouraging. If you or anyone you know is struggling with infertility, feel free to pass along this opportunity.

Infertility is a difficult and delicate topic for 25% of couples in the childbearing stage of life. Few will talk openly about it. But Sheridan and Merryn Voysey do.

Join the Voyseys and host Tim Jackson on Tuesday, October 14, from 10:00-11:00 a.m. EDT as RBC Ministries presents a live webinar called Infertility: Finding Hope with Empty Arms. The Voyseys share their story of enduring a decade of failed in vitro fertilization (IFV) procedures and attempts to adopt without any success. They know firsthand the painful burden of hope deferred and the heartache and isolation that haunts couples struggling with infertility.

In this webinar we will explore some of the healthy and unhealthy ways a couple can respond when facing the problem of infertility. As a part of this lively discussion, you will learn to:

• Identify how husbands and wives handle the struggles of infertility differently
• Understand the challenges and decisions regarding infertility options
• Understand the ethical dilemma of in vitro fertilization (IFV) for Christian couples
• Discover the commonality in all broken dreams that is not unique to infertility
• Understand how perhaps the greater tragedy than a broken dream is a life forever defined by it

If you or someone you know is struggling with infertility or another broken dream, plan to join us for Infertility: Finding Hope with Empty Arms and listen to a couple who has walked that road and found hope and healing.

Register today by clicking on the link below.

Join the conversation on Twitter! #EmptyArms