The Homestudy Agency 12/22/03

Today we contacted our homestudy agency, Adoptions of Kentucky. We had contacted them over a year ago about a domestic adoption but decided against that at that time. They are now doing international homestudies so we decided to go with them since we had already met with them once before and they seemed really nice. They told us that we had to comply with all of Kentucky requirements as well as Russia requirements. This means that anything that they require for domestic adoptive parents they were going to require from us. First off would be filling out all of the background on Michael and myself. This amounted to 35 pages each of any and every kind of question that you can imagine from how you were raised, discipline methods, school......you name it and they ask it. Next we have to go to an orientation which they will set up for us once we turn in all of the background papers.

And the fun begins.......................

12/24/06 It's Christmas Eve and tonight at dinner we are going to tell our family of our plans to adopt a child. Mom and Dad already know and Ed and Charlotte already know. The excited Grandparents to be.

I was a nervous wreck. Don't ask me why, I have know idea. Everyone knew of our desire to have a child and knew of the struggles we'd had over the last several years. Every year on Christmas Eve my aunts, uncles, cousins and Grandparents get together and have dinner and exchange gifts. I just couldn't decide when was the right time to "cut in" with our exciting news. I kept looking at Mom like "now?"

Finally with my heart pounding in my chest and Michael sitting beside me we broke the news. Everyone was quite shocked to say the least. Excited and full of question but surprsed. My Granny was really curious about how everything worked and we answered everyones questions as best we could but we are still very very new to this and are just learning ourselves. We told them that we would keep them posted on our progress but that more than likely it would be about a year before we would be matched with our child. They wished us well and were very supportive of our decision.