We're adopting!

Many of you by now know that Todd and I have decided to adopt and we begin the process next week! I can't believe it's right around the corner! We have been trying to have our own for a while now and were at a crossroads of what our next step would be. We have both prayed about it and have felt God calling us to adoption, rather than go through fertility testing and treatments. We do still hope to have our own child one day and know that if it is in God's plan for us, it will happen in His time!

We are going to adopt a child from foster care here in the US. When you adopt out of foster care you have to complete PATH training, which stands for "Parents as Tender Healers". This is a 30 hour education and self-assessment process which will help us understand the feelings of grief and the loss that children can experience. It also helps us identify our family strengths and in what situations we can most successfully parent. Some of you have asked us lots of questions about the process, but we do not, yet, know a lot of the answers. Here's what we do know:

• We want an older child (8 years old, max)
• No preference of gender
• No preference of race
• We're open to adopting siblings (no more than two)
• We're open to a adopting a child with mild learning disabilities, and of course, speech-language delays

Our orientation course is next Thursday night, February 3rd, where we hope to have most of our initial questions answered. We will then go every Thursday night for 10 weeks to 3 hour classes on specific topics. After that we will have a home study completed and have to complete other trainings including CPR certification and medication dispensing training. We decided to do a blog to keep everyone updated throughout the process (Todd's idea!). We will try to post weekly after our class with any updates. Not sure how the whole Blog thing works, this is our first time. So anyone with Blog experience feel free to give some pointers!

In the meantime, please keep us in your prayers, as this is going to be a long, tedious process! Hopefully this time next year, though, we'll have our very own precious child! Until next week...