The "process"

So we're going to adopt. If you're like us, the adoption process was is somewhat of a mystery, so we thought we'd share an overview of what we plan to be involved with in the coming months.

Domestic adoption--meaning adopting from the U.S.--usually involves working through either a private adoption agency or the foster care system to bring children into your home. We will be deviating from the path of picking one adoption agency to work through, since with our desire to provide a loving family for a young child of any ethnicity from anywhere in the U.S., we have also chosen to work through the minority program of Christian Adoption Consultants (www.christianadoptionconsultants.com) that helps place African American children in adoptive families. Our consultant Tracie Loux will advise us throughout our journey.

The first step of adopting is completing a home study. We'd heard in the past that during a home study you get asked tons of personal questions, get to fill out tons of paperwork, and have to have tons of smoke detectors in your home. The first two are true, but we really only needed two smoke detectors :-). We have met twice with the social worker from our home study agency, The Miriam Project out of Anderson, IN, and have completed approximately 2/3 of the required paperwork, so we're in the "plugging along" stage.

While we work on our home study, we are also preparing a family profile. This will be used to present to birth mothers who may be interested in selecting our family for their child. We have opted to save money on this part by creating our profile ourselves since I can design it, so this has added an additional load on top of "normal" life (whatever that looks like anyway).

Once our home study is complete, instead of working through only one agency to wait on a match with a birth mother, we will work with Tracie and apply with multiple agencies throughout the country who are in need of adoptive families. This way our family's profile will be available to many more situations that are in need of a placement instead of just waiting in line at one agency.

This will likely mean travelling cross-country to meet our new son/daughter(s?) and could mean doing so on short notice, but one big advantage with working through CAC is that they work only with agencies in "safe" or "adoption-friendly" states in which the adopting family are given parental rights very soon after birth. Once we are matched with a child, we will simply wait until the baby is born or rush to the state of his/her birth if it is a last-minute placement. There are many unknowns ahead, and for us "planners," we will just have to trust God in each step!

What happens at the end of the placement is still kind of blurry to us, so we'll just share those details after the fact. (Did we mention we will be working with a consultant? Yes, this ignorance is part of why we're doing so :-).) But the end result should be welcoming a new little family member (or members?) into our home within an unknown amount of time.

So there you have it. It's perfectly clear, right? Stay tuned to read how God has already been moving in the first six weeks of our journey and for how you can partner with us along the way!