Hurry up and wait

First, the exciting news that you might already know – we are now a licensed foster/adopt home! We’re now getting e-mails about kiddos who may soon be available for adoption and we can submit our home study for consideration for kiddos who are already available for adoption.

Our original hope was that, once we got to this point, we’d be able to have kids in our home within weeks, but hopefully days. We’ve now learned more from the adoption coordinator at our agency and found that it will more likely be months, but hopefully weeks.

There were three groups of four siblings that we had been looking at on AdoptUSKids.org, and we immediately submitted our home study for all three. That basically means that we told that powers-that-be that we would like to be considered to possibly become those kids’ parents.

Submitting our home study is a first step, and it is perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, to submit our home study for multiple kids at the same time. Case workers often receive numerous home studies per sibling group, so they will narrow the submissions down to only the top 3-5 and then ultimately only one. By submitting on multiple kids, we’re basically improving our odds on “making the cut” for at least one group.

Our adoption coordinator advised that we may also need to be more broad in what we’re looking for. We thought that we were being pretty open by being willing to adopt four kids at once, but it is apparently limiting us that we are looking only at groups of four. In light of this, we’ve expanded our search to groups of three (with the intention of adopting another kiddo later).

At this point, we’ve submitted our home study on six sibling groups of four kiddos, three groups of three kiddos, and one group of five kiddos (Yes, five. Are we crazy or what, haha!). We’ve learned that one group of four was already in the process of being adopted, but for the rest, we are just waiting.

Since case workers have so much on their plates, they will often only notify the families that are chosen. So, no news is generally bad news. Since it has been several weeks for four of the groups of four, we’re pretty sure we haven’t been chosen. We’ve submitted on all of the others in the past couple of days, so now we’re just waiting, hoping, and praying.

Please continue to pray for our future kiddos – that they be patient and that they know they’re loved. Pray that the transition they’ll be experiencing goes smoothly and that things will continue to go smoothly even after the “honeymoon” period is over.

Please also pray for us. Pray that we’ll be patient for God’s timing and that we’ll be prepared for the challenges of parenthood.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll have a new update next week that we’ve been selected! In the meantime, you’ll just have to wait along with us. :)