Welcome to our blog! We have been wanting to get this going for a while so it's great to finally join the blogging world and keep people updated on our journey. As many of you know, Ian and I have decided to adopt from South Africa. This is something that we have always known we wanted to do, but never thought it would happen this soon! Now it can't happen soon enough!
If I explained everything that has happened up until this point you'd be reading all day, so I'll give you a quick look at what has led us to where we are now...
Aug./09 - We first started thinking more about adoption and what our options would be. We've always wanted to adopt from South Africa, but didn't know for sure if that was possible in Canada. I started making some calls and found out that there is only one adoption agency in Canada who does S.A. adoptions. They're called Mission of TEARS in Ontario and they happened to be having a S.A. adoption seminar in Regina in Sept.
Sept./09 - We went to Regina for the seminar and came away feeling very encouraged and excited about the possibility of adoption. Although we still weren't totally sure, we started thinking it might be the direction for us to take right now. For the next couple of months we spent time praying about it and trying to understand what we should do.
Nov./09 - The big decision! Through lots of prayer & discernment we decided to go ahead with adopting! We felt so strongly that the Lord was saying that He had a baby in Africa for us. It was a whirlwind of a week as we got our initial application filled out, sent off and made an appointment for our home study to start. We also started telling family and friends and were very encouraged! We felt confirmed again that this was the direction God had for us right now. It was so exciting to start thinking that there was a baby out there just for us. The reality hadn't totally set in yet that this was actually happening!
Dec./09 - We had almost weekly meetings with our Independent Practitioner (IP) to have our home study completed. She would come to our house most of the time and would ask questions to get to know us better. She also helped prepare us a little better for what is ahead. We also had to fill out a 30 page application each!! Let me tell you, we were SO glad to have that done! Just before Christmas we had our last meeting and she started getting her report written up as we got our other paperwork together...doctor's reports, fingerprints, criminal checks, reference letters and a personal profile.
Jan./09 - On Jan. 15 our IP came for one last meeting to have us sign off and put everything together for our dossier. What a great feeling! It really felt good to have it out of our hands and not worry about all the paperwork anymore. Our dossier was sent off that night and by Jan. 26 (Tues.) it had been approved in Regina and was at our agency in Ont. waiting to be reviewed. Yeah!
So, now we are waiting for our file to be reviewed and within the next few weeks (assuming everything goes as it should) our dossier should be sent to South Africa. From there, we don't know a lot about the details of the process; only that they will be looking for a baby for us which I still can hardly believe.
That's it in a nut shell. It feels like things have been going so smoothly and we feel very blessed.
We think about our baby all the time - Where are they now? Are they even born? Are they safe? What will they look like? We can hardly wait to meet him or her and bring them home!
Anyway, I could ramble for a while, but I'll leave it at this for now. Thanks for reading!
