One Step Closer...

Good Evening Everyone!
First off, John's Grandma Angie is ill and while she is on the mend, I would like to ask everyone to keep this very special woman in your thoughts and prayers.
This week John and I had our home visit with the home study social worker. We scrubbed the house for 10 straight days, you could literally eat off of any surface in our house! Even Ruby's crate is spotless. Did the visit last long enough to warrant the amount of detergent and cleanser that we used? Probably not, but the meeting was nice and quick and now we are one step closer. The next step is to wait for our completed home study which hopefully should be early next week and then we continue to work on collecting our paperwork for the dossier. The program director at the placing agency is in Thailand right now meeting the children and collecting information on any new children. How crazy is it that it is somewhat feasible that she has met our child?!?! When I think about it in those terms, I just want to stay up all night painting the baby's room and buying every toy and book I can find online!
Speaking of books, my mom found a life book for us that is hands down the cutest thing ever. As I learned more about life books vs. traditional baby books and I could not find one that really seemed right. I started to panic thinking that we would have to make one ourselves and then I really thought about our lack of artistic...well, anything! So thankfully my mom found exactly what I had in my head!
We are off to fill out more paperwork (can't wait until that is not an everyday sentence!) and hope that everyone is doing well.
Love,
John and Nancy

Fingerprinting!!!

Hi Everyone! Hope everyone had a Happy Easter and a relaxing weekend. We received some good news in the mail this weekend...we received our fingerprinting dates!!! In two weeks John and I will go down and have our fingerprints taken and send them off to USCIS! One more step closer...We have our home visit tonight so I will update again later. Have a good day everyone!
Love,
Nancy

Happy Birthday Uncle Chuck!

Just wanted to tell you to have a wonderful day Uncle Chuck. We will be starting on the "Deep Clean of 2008" in our house this weekend in preparation of the home visit. You would think that since we have been living in our house for a year and a half we would not still have things in boxes...Hope you all have a great weekend and if we receive news on anything, we will be sure to pass it along!
Love,
Nancy and John

March 13, 2008

Hi Everyone! I hope that everyone received the email with this link OK. Thank you Mr. B for passing it on for us! We have made some progress. According to the Hague regulations we have to take 10 hours of adoptive parenting classes before our home study is considered complete. We were unable to attend the classes in person through our home study agency so we opted for online classes. Last Saturday, we sat in front of our computer and moved fairly quickly through the first class. We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and decided we could do one more. Well, needless to say, 6 hours later we were rubbing our eyes but completely done with all of the classes! On Tuesday of this week, we received our certificates of completion and we passed them on to the placement agency. One more thing we can cross off our list. So that is where we stand right now. I am so happy to hear from all of you again, it is lovely to catch up properly and hear how all of your lives are going! Talk to you soon.
Love,
Nancy and John

The Begining

Hello everyone! So I guess I should start with a little background info. John and I have always planned on adopting one of our children; we thought after a biological one. But life had a different plan for us and we are just running with it. So, after months of research and scouring the Internet and calling agencies across the country we finally made a few decisions. Yes I know that our parents have heard that many times in the last 6 months (!) but we really have this time. We feel that our child is in Thailand!!! Every time we would look through all of the country options we just kept coming back to Thailand. One of the requirements is a minimum two year marriage though, and at the time we started this, that seemed to be a VERY long time away. So we kept researching and calling and requesting info and what do you know, our anniversary is right around the corner now. We are having our home study done by an agency here in Nashville and our placement agency is in Washington. So far we have filled out a TON of papers, forms and questionnaires. Our home visit is in two weeks, so basically we need to start cleaning now! After that, our social worker will put everything together and it will become our "Home Study". That will be shipped off to Washington and we begin to work on our dossier. The dossier is a collection of our home study, background checks, more forms, photos, reference letters, etc...We have also recently sent in a form to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to petition to adopt and it was preliminarily approved! Now we wait a few weeks until we receive our invitation to get fingerprinted. Whew...So that is where we are. We know this is not the most personal way to communicate with everyone, but we know how busy everyone (ourselves included) is these days and we just wanted to make sure that both of our families and all of our friends are included in this. Also, this will be a great way to update everyone once we are in Thailand. It really does take a village to raise a child, and all of you are our village. We look forward to hearing from you, please feel free to call, email or post a comment whenever you feel. We love and miss you all very much and hope that everything is going well with you and your loved ones. Talk to you soon!
Love,
John and Nancy