Finally at Square One!

Billy and I have decided on an adoption agency since I last posted!! YAY! After much prayer and consideration, we feel like Christian Adoption Services (CAS) is the place we should work with for our adoption. They are a private, non-profit organization. And have been providing adoption services for over 3 decades. We attended a "Fund your Adoption" fundraising seminar there and one week later we attended their informational meeting all about their agency. After each meeting we felt such a peace that this is the direction we are supposed to go in. They seemed very eager to help and we already feel assured in the fact that they are the experts to lead us along the way. 

Now that we have chosen an agency there are several items on the agenda. To break it down for you...

First decide on Domestic vs. International. We have decided domestic. 

Second, we need to fill out the preliminary application for CAS to review and see if they can meet our initial requests. Then they will inform us on how to obtain a formal application.

Third, once we complete the formal application, a CAS caseworker will conduct a home study as required in NC for all adoptions. This usually takes 3 months to complete the home study.

Finally, we become a waiting family and wait for a child to be referred to us. 

So being the task master I am, I thought we could get this preliminary application out of the way tonight with no problem. Turns out the word preliminary does not mean short and easy. We set aside some time to meet at my parents house after work and try to knock it out. But once we logged on to the online portal through CAS for our application we were met with many different tasks. For starters we needed to set up a profile, which we still lack information on that to be able to check the "completed" box. Next we took a look at the application and it was a list of about 8 categories with multiple pages in each. Wow!! I really like completing tasks and having to leave every single box as uncompleted tonight was daunting! However, this is only the beginning so it has helped me put everything into better perspective about how large and extremely detailed this journey will be. I am still very excited about it and it has only helped to fuel my fire! 

Where it all began....

    We all know that life has its individual journeys and points where we may be called to take a leap of faith, or settle for the norm. Some of us step out, some of us don't. Until this year I always considered myself as someone who stayed with the routines, and never knew exactly what I was here on this earth for. But we serve a much bigger God....and He began placing on my heart the thoughts to adopt our second child. I began having conversations with my husband, Billy, and we continued to think and pray about it and really felt like this was the direction we were being called to go in. While we have one biological daughter, Maylena, we feel very grateful for this direction God has prompted us to take with our next family member. 

    Although we are really, really excited about getting the process started, we know that it will be something that takes time and we will need much support along the way!! We have been researching the ins and outs of adoption. The main thing we have decided is that we want to adopt domestically. We have attended a fundraising seminar that was very helpful with great ideas on how to raise the funds needed for the adoption and we have been to informational meetings. At the moment we are looking into an agencies who can help take us from start to finish. We hope to have a decision on this soon and begin our adoption!! Please continue to check in with us, I will keep this updated very often to help everyone stay in the loop.