Update

It's been another good long while since I posted an update and a few people have asked me what is happening on our journey, so I thought I should take the time to do so.

Late in October we had our meeting with the social worker from Lutheran Children Family Services. Everything I had read encouraged us not to be nervous, and not to worry. However it was difficult not to be nervous. Our social worker quickly put us at ease with her easy going demeanor though and we spent the next few hours chatting with her. She interviewed us separately and then together, asking us questions about our families and childhood and our child rearing philosophies (which of course, are great and fine, until you get children, and then they all change!! :) ) She then did a quick tour of the house, making sure it was a safe place for a child to live and grow up. All in all, it went well.

At this point our social worker is in the final stages of writing our homestudy report and CHI is doing a final review of it. Once we get that finished, we are almost finished getting our paperwork together.

We have an appointment in mid December to go to the Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Kansas City to turn in our paperwork and get fingerprinted for the background check.

With only two more steps to be done after our background check is completed, I'm hoping that we will be completely finished and have our paperwork to CHI and ready to be shipped to China by the end of January. That will give us a log in date of late February, which will then hopefully mean we will get a referral by August or September.

Right now there are rumors of the referral process taking longer than it has in the past, but we are still believing it will all happen exactly as it is supposed to.

I'm ready for this part of the process to be over. Once we don't have to worry about the paperwork and whether or not there is anything we should be doing, we will be able to focus on getting the house ready for the little ones. I've already given Tony a list of things I would like him to do, and I have my list also.

For those of you who don't know, Tony has recently started a new job with the Columbia City Police Department. He is enjoying this new adventure and comes home with stories every night of the things he is getting to do. I'm glad he has found something that he enjoys this much and it's fun to see him get excited over being able to bust the "bad guys".