Our first home study meeting!

Well tomorrow is the big day! We have our first home study meeting with a counselor at Bethany. We are so excited to get this going but I'm also nervous because we've been told there's lots of crying that normally happens during the first meeting. We will be asked to talk about our fertility journey and why we decided to choose adoption so I'm just praying that I won't be too much of an emotional wreck. We hope that she sees us as the loving and caring people that we are and how much we want a family of our own.
I'm also handing off our pictures to my brother tomorrow so he can start our portfolio. It was fun going through years of pictures and picking the ones that will represent our lives the best. I can't wait to see what my brother will be able to do with all of them. Our last assignment will be to write a letter to the birth mom and add that to the portfolio as well. I really want to spend a lot of time on this since it will be the first thing the birth mom will read from us.
Please keep us in your prayers as we go through these next 4 meetings. We are hoping to get one in a week so we can be done by March. Pray that they go smoothly and that God is preparing the perfect baby for our family. Thank you all! And I'll let you know how tomorrow goes. xoxo

Done and Done!

We finally turned in all our adoption paperwork! Yay!!!! We turned it in last Thursday and are now waiting for our counseling appointments to be set up or.... for Bethany to call us and let us know if we are missing anything. If all our paperwork is complete, our next step will be to attend 4 counseling sessions. However, one of those will be individual appointments so I guess it's really 5 sessions. We are hoping this will only take a month or so and that we can be on the list by mid February. Darryl and I are so excited and today we received our first baby shower present!

We need a place for our newborn to sleep and have to have it by our fifth counseling session or home study as they call it. So my parents and my grandma pitched in and got us our co-sleeper! It's tan and polka dot so it could be for a boy or girl. My sister in laws both have one and love it! Thanks Mom and Dad and Grandma! And thank you everyone for being so supportive through this. Please continue to pray that this will be a smooth process and that Darryl and I can bring the baby that was meant for us all along home very soon. Also, please pray for our baby's birth mom.....she could be pregnant right now and in the middle of making a very tough but loving and responsible decision. (ooooo....gives me goosebumps!) :)
We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and wish you a happy new year! We are praying this year will be the best one ever!