Good News: We're Active!

I told you I would have some good news very soon! We're active!!

The truth is, as I was proofreading my post yesterday and about to push the 'publish' button, I received a call from my placement agency stating that our home study had been approved, our reference letters had been received (thank you, overnight FedEx!), and we are officially being listed as "active" and they'll be starting to show us to birthparents! We took a few cheesy photos to mark the occasion:

So we're obviously very, very excited! We've cleared some major hurdles and although there is still a lot ahead of us, I feel like we've really come a loooooong way. It feels amazing to have the home study completely behind us!

So what now? Well.... now we wait. Yes, the "w" word again. Our placement agency will start showing us to birthparents that meet our guidelines (who are looking for people like us), and there is no way to know how long it will be until someone looks at our profile and says, "Them... they're the ones." (Gives me chills just thinking about it!)

So we wait! But this wait feels different already... I like it! At any moment we're going to get a call that will change our lives -- maybe two months from now, maybe six months from now... we can't know that now, but this is 'the wait' we've been waiting for!

Stalled and Brokedown

It's been 1 month since I have blogged about our adoption journey, and that's because I wanted to wait until I had some good news to blog about! But, that meant a really long time between blog posts because there has been a really long wait to get some good news -- ANY good news.

For a long time, our process stalled... I don't want to complain, but I want to be honest about how I feel and so that's what I'll be... The wait for our home study to be completed was much, MUCH longer than we were hoping. After our home visit on December 21st, we didn't hear anything for many weeks -- 5 weeks, to be exact. Even then, we only heard something because I brokedown and wrote our social worker to check on the progress of the report; we were told at that time things were going well and we'd be hearing something soon. Well, "soon" would be 2-1/2 weeks, and we finally received word on Thursday last week that our home study was complete and being sent to our placement agency for review. So, the entire home study process for us was almost 5 months. (Our home study agency told us when we were "shopping" for agencies that if we went with them to expect 3 months, start to finish... but hey, at least it got done, right?)

Wahoo!!!!  This was finally some good news!!!  BUT....... HOLD ON, not so fast! This good news was accompanied by some really, really unexpected not-so-great news: our home study agency would not be releasing the reference letters our dear friends and family had sent in for us, in OCTOBER, which our placement agency requires in order to become active.

And... PROCESS BREAKDOWN.

I'm not going to lie, I was upset. Since this process started I have been right on top of things, yet for some reason something that we should have been told about months ago was kept from us and there wasn't anything I could do about it. Our home study agency required 3 reference letters, and our placement agency asks for 5 -- so we were proactive and told our social worker we would get 5 letters so that we covered our bases for the placement agency too, and we were told this was no problem. So, when our wonderful friends and family worked on these letters for us and sent them in 4 months ago, how could we know that our home study agency wouldn't be passing those on to our placement agency -- not even copies?! It was especially disappointing given that we had been sitting around, doing nothing for the past 7-1/2 weeks while we waited for our social worker and could have been working on getting new references done during that time. I'm still trying to see the bright side of this one.

But, we are blessed with some amazing friends and family, and I mean amazing!! Within a few hours of getting this news, four friends and one sister-in-law interrupted their busy lives to do a favor for a disappointed mama-to-be. Some of them had already done the letters once, which made it even more frustrating to ask them to do it again. But -- they all came through and helped this process get back into motion. I'm so, so grateful.

And that means...  good news coming soon!!  (Very soon!!)