Adopted

Sooo... we are in the "Home Study" portion of the adoption... What is that you might ask? Here is the definition from childwelfare.gov:

The laws of every State and the District of Columbia require all prospective adoptive parents (no matter how they intend to adopt) to participate in a home study. This process has three purposes:

• Educate and prepare the adoptive family for adoption
• Evaluate the fitness of the adoptive family
• Gather information about the prospective parents that will help a social worker connect the family with a child whose needs they can meet

We first met with the adoption agency to gather information, then submitted a pre-application just because we are like that. Then we prayed some more and felt that God was going to speak to us directly about whether we should adopt or not.

We had a prophetic conference at our church... Again you might wonder what that is? It is a time where you are prayed for and God speaks through different individuals, in our case pastors, and gives you a word from God. WOW. I have had moments in my life where I have stepped back and truly said, God is real and this was one of them. There were 2 couples who prayed for us. They did not even know our name our what our story was and here they were praying for us and sharing words which only Daniel and I knew were specifically in regards to the adoption. We were searching, asking and wondering if we should submit our final application. That night we went out and had the most amazing dinner we had had all year. We celebrated that we were going to be parents.

So here we are, I am now more open about sharing and it is becoming more real to me. Though I am not pregnant, our baby could be growing right now. Right this very instant... Baby Boo... I'm thinking about you already. I have come to realize that things that used to matter matter very little, things that have always mattered such as family, health, relationships matter even more. Dreams readjust, emotions are fine tuned, expectations can be ground to smithereens with life, but I choose life. Every day we work on one more paper, one more letter, one more page in a book to read. This "baby" journey is taking us for a spin! Good thing I like adventure.

While reading up on adoption and such we watched three videos from The Austin Stone Church in Austin, Texas that were so on point. I want to share them with you as they were a blessing to us.

Adopted: Rescued by Love
Adopted: Rescued to Love
Adopted: The Cost of Love

Love,
Liza