New J-O-B

It’s been a bit since I’ve last updated the blog but I have a good excuse- I got a new job!! I am now officially a school-based occupational therapist and I play (ahem, work) with kiddos ages 3-16! I absolutely love it and am finding myself truly at home with this new position.

So with the new job, a few things went on hold with the adoption process. We were all done with the Home Study a few months ago but could not submit it until I actually started my new job and got my first paycheck. Our complete file (including home study, paperwork, etc.) was reviewed by the board at our adoption agency last week. Praise God that went quickly and there were only a few minor changes our Home Study agency had to make. We are currently waiting to get the final copy of our home study back and then can submit our USCIS I-800A application (woo hoo!) Hopefully it won’t take too long for that to be accepted.

Our adoption agency recently hired a new international adoption coordinator. This made us a little nervous to be switching our main contact at the agency at a crucial time when we are submitting all our paperwork but know God is in control of the situation. She has been very prompt with her e-mails, which is comforting to know we have someone reliable on our side.

We received some not-so-wonderful news last week. We were told at the beginning of the process that because we are adopting a special needs child we could probably choose the city in which she will come from. Delhi was where our heart was set on because A)we’ve been there! B)we are familiar with the orphanages there and C) we have friends there! God shook things up a bit and we were told this week there is no spot on the CARA application that will be sent to India in which we could recommend a city. So maybe our little one is in another city besides Delhi…

Also, CARA (India’s Central Adoption Resource Authority) sent out a memo this week stating they have implemented a temporary hold of online registration that is expected to be lifted in February of 2013. The memo said “In view of sufficient number of prospective parents already registered for inter-country adoption, on-line registration has been suspended until February 2013 and no application can be submitted during this time period.” What this means is while we can fill out and submit our USCIS at this time, we cannot submit all of our paperwork to India until that registration opens up again… While this news was sad we were aware that this could happen at any point in our adoption process. We know there is a reason this happened when it did and that God will continue to protect our little girl whether in her mommy’s tummy or in an orphanage. He has proven that His timing is perfect and we can plan all we want but we have peace knowing that he is carefully guiding each step of this process. 

I'll end with a few pictures from Thanksgiving. We celebrated at my parents house with a huge dinner potluck-style and hayride. Our friends Rithika and Sowmitha were able to come with us which was so much fun!

 Rithika, Sowmitha and I at my parents house.

The annual Thanksgiving Hayride through the pasture.

Our new friend, Rithika

So it has been a little while since I have posted and I thought I would catch everyone up with where we are at. Our last home study meeting went well-our agency came to our house and looked through to basically make sure it would be a safe place for a child. They also did 1-1 interviews with us asking questions on how we plan to discipline, our family values, influential experiences/people in our lives and more. Good news is-we passed! At this point, our home study is pretty much done! We have one or two little things that we are waiting on to come through before we get to read it and then submit it to our government for USCIS approval with our application. We are currently working on finishing up the things for our dossier that we will send with our application to India. This week my goal is to get our picture page completed which includes our life summed up in 5 or 6 pictures! It is so hard to choose but I think we will include a picture of Brian and I, one of the front of our home, one of our backyard, one or two of her future bedroom and one of the living room. One exciting thing that happened recently was the beginning of a new semester of the Friendship Family program through the University of Arkansas. We have been involved in this program for over a year now and have loved bringing international students into our home and lives! We have had 2 students from South Korea and 1 from Belgium and have had so much fun learning about their cultures. This year our student is from India! Woo Hoo! Her name is Rithika and she is so fun! Here are a few pictures of us. The first one was at the banquet and second was taken this weekend at the Farmers Market. We are SO excited to get to know her better and learn even more about the culture, food, etc. of India.

A little sidenote: Brian just got back from a week trip with 7 guys to Colorado! They had a blast mountain biking, hiking, and fly fishing-I was a little jealous! Here a few pics from his trip!

Well I guess that's all for now! Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

What turning a quarter-of-a-century means to me...

Well I finally turned the big 2-5 yesterday! I have been counting down the days until I turned 25 because this means I can finally officially adopt from India! Woo hoooooooo!  We are confident that this is what God had planned for our lives all along but it so fun to look back and see how he is bringing things together.  You can read here about when we found out India had changed their age to adopt!

Here are a few pictures from the birthday! 

Yummy birthday lunch at Stone Mill!

Coldstone birthday cake!

Birthday breakfast including french toast and fresh peaches made by my sweet husband, Brian!

These were on my desk when I walked into work yesterday. I have the best husband (flowers) and co-workers (basket of goodies)!

Spent the evening at Kingston listening to some wonderful music and visiting with family. 

I don't know how I ever made it through college without rain boots!  My first real pair :) Thanks, Bri! Now just bring on the rain!! (I have a slight obsession with chevron print because it reminds us so much of India!)

So many of you have asked about a timeline for our adoption, which is very unpredictable.  We have not heard of a successful international adoption taking place from India>US since they implemented their new adoption guidelines.  About all we know is that our Home Study should be ready to go at the beginning of September. After that we fill out a form for the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) which could take up to 90 days to get accepted (hopefully sooner though), then prepare a few more dossier documents and mail the complete Dossier to India! We know that CARA (India's Central Adoption Resource Authority) will only accept a certain # of new home studies each month but will not tell what that number is.  So starting there it will be a waiting game to get a referral. It could take months or a year or two years or who knows! Our patience will be tested in a big way when it comes to all the waiting but we know this is where we will probably grow in our faith the most.  I added a current timeline on the right side of the blog so y'all can see what the process has looked like so far for us and will try to keep that updated.

Our last Home Study meeting is a week from tomorrow so we would appreciate your prayers as we have some hard decisions to make before that time.

Thanks for following along this journey with us! Love y'all!

Making my list and checking it twice

First of all, we want to take a second and thank everyone for all of the sweet messages, e-mails, texts, and phone calls this past month!  It feels so good to know we have so many people praying for this process and our sweet little girl in India!  We truly appreciate each of you and words of encouragement! YOU ROCK!

Well we are well on our way in this process! Monday, July 9^th, was a very busy day!  We traveled to Southeast Arkansas that weekend to get certified copies of our birth certificates, then on to Little Rock to get certified copies of our birth certificates and then to the Secretary of State’s office (which is awesome!) to get the documents apostilled.  Who knew that you would have to get a certified birth certificate even more certified than it already was, haha.  After that we drove to Conway and had lunch at Holly’s with our wonderful friends, Sarah and Tracy!  At 1:00 we started our home study! That includes one meeting at our agency’s office in Conway and one at our home! The first meeting went really well and we are really excited the next meeting is just around the corner: August 4^th!  For this meeting, they will just check out our house and make sure it is a safe place for a child then we will have 1-on-1 interviews and answer questions on child-raising techniques and discipline. It feels a little bit crazy since we have never raised a child before so any advice would be appreciated!

I sent in another huge packet of paperwork today to our adoption agency including birth certificates, another set of autobiographies, health insurance information, training material and much more! Whew! It feels good to get those things checked off this massive list!

My accordion organizer has been a lifesaver! 

Definitely recommend this for anyone going through the adoption process.

As we travel along this journey, God is constantly showing us that He is the one in control! Early last week I received an e-mail from the International Adoption coordinator we have been closely working with since we started the process.  She answers all of my questions and I’m pretty sure there was one week where I consistently e-mailed her with questions at least 3 times a day! She’s wonderful and so prompt with responses.  Sadly, she is retiring from the agency.  I was a little freaked out at first thinking about who might fill her spot and what if they weren’t very good or didn’t know what they were doing, and how that could slow down the adoption process.  I realized that something was out of my control and it scared me. But I was instantly comforted when I thought about who was really in control-not only in control of who will take this lady’s place, but who is in control of the whole process.  He knows exactly where in India our little girl is, how old she is, if she is still in her momma’s tummy, if she is being cared for physically & emotionally, and every little detail about her! I have no idea on any one of these things but it is so comforting that my God does! 

The Announcement

We are so excited to tell all our friends and family about our decision to follow God’s plan for our family through international adoption!

God’s heart for adoption is so evident as we read His Word.  These are some of our favorite verses on adoption.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. Galatians 4:4-5

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”  Romans 8:14-16

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:27

Isn’t it incredible to know that we have been adopted as children of God?!

Special shout-out to the best sister in the world, Andrea, for being an awesome photographer and taking some wonderful announcement photos!

The Last Few Months

On May 17^th we turned in our first application to our adoption agency. We were told it would be about 2-4 weeks until we found out if they accepted us as a potential adoptive family. About 4 ½ weeks later we were traveling back from a continuing education course in Columbia, Missouri. We pulled up to our house a little after midnight and I went to the mailbox to get our mail from the weekend.  To my excitement there was a package from our adoption agency! We had been accepted by their agency and it was time for Application #2 and what felt like a million other documents to get signed. We were so pumped it was hard to sleep that night! We realized it was Fathers Day and thought that was rather fitting! The next morning we woke up just praising the Lord for getting us to this next step in the process. Our last month has definitely been one of the busiest we have ever had. It definitely compares to the semester when I was planning our wedding, starting Occupational Therapy school, living in a freshmen dorm, and training for a marathon. I’ve never seen so much paperwork but in a crazy way I feel like I was born for this kind of thing (Really-ask my parents/siblings)! I am such a planner and it has been fun to make my calendar, get an accordion organizer, and begin a long To-Do list.  At first the process was very overwhelming but as we have checked things off the list it is becoming much more manageable.  This part of the process includes things like giving blood, getting physicals, reading books, completing on-line training, contacting personal, relative, and pastoral references to get letters written, writing autobiographies, putting together pictorial essays, completing psych evaluations, retrieving certified copies of birth certificates/marriage license, and so much more.  

Back in America

Once we were back in America I decided to start contacting a few different adoption agencies that did Indian adoptions. After a few weeks we found a great agency that has been doing Indian adoption since like the 1980’s. We were able to hear from about 10 different families that had adopted from India using their agency and it was wonderful getting to hear about successful adoptions! I began e-mailing back and forth with this agency and although I knew I was too young to adopt (with the minimum age being 28) from India I decided to go ahead and ask for clarification about the minimum age to adopt. I remember the next day when I checked my e-mail so vividly! I got goosebumps as I began to read “We just got India’s new guidelines in-the minimum age to adopt is 25.” 25!?!? I couldn’t believe it!  I turn 25 on July 27^th and I could not have been more excited. I really felt the Lord taking control of the whole process as I fell to my knees and just praised Him for giving me such a clear indication of what he wanted us to do! Every day I am amazed about what a big and powerful God I serve! 

Finally in India

This Spring we made our trip to India. We had so much fun learning about the culture, shopping in the markets, and visiting the Taj Mahal-it was the best trip ever! We could tell that the Lord’s hands were over each and every aspect of our trip.  We LOVED getting to spend time with our friends Grant and Nicole (and of course, Jack!) and seeing about what life looks like in India. We had the most incredible trip with the highlight most definitely being the time we spent at an orphanage in Delhi. While we were there we had the incredible opportunity to educate the workers on exercises and activities they could be doing with their ‘special needs’ children.  We are by no-means pediatric specialists but we both learned a lot in school and on clinical internships that we felt could benefit children living in an orphanage.  The workers were all so sweet and eager to learn and we left there feeling so rewarded in that if we were able to improve the quality of life of one child in that orphanage-the trip to India was totally worth it!

We would usually spend our mornings there working with the children with special needs-especially a boy with cerebral palsy who had pretty much the best smile I have ever seen! In the afternoons we would spend our time holding and loving on the babies. They were the most precious things we had ever seen-beautiful with big brown eyes and the sweetest little smiles and facial expressions (see the pictures below!) We fell in love with those sweet babies and we left the orphanage that last day with tears in our eyes that we couldn’t bring them all home with us. One of our last nights in India I woke up around 2 a.m. just crying-my heart aching for those sweet baby girls at the orphanage and thinking that they may never have a loving family. I decided to get on my phone and search about India’s guidelines for international adoptions. After reading CARA’s 27 page document on my phone (my eyes were hating me!) I found out that the minimum age to adopt was 28. I was a little sad thinking that that was still 4 years away but thought if it was God’s plan for us to wait to adopt then that’s what we do...

Here are a few of the sweeties that pulled at our heart strings!

From China to India

Before this Spring, Brian and I tried for about 2 1/2 years to plan a short-term trip to work at an orphanage somewhere in China. We have a heart for children with special needs and thought this would be an opportunity for us to use our skills (Brian=PT and Meg=OT) and learn more about a country we wanted to adopt from someday.  We researched so many different orphanages and organizations that we could work with there, sent what felt like a million e-mails, filled out applications, and did everything we could possibly do to make contacts there. It seemed like nothing would come together. We talked with one reliable organization about coming to work with their program for a few weeks and we were told we had to learn to speak Chinese fluently, agree to come back and work every year and stay for extended periods of time. This obviously was not realistic for us and we had to decline. We could not find any other orphanages that were consistent enough in their responses to feel good about buying plane tickets to travel to a place we had never been to meet up with people we didn’t know.  After 2 years we began to take this as a sign that God did not want us to go to China, at least not at this time. So we began our search for another country…

Not long after we decided to start searching for another country we could travel to some of our best friends, Grant & Nicole, returned to America from India for a few months. We had the opportunity to have them stay at our house for a few days (which we loved-especially because we got to meet their newborn baby-one of the cutest kids in the world, Jack!) We had such a fun time hearing about their life in India and by the time they left that weekend we were pretty sure we were going to India! Within a week we had made reliable contact with an orphanage in Delhi that said they would love for us to come. Things quickly started to fall in place and we had such a peace about India that we went ahead and bought tickets to go for 2 weeks the next Spring.

What led us to adoption...

International Adoption is something that Brian and I have been talking about since we got married 4 ½ years ago.  We always said this was something we wanted to do and had the country of China on our hearts. When we started looking more seriously into adoption last fall we started researching the guidelines on China adoptions and met with some friends who had adopted from China to get advice. We quickly found out that the minimum age to adopt from there was 30.  Since I was only 24, six more years just to start the process sounded like a really long time. We decided to continue praying about adoption and just let the Lord lead us in whichever direction we were supposed to go.

Here it goes!

Hi, my name is Megan and I am jumping on the blog bandwagon (with the inspiration from my friend, Alex!) as a means to share our heart and experiences with international adoption!