75%

Our social worker came out to our house this morning for our final interview/safety audit. It went really well. She was here about 2 hours. The boys were good, Bailey didn't attack her and she didn't find any major issues with the house. We do have to make some minor adjustments to the door locks, but she is going to trust that we do that and she wont hold up the home study by coming back out. The best part is that she advised us she is 75% done with the home study. We covered a lot today, but she said she is planning to have everything done by the middle of May. Of course, emergencies come up all the time so we can't put a date in writing, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Frustration

Our social worker came back from vacation last Monday. She gave me a call and I filled her in on the new agency and the grant. I asked her how the home study was going and when it would be done.

She told me we are top on her list of things to do, but if an emergency comes up or her boss gives her something to do, she has to do that first.

Ok, so when (approximately) will it be done?

Well, they have had budget cuts and people have left the department so they have more work than normal.

Ok, so give me your best guess, when will the home study be done?

Well, even though our application was received in January, it wasn't marked as received until February 5th. As long as its done before June 5th, her supervisor will be happy.

So it wont be done until June 5th???

It might be done sooner.

Thats where I'm at with Bellefaire.

We have sent in our application to the new agency as well as the application fee, openness questionnaire and some other miscellaneous forms. We also did our own profile. The agency typically does them, but since we are so open and could be matched so quickly, they suggested we do our own so we wont be waiting on them in case the home study gets done sooner than later. Not to brag, but the profile is amazing. Jon helped me out with a few professional touches and it looks just as good as the professional ones the agency puts together. I'm actually quite impressed with myself! As soon as the home study is done, it can be shown to the birth moms and hopefully someone will love us and pick us.

As annoyed and as anxious as I am, I have a wonderful husband that keeps reminding me we are on Gods time frame, not ours. The delay at Bellefaire is for a reason. We just have to keep reminding me that God is in control and we'll have our girl before we know it!

Creativity

Although we are still on cloud 9 (see last post), we were made aware of a minor glitch today. The agency we are using doesn't accept credit cards. How is that possible???? The grant will cover the last half of our fees. We still have to pay the first half. For now, they were going to go on a credit card. Time to get creative!

Now that we know what agency we are going with, I e mailed my social worker to get the status of our home study---no response. I called this morning and her voice mail said she is out of the office until Monday. I called her back up and got her voice mail. Hopefully we'll get a call back soon. The waiting is definitely the hardest part of the whole process.

If these are our biggest road blocks, I think we'll be ok!

GRANT!

God is so good! I said in the first post that if this adoption wasn't meant to be that it wouldn't happen. Luckily, it looks like it was meant to be---just not the way we thought. Isn't that always the case though?
So lets recap, just because I'm loving our story! We heard Gods whispers to us about adoption. We listened, but apparently not to the whole message. We thought Ethiopia was the way to go. We started with an agency that turned out to be ....not the place for us. We switched to another placing agency that forced us to find Bellefaire (our local agency). We got the facts about domestic adoption from them and spent a week agonizing about switching to domestic adoption through Bellefaire and possibly compromising on having a girl. We didn't get a clear call to switch so we stuck with Ethiopia. We still had a doubt or two floating around, but we stayed with the plan. Then every effort we made to finance the adoption fell through. Then Ethiopia changed its policy.
After getting the message loud and clear, we switched to domestic and found the consultants in
Georgia. The day we were going to sign the contract with them, we found out about the potential problems. That night I prayed that if Georgia was meant to be that when I called the courts to get clarification, I would get all the answers I needed and everything would be fine. Clearly that call didn't go as well as I hoped. I forgot about my prayer for a while, but once I remembered it, Jon reminded me that we have to stay true to God and he was telling us Georgia wasn't meant to be.
That brought us to our new agency (the one I wont list by name). They were left with 1 family wanting an AA baby. Because of their desperation to find open families, they are willing to let us select the gender of our baby. They typically don't let you do that. Had we looked into them when we first thought about switching to domestic, I don't know that we would have had the same luck with them.
Then we got news that not only has the tax credit been increased by $1000 and extended for another year, now is refundable. That means we will get a check for the full tax credit amount, not just our tax liability. I felt like things were finally starting to fall into place.
Today I KNOW that we have found our meant to be agency. We applied for their grant and have been approved for the largest possible amount! They just knocked the cost down by half! HALF!!! Between the grant, the tax credit (even though it wont be until next year) and generous friends and family, we are looking really good. We are so close to our girl and we wont be in the poor house when we get her!! It will be a while before I come down from cloud 9. If you need me, thats where we'll be!