It’s been over a year now since my husband and I began the process to adopt a child from the State of Iowa foster care system.
For those of you that don’t remember, or weren’t reading my blog back then, it started out with some very weird coincedences. I say they were signs. Signs that this was something that was meant to be.
So we took the plunge. We filled out the paperwork, went to the county jail and got fingerprinted, and went to the informational meeting. After that, we were really excited to start our 10 weeks of classes and have our homestudy completed.
But in the 3 month wait between the informational meeting and the classes starting, some big things happened in our lives. We had an overwhelmingly huge surprise of meeting the son I gave up for adoption 19 years ago (post is password-protected; ask me for the password) and we had the devastating breakdown of the relationship with my stepson.
So when it was time for the classes to start, we decided it just wasn’t the right time in our lives to be going through an adoption, and we stopped the process. I felt almost sick to my stomach, as I watched Christopher, the little boy we had our eye on, disappear from the adoption listings. He was adopted by another family. I had never met him, never talked to him; I had only read his story, seen his picture, and watched one video of him. I could almost see him as part of our family.
I kept telling myself it wasn’t meant to be.
Over the last year, I have checked in on the adoption listings every few weeks. I check to see which new children have added, I shed a tear over the children that are still waiting, and I wonder if it will ever be the right time for us to make this happen.
A few days ago, I did my usual skim through the listings and I finally realized that maybe we needed to try again. The relationship with my stepson has thankfully taken a turn for the better, and we have a fabulous relationship with the son I gave up for adoption. Things are going great in our lives right now. My husband is starting a new job with regular hours again, and I’m thinking ‘Why wait any longer when we know this is what we’ve been wanting for years?’
We have to go through the whole paperwork process again, and of course, get fingerprinted again, so I ordered the paperwork all over again. It’s a crazy combination of being nervous and excited all at the same time.
We’ve come full circle.
Very cool my dear. That’s super exciting. Glad to catch up with you a little bit. When do you guys start classes?
tamara b´s last [type] ..hard momma moment
We have our informational meeting on June 14th, and we can’t turn our paperwork in until that time. They are supposed to have someone there to do our fingerprints there also. Once our paperwork is approved, they will contact us to begin classes. I assume we will be able to begin classes sometime in July or August, and the homestudy is completed sometime during the 10-week classes as well. They say once the classes are done, the process can move very quickly after that, depending on our criteria for the child we are looking for.