Swope Family Update

I'm back and boy do I have a bunch to catch up on in our family blog! As many of you know we are going to adopt a daughter from Ethiopia. I'll share more in another post (hopefully soon) about how God lead us to adopt, but today I want to catch up on where we are in the process.

In January we completed our home study. That was quite the adventure. It was funny at times as we described how we met, what drew us to one another, what our family is like, what are dreams are for the future, why we want to adopt, etc. They also did lots of digging into our pasts which was interesting to see the high contrast between our upbringings.

The last visit was our case worker came to our home to see where we live and meet our boys. It was so cute to watch Andrew give her the tour and tell her about our family. When asked about his concerns he talked about being afraid she'd get bullied and that he'd want to protect her. Joshua talked about his concerns being if she didn't like us or connect with our family. All normal and precious thoughts to me to see into their hearts. Both of them are very excited about our adoption and just don't understand why it takes so long. They hope she knows we are coming to get her. (Although we don't know yet who "she" is but we're asking God to assure her heart that she is going to be found and brought home.)

While our homestudy was being completed, we recieved our approval for fingerprinting and the I600-A form is being processed. The next step is to send our homestudy to our adoption agency. It was ready to go, but I'd been feeling like we needed to pray more and look into more agencies. I think it was all the risk factors of attachment disorders that scared me into "lets make sure we do all that we can to find just the right agency mode."

So we did more research during February only to come back to the original adoption agency we had been leaning towards from the beginning. JJ laughs at me because he can move forward with a commitment much more quickly than I can. I need options . I want to know as much as I can about each one and then choose the one that "fits" best in my heart. I think that is just the way my heart works and I love him so much for letting me be me.

During January and February we were also pondering the idea of moving to a little bigger house with more bedrooms in case God leads us to adopt two childre. We looked at a few houses and then decided we couldn't afford what we want in this area, and we don't want to change schools. So we settled on staying here for a while and re-evaluating after our daughter(s) come home. We could probably make space for one although it would mean giving up our bonus room where all the kids hang out when we have guests, and church gatherings at our house, etc. Somehow we'd make it work and if God wanted us to move then He'd lead us to a different house.