After so much research and prayer we have finally gotten started on our adoption journey! It has been a little stressful trying to decide on an agency and after 6 months of researching and calling agencies and getting packets in the mail we thought we had found our agency. We even sent our application with the fee into the agency and I threw away all the packets and notes on the other agencies. Well, after we stumbled across some information about the agency that we felt was very negative we made the difficult decision to switch. Of course, that meant we had to start over again in all our research...ugh!
Well, we prayed and prayed about it and we feel like the Lord has led us to go with VORF. The really great thing about it is that they are located in Ohio, about an hour and a half from where we will be moving and they have reunions every year with the families that have adopted through them so it will be great to be able to get together with them and meet new people and Alexa will be able to meet other children from Vietnam. We are so excited about that! We have a peace that this is the agency He wanted us with and that is so important in this process. Adoption is stressful enough without having to worry that your agency is unethical.
Right now in this process we have completed our homestudy with an agency in our state and are waiting for them to write it up. It went so quickly that I'm amazed. We turned our application in and got all our background checks and everything we needed and within about two weeks we were done with the whole thing (interviews and all). We have also already filed our I-600A and had our fingerprints done. It was such an easy process...we just drove to Louisville and turned it in without even having to wait in line. Now we just have to send our homestudy in to get our approval. We are praying that it doesn't take too long so we can get our dossier done and get "in line".
Overall, it looks like this is going to be at least a 15 month process so we know we have a lot of waiting ahead of us. We are leaning on God to guide us through this journey and to give us peace as we hit those inevitable bumps in the road. We know God has one particular, special little girl waiting for us and we are so looking forward to meeting her!
