The home-study was an interesting process...people ask about it, and this is how I describe it: "Imagine sitting down with a counselor and talking at length about your relationship as a married couple, then talking about your relationship with your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your philosophy of parenting, and then reviewing what you learned in the adoption education courses you had to take...and then talking about everything else in between." It was a very thorough process. Basically, the adoption agency needs to find out if you would be a healthy couple. They need to know if you would be good parents for a child - and also able to handle all the other realities that adoption brings. Personally, I think all parents should be required to go through a 'home-study' before they have kids!
The home-study took about 6 months...then, once we were approved by the agency we started working on our profile. What is a profile? Well, it's a document that summarizes who you are as a couple...it is what a birth mother sees when she goes to an adoption agency and starts looking at who she would like to adopt her child. It's almost like an 'advertisement' for who you are as a couple. Putting the profile together took a few more months...you want it to be an accurate reflection of who you are as a couple...who you are as human beings...and you want it to grab someone's attention. Once we finalized the profile and dropped it off at our agency, we were so excited and relieved...we had waited so long to get to this point...but now, there was nothing else we could really do other than to hope and pray...and wait some more.
Waiting is the hardest part...it's hard to wait for something that you've set your heart on...you want it to happen right away. But that's not always the case, is it? Usually there's a reason for having to wait for a dream to be fulfilled. You will learn to appreciate it more...you will grow stronger and more patient...sometimes there are more things that you need to learn before you get to the next step. In our case, we knew that we still had some fundraising to do - so we worked on putting together our first 'adoption fundraising event' in town. It was a great success, and a great encouragement to us as a couple. It also gave us a chance to share our story with others a little bit...we began to meet more people who had adopted, and many who were adopted themselves...we were also able to encourage others with our story. This was something that I would not have imagined a year before...at that point, the pain of infertility was too great and we were just trying to move forward as a couple. But now we at least had something to dream of...something to share with others...something to move towards...we had something to wait for...
