We Have a Psychologist & Let the Fundraising Begin!

We are continuing to make progress! Our criminal checks from Pennsylvania and Nebraska are in and all but one of our reference questionnaires! That means we will be able to start our home study interviews very very soon!!

On the dossier front we are making very nice progress as well! We received our certified copies of our marriage lisence, one of our church reference letters, our "Guardian's Letter of Acceptance" (if anything were to happen to us the guardian's of our children have to say that they would accept our adopted child and are in support of the adoption), and Jonathan's boss' reference letter! Most importantly...we found a Psychologist! And awesomely enough we got an appointment for Monday already! Even more favor! Things are definitely coming together!

So I've been saying that I'm going to have a fundraiser and I'd post some pictures...here it is...

I'm making and selling infinity scarves and my sweet friend, Courtney, is knitting scarves as well. All scarves are $20 and all proceeds go towards our adoption fees. I can make scarves out of almost any fabric (as long as its wide and long enough) so the options are endless. If you don't see one you like I can always do something to fit you better. These are the infinity scarves I'm making:



Here are the patterns up close and what it looks like on...

These are the knitted scarves:

Please get in touch with me if you would like any or have any questions! Of course if you would simply like to donate money at anytime we would be so blessed and honored by your support! Thanks again for all your prayer and support!

We Have a Social Worker!

It has been another successful week! First and most importantly, we received our Home Study invoice...I've never been so excited to receive a bill before! LOL! Basically our invoice is prepayment for our home study interviews and the home study report that will be part of our dossier to the Philippines. With the invoice we found out who our social worker is and we are so excited that it is the same social worker who taught our classes last weekend! She has such an amazing heart and we are thrilled to go through this journey with her by our side. She just went to the Philippines in October as part of an ambassador program for our agency. They become ambassadors for older children that need forever families. Now she is working to adopt two of those children herself!

We still haven't found a psychologist that can perform both of the evaluations we need BUT in the process of looking, we found out that our health insurance will cover all the time we need with an in-network psychologist and we only have to pay a $30 copay! This is a major answer to prayer as we were expecting to have to pay it out-of-pocket which is very expensive.

I was also able to get a phone number for someone at our sheriff's office to help us get our police clearance letter. A dad at our the boys' preschool is a sheriff, so he gave us the phone number. The Captain that I got a hold of is being so helpful and is ensuring the day we come into the office to get it that either he or one of his Lieutenants will be there and ready to assist us. We talked on the phone for about 5 minutes just "chatting". Yet another example of the favor that God has given us in this process!!

Our dossier is coming along and references and other documents are slowly starting to trickle in! We are already learning so much from this journey...every step requires faith and complete trust in God! I hope by next week to have some pictures of what I'm making for a fundraiser...I'm excited to see what everyone thinks. Thanks so much for your prayer and support!

In Him,
Alaina

Making Progress

We have had a very successful past few days! We had a couple of mini-miracles that I can't really give details about but have been major wins for us and have just continued to show us God's favor and grace!

We have completed the last of our current paperwork for our home study!! We also learned that all of our background checks have come in except for Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and our criminal checks for Nebraska (with FBI fingerprinting). Yesterday and today we took a "Parents in Process" class at our agency's local branch office that had to be completed before we can start the next steps. They were great classes that helped us to start preparing our hearts and minds for what is ahead of us and becoming a multi-cultural family. It was also an awesome opportunity to meet with a local social worker and 5 other families in the process. We are excited to continue building those relationships in the future as we met a lot of really great people. Lastly, we are still waiting for 3 of our 4 references to complete their questionnaires and then we can start our home study interviews!! It's very exciting! 

We are making progress on our dossier as well. We have ordered extra copies of our birth certificates and marriage certificate (we need 2 or 3 certified copies of each!) We put out requests to our current church and our past church in Ohio for our pastoral references and to our bosses for our employer references.

We've also been trying to track down a psychologist or psychiatrist that can complete our psychological evaluations. We've had multiple references from our church but so far none of them do both of the tests we need to have completed. Please keep in your prayers that we will not just find one but the right one! We may have to spend quite a bit of time on this so we are believing it will be another person that God puts in our path for a reason.

Hopefully my next update will be that we have a social worker assigned and are starting our interviews! I have a fundraiser coming up that I'll share too once I get some made and can show some pictures. Thanks for all the prayers and support!