Just Beginning

Scott and I are still in "the early stages", but are hoping to complete our dossier soon .

We have had our home studies, have tracked down all our marriage and birth certificate information, and our right now waiting for our invitation to go get fingerprinted. Every step brings us just a little bit closer! We know the wait will be long even after we get our dossier completed and get officially "logged in", but each little thing we get completed makes it more real. We are currently having our deck enlarged and it was a great thing when doing the planning to talk about making sure we had a secure gate for the dog and THE BABY!!!!

OR MAYBE BABIES!!!!

Yes, that's right! I did just say babies. Scott and I have put in a request for twins. That is not a guarantee that we'll get them however. What we have been told is that when it is our time to be matched if there are twins available then we can be matched to them. If there are not any twins at that point the CCAA (the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs) will not delay the match to try to set us up with twins. In order to increase our chances we have asked them to expand the age range that we are eligible for. Because of our ages we are officially only eligible to adopt 0-12 months. They do take special requests sometimes if the social worker also agrees. Our social worker did put our request in our home study asking to expand the age range to 18 months. Our thought is what if there is a set of twins that are 14mths old or 16 mnths that have been overlooked? Why not match them to us!

So that is where we are in the process. We are working through the last steps of completing our dossier. All the people with CCAI (Chinese Children Adoption International) the agency we are going with have been a great help. One of the best things was how they introduced us to the "First Friday's." For those of you who haven't yet heard us talk about them the First Friday's are when families who have been through the process and families who are mid-process get together for support and sharing of information. We haven't been able to attend every month due to my (Jennifer's) work schedule, but it's great when we get to go. Thanks to all of you who have been there! It's meant alot to us that you allowed us to come when we were still making up our minds about doing it!

That's enough rambling for one day. I just wanted to get our blog started- like I've said, it makes me feel like we are a little bit closer with every small thing we do in our journey to China!