Our New Look!

We hope you like our new design! We saw it on "Final Sense" and fell in love with it! How precious is this beautiful child?! We are still trying to make all our fun little elements fit onto this new template.

On the other hand, I want to bring you up to date on our new "developments!" We are still plugging away on paper work and other specifics. However, we did receive our notices in the mail last week to go for our fingerprinting in Naperville (@ the Immigration Office) this week! So we're making a nice little trip out of it and will spend the night with my brother and sister-n-law in Bourbonnais! We're excited about seeing our 4 year old niece (Kalyne) and 4 month old nephew (Caleb) again!

As we mentioned before, Immigration Services are behind by 7 months, but we did get our request for fingerprints rather quickly! Wouldn't it be nice if their moving a little quicker?!

A positive twist is that we are feeling pretty good about everything despite the long time frame. We had such a great morning at church with our church family asking us how things are going and giving us a plethora of encouragement! Thank you so much! You can't imagine how your comments make such a difference in our attitudes towards the situation. Thank you also for all your prayers. They are making a difference!

God Bless!

Latest Update!

Since our last update, we have had several more developments in our "adoption saga." To begin with, we want to thank all of our friends and family who are supporting and encouraging us. We feel so blessed! God has also provided us with new friends, whom we've had the privilege of getting to together with, who are traveling down a journey similar to our own! We have also had contact with other couples adopting internationally, which has also been extremely helpful! God is good!

As far as our updates go, we are still very pleased with our social worker and adoption agency. Our home study meetings are continuing and will probably be completed sometime in April. We are thankful for our home study agency Lutheran Social Services in that they are providing us with a very thorough training/counseling/supportive experience.

Our agency has moved us along the process as fast as possible, but I do feel we have hit a wall. We have turned our CIS document (Orphan Petition) into Immigration Services, which is great! Usually this document takes about 3-4 months to process. However, Immigration Services is behind by 7 months and unless they speed up, we won't be able turn our dossier into Poland until September. This part isn't so great. We were hoping to have our dossier in by June so as you can tell, this is much later then we were originally expecting. Our dossier needs to be turned into the country before our wait time begins for a child referral. Our referral time can take anywhere from 4-12 months.

If it really does take Immigration 7 months, then our time frame now (best scenario) is as follows:
March (08)-Turn in CIS document
September (08)-Receive CIS approval and turn in dossier
January (09)-Receive child referral
February (09)-Travel to Poland

It will undoubtedly go faster if our document is processed faster!

Please continue to keep us in your prayers and thank you for your continued support! We love you all!

The First Waiting Game

Not much has happened in the past several weeks, but we did send in our 38 page agreement a week ago. We are waiting to here back from agency about what our next step will be. I'm hoping it will be to send in our CIS document (Citizens Immigration Services) and begin work on our Dossier (our papers that will go over to Poland). We are itching to get the CIS turned in because it can take 3 months or more to process. In other words our adoption is pretty much on hold until that document gets returned to us!

We have started our home study and are excited that we are at least doing something substantial as far as getting this adoption underway. We really like our social worker and are currently working on some more adoption training which we find to be very beneficial.

We cherish each one of your prayers and praise God everyday for his never ending love and support. God's Blessings!

Could this be our future child?!

Isn't he adorable? James found this on "YouTube." This is a video of a 4 year old polish boy playing the drums and he's good! His name is Igor Falecki. When the clip is over, you can choose from 15 other clips of him playing the drums. Unbelievable! You'll need to pause the music at the bottom of this page in order to hear it.

The Process Has Begun!

The process has finally begun! We received our acceptance letter in the mail today along with a 38 page agreement (Yikes!) from our new adoption agency! We are really excited about how fast things are finally going. It took our last adoption agency 1 month to process our application and get everything sent out to us. It took this agency a week! We are pleased with the personal service SMIA (Saint Mary's International Adoptions) has given us and are really looking forward to working with them. They have such a good relationship with Poland and we are looking forward to watching this process unfold.

We have also had our first home study done and are expecting another visit soon. We really like our social worker and feel she is a God send. She is truly wanting to help us and our adoptive child (ren) get ready for this gigantic leap of faith. We really appreciate that about her. Our fears have subsided some and we hope to have the home study completed in a few weeks!

Thanks again for your continued prayers, encouragement, and support. We feel blessed to have family and friends as dedicated as you!

God's Blessings to you all and we will keep you updated as things move along!