January Update

Today was our monthly call with our case worker, Beth. She didn't have much for updates except for the fact that our agency has already matched 12 Colombian children with families... this month! So it's good to hear that things are moving along and it gives me hope that we will hear something soon.

In regards to the travel, Beth told us that the average stay in-country has been right around 4 weeks. We will travel to Medellin on a Saturday, receive our child on Monday and meet with a social worker on Friday. After that, only one parent is required to stay in Colombia with the child for the remainder of the legal process. So while we were initially hoping that all 3 of us could stay in Colombia the whole time, we are now leaning towards Josh and Joey leaving after a week or 10 days. Besides the fact that I will miss my boys (and dog) terribly, I do feel comfortable staying there by myself. The only thing I am a little nervous about is the language barrier so I am going to work on learning as much Spanish as possible before we travel... it's amazing how quickly you forget it when you don't use it.

Until next time...

Where did 2009 go?

It's crazy to think that it's been almost a year since we "officially" started the adoption process for our second child. Where does the time go? When we first started thinking about another adoption, the decisions did not come easily... should we look at domestic or another international adoption? We ultimately decided on international but then needed to choose a country. We always felt drawn to Colombia but the wait was 3 + years... could we handle being in-process for that long? And what about the required 3-6 weeks we would need to be in-country? How would we manage that with Joey... and taking time off from our jobs... and the expenses that go along with an extended in-country stay? We had so many decisions to make and I have to say, the decisions are so much harder the second time around. But we thought about it alot and had many, many discussions... and prayed for guidance and we just knew that Colombia was where we needed to go. And now it seems that everything is starting to fall into place. First we were given the opportunity to adopt from a private orphanage which will give us a shorter wait time than adopting from the government program and of all of the places our dossier could go, it ended up in Medellin, which is the region with the shortest average in-country stay. So now we begin a new year with much anticipation of the joys another child will bring to our family...