Our trip to India with folks from church was amazing. Lots of pictures on my Facebook page. I need to write more, but not now. Dinner is in the oven...


Our first homestudy interview is Tuesday, January 6, 2009. We are ready for Kate! Dennis was thrilled to finally buy the gunsafe, which is required for the homestudy report.


Talked to Stephanie at Holt today; she works with the Ethiopia program. We had a nice talk, and she reminded us that we need to decide on a country before the homestudy is complete. Oh yeah. No problem.

We finished our Core Training on October 11, 2008. What a great experience and an amazing group of classmates! I think we finally have everything together for the home study application, and hope to mail it this week.

I talked to Holt this past week and learned that Nepal is not a good choice for us after all. We will reconsider India, and look at the China Child of Promise Program, in addition to Ethiopia and Bulgaria.

We had a great time with my family last weekend in Plano, celebrating mom's 70th birthday.

So I mailed the application over one month ago, and little progress has been made. We decided not to adopt from India because the child would be more than 2 years of age, and the wait time is long. So we then looked to Bulgaria because it also seemed to have a shorter wait time. But when we received more detailed information from Holt, the wait time was similar to India, and the children needing homes were also older than 2, more like 3-5 years of age. The reality is that all wait times are long now because of the changeability in the regulations, etc.

I did write the check to LFS for the Homestudy, but have not mailed it yet. Is it fear? Am I afraid of my dreams?

So, one week ago I mailed our adoption application to Holt International http://www.holtintl.org/. I sent it Priority Mail, so they probably received it on Monday. Perhaps I will call them today because I do not see in their materials an estimate of when they will contact us.

This photo is from almost two years ago, but we have not changed much.