We figure 6 to 9 months...

So about 8 to 10 weeks ago Heath says to me "Andrea, I've been thinking about something that I think God wants us to do. I've been thinking and praying about this for about 6 months or so. I want us to think about becoming adoptive parents." So I looked at Heath, coughed (to remind him that I was still sick with pneumonia), and essentially said "I don't think God wants me to do that." He looked confused and mildly annoyed with the coughing (which had been going on for months by the way) and said "Well, you can think about it for awhile." I thought this was a good response- if I'm just going to think about it that means the ball is in my court, and my plan was to throw the ball out of the gym and never go look for it.
That worked for about 6 weeks. And then I woke up one night at about 3 am and realized something that made me think I might be pregnant (I'm not, but I had a real legitemate scare). I confirmed by 2 o'clock the next day that I was in fact not pregnant. But in the roughly 11 hours that I didn't know I considered something that I had not considered for a solid 4 years. And that was the possibility that maybe, just maybe, our family wasn't done. That was all it took really. Just something to make me seriously consider it. By 8 that night I had found the dept of Child and Family services and reviewed some of the qualifications we had to have.
So, we are going to adopt some children. We've filled out a small truck load of paper work and turned it in to the right people. We have to wait for our back ground checks to go through before we can begin training (the last 6 years of parenting don't count). Training takes about 6 weeks followed by home studies (because our house might not be safe- even for the children we already have!!) and then they'll try to match us with some kids who need happy homes.
We are not trying to adopt babies. We like babies but infants have an easier time finding parents then older children. We also don't think we have the parenting skills yet for children over the age of 6 or 7. Also, siblings are less likely to find a home where they can all be together then just 1 child alone so we want to adopt a sibling group. Heath thinks 2 but I'm pretty sure 3 is the magic number (I'm a real all or nothing kind of girl- from "NO" to "at least 3"). So we could get a baby if it comes with a couple of older sisters- we're pretty good at parenting girls so far, I think we could handle up to 1 boy if he was pretty small to start with (again, Heath and I are not in total agreement on this- he doesn't seem to think that we should have a boy- I'm not worried though, things usually go my way when it comes time ;))
Thats the story so far. We could have more kids by christmas. It could be longer. We don't really know exactly. We know it's kind of crazy. Please don't warn us how hard this could be. We know adopting older children through the state out of foster care isn't going to be simple. But here is something we do know: God loves abandonded , parentless children and wants them to be loved by a momma and daddy. We can, and strangly, already do love them.

Thanks to computer applications in art I have made a photo of our new family. Sort of...;0)


aaaa