Picnic

Yesterday we attended A Red Thread Adoption annual picnic. At first I was bit apprehensive in going because I thought that seeing all these families with the kids would make me a bit anxious for us to get ours...NO WAY...it made us both inspired. Inspired to see how many families Leah has been able to directly impact; a one person show impacting over 100 individual families. She knows all their names and all their stories...nothing short of AMAZING! Inspired to see how happy these families are and how diverse the domestic and international adoptions have become. Children were walking up to us introducing themselves and telling us they spoke Russian or are from China and/or that they are adopted. I loved how open it was; when my Mom and I talked about my Gram Holt's adoption, my mom said it was a topic not discussed outside the home and her mom did not tell her until her wedding day. Wow times have changed!! These kids are empowered at such a young age, SO awesome!! Inspired that although we have chosen to adopt before having bio children almost all of these families did not have this choice and they chose to move past their sadness, disappointment, frustration and provide a home to a child that did not have one. And inspired to button up our last pieces of our dossier and get this party bus moving along.

We went to our first psych eval meeting; we have four more to go. With this time frame we are thinking we will have everything to Colombia by mid-October. I am sending in our finger prints this week to the FBI. Then we need to make an appointment to have some tests done by our Doctor and get a letter of economic capacity from Matt's employer. That's it!!! It seems like it has been a lot of paperwork but we started this journey in April and we are only in August!

I began reading more into what defines "waiting children"; this is a phrase used typically for children with some form of special needs. We knew early on that we wanted to have healthy children as with Damien and Devon (Matt's godsons) being terminable with their Muscular Dystrophy we did not want to add to this. I found out that a sibling group of 3 and/or children over 8 years old are considered "waiting" in Colombia...what to do?!?!? Our dear friend Tom said to us when we began this journey, "what if they call you with a referral and say we have two but there are three other siblings who are being separated...you guys would never say no, Casey may but Matt won't..." What path are we going to take? :) Sean and I always said we wanted our kids to have A LOT of cousins like we did growing up (17 first cousins)!