ADOPTION UPDATES - WE'RE MOVING FORWARD:

We had our first homestudy appointment yesterday. So far, so good. Our social worker spent about two hours at our house asking us questions related to our motivation for adopting. She also briefly toured of our house. And to think, we spent all weekend getting our house ready for her first visit. We knew that it was probably going to be like this .. but having a social worker come to your home is definitely motivation to get the things that we've wanted to get done for years. She was glad that she was the source of our motivation, but she insisted that we don't need to worry about having our house clean for her next visits.

We have two more visits next week, then hopefully our social worker can get our homestudy written up quickly. As soon as we submit a draft of our homestudy to our agency, we are officially on the waiting list for a referral! How exciting!

IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR OUR SON??

Adlai LOVES to imitate his sister. I think that it's hillarious, but Case isn't so thrilled. I'm supposed to be buying a Rambo outfit for him as I write this.

It is so fun to watch Ella and Adlai play together. They certainly are best buddies! Even with Ella's strong influence, it has been fun to see how differently God created girls and boys. Adlai often carries around his baby (like his sister) but he also insists on carrying his John Deere tractor too.

The other day I found Adlai playing in the yard with his toy dinosaurs. He was acting out that these toy dinosaurs were fighting and eating eachother up. I never taught him how to play like that. He's all boy!

Case's Genes are the Dominant Genes in this family:

This is a picture of Case (no it's not Adlai) when he was about 1 year old.

Ella posing for the Camera:

ADOPTION UPDATES

We have completed the overwhelming process of collecting all of the necessary paperwork to start our homestudy. The homestudy is the process where a social worker visits our home (the state of Colorado requires three separate visits), examines our home and interviews us. He/she then writes up a long report that is submitted to our agency and to the orphanage in Taiwan. Hopefully we will be able to get our homestudy started this week.

We have been fingerprinted, have had background checks run on us, we've provided our complete financial history, we have completed detailed questionairres about our life history (thankfully the state of Colorado allows us to do this in place of writing and autobiography), we've had physicals performed for our whole family, we've had to go through training, we've had to provide copies of every significant document we have (birth certificates, passports, marriage liscense, tax returns, etc.), we've provided proof of health insurance for our adopted child & proof of employment, we've written a dear birthmother letter (which the birthmother in Taiwan may see), and we have put together a scrapbook of our family. We've already spent thousands of dollars and we're not even close to being finished (the entire adoption will cost us about $25,000). Sometimes the whole process is so overwhelming. I've struggled with not growing bitter over all that is required of us. But, we are confident that this is where God is leading us, so I'm willing to coninue providing what is required.

As soon as we get a draft of our homestudy into our agency we will officially be on the waiting list for our child. How exciting!! At that point we expect the wait for a referral to be close to 12 months.

P.S. If anyone has any unique fundraising ideas for our adoption let me know. We won't have to pay most of the money until after we get a referral, so we have a little while to raise some money.

MEMORIAL DAY IN TEXAS

We spent the past week in Texas with our friend Fondly and her son Erik. She has a great slideshow of our trip on her blog. Check it out at:

www.wucooper.blogspot.com