Home study visits....DONE!

Ok, our social worker, Tiffany just left our house and so we have officially completed the home study portion of our adoption journey. We had to give her numerous documents, as well as meet with her 4 times! Our first visit was with just Jaime and myself, and we talked about our reasons for wanting to adopt, and gave her a tour of our home and showed her the room our 3rd daughter would have, etc. We then met with her individually and went over our autobiography more in detail (this was to be completed before the first home study even took place and it was 13 pages long-yikes!). Then today's visit was so she could meet our girls and interact with them and see us all interact as a family! We went over some stuff with her first, giving her all of the paperwork needed for the home study to be completed and then it was her time to 'play' with Abby to get to know her better. I asked Abby what she wanted to do with Tiffany (ie; play outside, upstairs, do a craft, etc.), and Abby chose a craft and I thought 'Great choice, this should go well'....until, I heard Abby tell Tiffany what she wanted to make........a TOY GUN! Are you kidding me, seriously, did she just say that???? And yes, she did, so Abby went to work on her toy gun (or really it ended up being more like a sling shot) but still, I couldn't believe it! Of all things she wanted to do...I mean Abby loves to draw, make books, hats, play with beads and make bracelets but today of all days when our social worker is here she wants to make a toy gun!! Aaaahhhhh! Oh well, I just need to move past it and hope all will still be ok! Other than that, I feel like the whole process went very smoothly.
The next step is for Tiffany, our social worker, to put together our home study and send it to Great Wall to be looked over (and she'll send us a copy too). She hopes to have that done early next week before Thanksgiving so that was good news to hear! Then after Great Wall looks over it, which will take 1 to 2 weeks, it's sent back to Tiffany for her to get notarized and she'll make 5 copies in which we get 4 of them and Great Wall gets 1. We then continue getting our other documents together for the dossier (immigration forms, doctor's letters, fingerprints, etc.). We hope to have this all completed in the next few months but we know that some of it is out of our hands on the time issues on some of these forms.
Thanks to all of you for your prayers and support during this exciting (and long) journey! We will keep you all updated!!

We're moving right along...

Well, tomorrow, Tuesday, November 4th is our first home study visit by our social worker. We have to have 4 visits in all and hope to have them completed in the next few weeks. I'll keep you all posted on how they all go...please pray all goes smoothly. We are just moving right along with the adoption process and getting all our stuff together from ordering copies of birth certificates and our marriage license, to making appointments with our doctors for physicals, to going to our local police station so they can type a letter saying we have no criminal record, and the list goes on and on. Jaime and I both just completed a 13 page autobiography to be given to our social worker tomorrow but still there's so much to be done.
Two weeks ago after we were offically accepted into the Great Wall Adoption program we decided it was time to tell our oldest daughter, Abby, what we were doing and can I just say she is just as excited as Jaime and I. In fact when she asked us when we'd be getting her little sister from China she started crying when we told her it may be 2 to 3 years (when she's 8 or 9-to really help her comprehend the time frame). She said she didn't want to wait that long and wanted her sister sooner...she is such a sweet girl. She is already such an awesome big sister to Avery so we know she'll be even that much better of a big sister to this new little one! She has been telling everyone about her new little sister and even drew a picture of what she might look like-such the proud big sister!!