Nice family pictures

Here are some of the pictures that actually came out nice this year. If you got our Christmas card then you've already seen some of them. The kids & Sean clean up nice. hehehe

 These are from the girls birthday. As you can see, they tolerate my photography but not very well :)

 Abby has always got to make us laugh!

 We went for a walk on the river trail on a really nice day. The girls did nothing but whine the entire time. Especially on the walk back to the car. oy. But I got a few nice pics. So they can complain all they want :)~

Changes are coming

Our major dilemma with adopting kids is our tiny house. Seriously tiny house. It was great when it was just Sean and I and the girls every other weekend. It's looking pretty darn small at the moment. So we are looking at some creative ways to save some space but have enough room for more kids. oh, yeah. We have a finished basement that is all the rage in the summer since it's way cooler than the rest of the house. Winter, not so much, but we have little heaters to warm it up a little. I speak from experience since I use the little heaters when I am working in the craft side of the basement in the winter. Since it's not a very large space, it doesn't take long to get warmed up. It's kinda nice. Our idea is to have the girls, since they are older and enjoy their independence, to move downstairs. AKA: hiding in their rooms for hours on end playing on various electronic devices. No adults needed or desired. My original idea was to get 2 futons that could be left as couches when the girls aren't at our house. But now I'm wondering if maybe I was thinking too big. A friend suggested a day bed with a trundle underneath. hmmmm, while this would negate the space under the bed for storage it was free up the entire wall in the basement for storage. I'm liking this idea. However, another friend of mine was giving away a futon that was in nice shape so I grabbed it. crap, now what am I going to do with it. decisions, decisions. I still have to figure out how to store the couch & chair we have, since I know we are planning on getting a larger house when we move across the country and we will eventually need it. Or we could just buy a new one when we get where we are going. Like I said, decisions.....
As for our classes Sean and I are headed to one this weekend. 2 for me, 1 for him. The sweet part is that we have them all scheduled and we will be done with the classes on March 2!!! I'm so excited. I'm hoping that we can get everything approved and arranged so that we can go for visits during Sean's spring break. I guess if that is the way it's supposed to happen Heavenly Father will make it happen. We are doing our part, He will do the rest :)

Moving right along

Sean and I have filled out a large stack of paperwork. Yikes! I think I mentioned before that they know you're serious when you are willing to subject yourself to the mound of paperwork that needs filled out. anyway. I was able to go to one of the training meetings on Saturday. Interesting and enlightening. I was able to get another perspective on what happens when kids are removed from their homes and put into foster care. I am hoping that we will be able to help these kids get back on track and feel safe in our home. Sean is going with me this weekend to the meeting. So I will have 2 classes done and he will have 1. Can't wait until we have them ALL done. it will take us until mid-March to get everything done with classes, but it will be worth it. I'm so excited to have a large family :) Some may say I'm crazy, but hey, I would probably agree! 

Next Step

We made it to the orientation meeting last night. We also got the last of our background checks back in the mail. The meeting was nice, it also got us pretty excited. We were given a gigando stack of paperwork to fill out, but we can do that. We got the hard part completed, the background checks. We are excited to move on. The women at the meeting from the agency said that since we have completed the process before we may be able to move a little quicker through the process. We will still have to complete the required number of training hours, but we may be able to contact other agencies earlier. She wasn't sure, and I'm not holding my breath, but it would be cool to let the other agencies know that we are interested in a specific group of boys. So I will be going to an all day class on Saturday. Oh, yeah, fun :) There was another women at the meeting, her and her husband are planning on adopting out of foster care as well. She had a friend complete the training classes and the friend said that the classes were very beneficial and helped her to deal with situations that came up after she had adopted her son. It's good to know that we won't be doing these classes for nothing. I'm all for tools to help these kids! Another nice thing we learned is that we will probably get "child support" for them. Whew. While we really want to have these kids and know we are supposed to be doing this at this time, we were a little concerned about how we were going to make it work, money-wise, since Sean is still in school. Heavenly Father will make it possible. So, we are excited to move forward.

4 out of 6

For background checks there are 6 that have to be completed in this state. One of which is the FBI. Sean and I have 4 out of the 6 we need back already. The FBI ones are supposed to take up to 6 weeks. We got ours back in 1. Hopefully we will have the two remaining clearances by the time we go to the introduction meeting next Wednesday. Things are moving along. 

Our Journey has begun

I've been trying to post pictures from Christmas and also our nice family pictures from our Christmas card but this stupid blogger won't let me upload pictures from home. So, once I get that figured out, I'll post some pictures. But I wanted to write a little about what Sean and I have started. I think we are crazy :) About 2 months ago I was stalking The R house blog. (like always:) It's an awesome blog about open adoption and this family that has 3 little boys that are all adopted. So cute. anyway. They have something called "Matching Mondays." She had posted about a sibling group of 3 that were out west and they were in foster care. I couldn't get those little faces out of my mind. So I talked to Sean about it. I can't remember if I talked to anyone about it but about 3 years ago we started on a journey for adoption, wanting a baby, but felt we hadn't gotten the support or help we needed to get a child. So we dropped our agency and made lots of plans for vacations we were going to take, all over the world. The doctors still have no idea why we can't have biological children, so they can't fix it, so we have given up in that area as well. But, back to my point. I couldn't get these kids out of my mind. Sean was still in the "having fun on vacation" stage. Can't say as I blame him :) I talked to a friend of mine from church, Amy, about wanting more kids. I have felt for a while that our house is empty and it needs to be filled up. So I had been doing a little research on my own. Then another friend, Chelsea, called me. She used to be a social worker and now works with an adoption agency that helps families in the US adopt children from overseas. She had said that she really wanted to talk to me about it, but had been shot down too many times before by friends that she didn't want to step over that boundary. Amy told her to talk to me. So anyway. After Chelsea talked to me about international adoption Sean and I talked again about adopting kids.  We decided that maybe this was Heavenly Fathers way of telling us that yes, our house was empty and we needed to fill it up. We did research and I talked to Chelsea about international adoption and the cost really freaked us out. Then I talked to another friend and she said that money should never be an issue when it came to something this important. "Money can be a hurdle, not a mountain in your way." hmm. Well after looking, thinking, and discussing (Sean is in school) we decided that maybe be should look at domestic adoption. There are over 400,000 kids in foster care in the US alone. Sean and I have decided that we need to shrink that number by a few. Before Christmas we sent in our background checks to the appropriate departments and last Wednesday we got fingerprinted. We've already got 3 of the 6 background checks back. Crazy! And we have called the adoption agency that we will be working with and adopting kids from foster care is basically FREE!!! We will have to travel to meet and pick up the kids, but it's nothing compared to the expense we would have had to incur to adopt internationally. Maybe when we are both working at real jobs we will look internationally but for now, we'll hang out in the US. We've already been looking at kids and have a few favorites. We know that we are going to adopt a sibling group, we just haven't decided on how many for sure yet. But the process has started and we are looking forward to having a house full of fun, laughter and love. Can't wait.