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.