So far so good!

So it was one week ago today that we officially started the "waiting" process. Some say this is the hardest part of the adoption process. I can see how it could become that way depending on your situation. Like for countries like China where it takes at least 5 years of waiting. For us this has been the most relaxing week of this process.

3 and a half months of worrying and running places to get paperwork completed and worrying again about whether we filled that piece of paperwork out the way it needed to be filled out are now behind us. No more worrying about whether or not the State or the FBI or a social worker will deny us our request. (Ok I still have to worry a little about The Department of Homeland Security, but I'm pretty sure they will let an infant into the country.)

Waiting is not always a bad thing. We can try to prepare ourselves for the change that will happen to our family. We can physically prepare our home and a nursery for a baby. (Which by the way we are starting on the nursery today!) We can start buying all the things we will need. We can do our best to prepare ourselves emotionally for an adopted child to enter our home. We can read books and come up with plans. Some transitions are perfect and easy for families to make with an adopted child but some are not easy (infants or older children). We have to be prepared for a difficult transition. Since this will be our first child, I am sure there will be a time of transition regardless of whether our baby bonds or attaches to us instantly. We have to come up with our family plan of how the first few weeks and months with our baby will go as far as visitors and schedules and such. We have to form a secure bond with our child before we introduce others into his/her circle and we don't know how long that will take. We hope it happens quickly but we have to prepare for the possibility that it could take months or even years.

So I am glad for this little break in the action. We need time to prepare. As soon as we made the decision to adopt we had a lot of things we needed to get done and to get them done as fast as possible. Now we wait. We have a few short months to prepare and then we will be very busy again and anxious for court and then for travel. So it is nice to have some time to just let our racing and aching hearts relax. I am looking forward to getting my referral but we need a little time to emotionally, physically, mentally, AND financially prepare for that day to come! As soon as the holiday's are over - I will be ready :)

Today we received our updated wait list numbers. The normal schedule is at the beginning of every month. Since they gave us our last numbers on October 30th (the day we were wait listed) I did not expect any change. There was not a big change in the numbers but any change was enough to make my day!

Notice that I was able to remove 2 links from our chains!

Each one of these links represents an orphaned child and a family hoping and waiting! In one weeks time I was able to remove one link from the boy list and one link from the girl list. Two more forever families!!!

Our official November wait list numbers are:

Girl - 42 (was 43)

Boy - 20 (was 21)

Siblings - 14 (stayed at 14)

So now we wait out this month and come the beginning of December we will get new numbers and hopefully there will be lots of activity to report!