The process begins!

Of course, as soon as I got the "OK" I had waited on so long, I had our preliminary application sent off immediately, June 24th 2008. We go our pre-approval and sent off our formal application on August 4th. We started answering all of our millions of questions, which Tommy was not a fan of, doing our drug screenings, taking the boys to do their physicals and all of the other fun stuff. On August 13th, we scheduled our psych evaluation, and that was a whole lot of fun! We had to do a 1 hour evaluation and then answer hundreds of more questions on paper. Tommy was really about ready to scream by then. On August 21st, we were told we were not crazy and that we could proceed with our interviews and homestudy. We did all of our interviews, online trainings, a homestudy paperwork, and then on Tuesday September 8th we had our home visit and were officially approved. Whoo Hoo! Now the real fun begins. We mailed the dreaded I-800A off to get approved to bring an orphan into the United States on Sept. 15th. Well, 1 week later, to my surprise, I got it back in the mail. I forgot to put our birth certificates in there! I could have smacked myself. I had to send that back off, and now we wait to get our appointments to be fingerprinted. That is where we are at now and this was definately the short version. Amy once had a title "adoption is not for sissies" and boy was she right. Please pray that this next phase moves quickly and we can get our Dossier to China by the end of October. Things are starting to look a little promising on the China side. They did nine days of referrals last month, which is double the amount they have been doing.

The Beginning

Well, where do I start? This journey began about 4 years ago, when I had this un-explainable desire for a little girl, and because we cannot have anymore children, I knew that I wanted to adopt. Not only did I want to adopt, but I knew I wanted to adopt from China. Tommy was definately not at the place I was at. He was very adamant that it was not going to happen now or in the future. My desire continued to grow and grow until it totally consumed me. I prayed and prayed to understand all of this. Tommy continued to say "no" and my heart continued to break more and more. I thought ok, I will start to pray for God to take all of this away, the hurt, the desire, and every other emotion I had gone through with this. Well, guess what? That didn't happen either. The more I prayed the more I wanted to adopt. I thought this is so cruel, because Tommy was still no where close to feeling like I did. I then tried to take matters into my own hands by really putting the pressure on him and resorting to some not very nice tactics. But, then my mother said something to me that made me realize I had to stop. She said, "you cannot change his heart, only God can, and you do not want to do this if it is not God's will". So it was then that I just continued to pray and pray and pray some more that his will be done in our lives and turned my faith over to God. It was very hard, and I have never gone through anything like that in my whole life. I felt like my heart would never heal, because I already loved a child that I didn't even know if I would ever have. Well, little did I know, but God was busy at work on Tommy. We started going to FBC Smyrna about 2 years ago, and at that time our pastor, Pat Hood and his wife Amy, were waiting on their daughter, Jadyn from China. I truly believe, that God put us there and used them and their journey to change our lives and Tommy's heart. In May of this year, Tommy told me that he was ready, and felt that adopting is what he thought we should do and that God had revealed this to him over the last year. I absolutely could not believe it. Praise God! I thank him everyday for his perfect timing, and he has taught me so many things over the last 4 years (especially patience, which I know to never pray for). I know that he has a very special little girl picked out for us, and we had to wait until it was time to start "Our Journey to Madie". Thanks for going along and praying us through every step of the way.