Chip had his doctor’s appointment this month and after that form is mailed to Bethany, we will be completely done with the paperwork. We still need to finish the profile, but it is mostly complete. In addition, we decided to make a video for the online profile. We had already decided to put a condensed version of our profile online, but after the newsletter suggested we create a video, Chip and I decided to do a mini-tour of the house as a video for our profile too.
We also attended the Birthparent Panel Discussion on May 5, 2009. We both really enjoyed this discussion and loved hearing about the adoption process from the birthparents’ perspective. We now understand even more the importance of fulfilling our promises as adoptive parents to send pictures and letters. We can see the significance these have on a birthparent and we appreciate that importance. Also, it helped us to better understand what might happen at the hospital and how the hospital plan could be set up. It also raised some questions we would like to ask Kelly at our next meeting.
We now know that we will be attending our Placement Preparation Meeting at Bethany Christian on June 16, 2009. We were unsure of the date until last week, but luckily it is after we are back from our trip to NC…which we are very thankful about. This meeting discusses what will happen between the time we are approved (from the homestudy) and when a baby is actually placed with us. This is also one of the last meetings we will need to attend at Bethany before our homestudy is complete.
Today, May 18, 2009 we met with Kelly again. We had a very long, but very good discussion about our backgrounds, childhood, and our personalities. It was a nice discussion and I’m so glad we feel so comfortable with Kelly and sharing our stories with her. We also set up our next meeting for June 10, 2009. This meeting will take place in our home so she can look around and make sure everything is OK to place a child.
We’ve also officially sent in all of our paperwork. We need to check to make sure it’s all been received, but we are done with our part. The only things we have left are a few meetings and finishing up our profile. We’ve written a draft of both our regular profile and our online profile for Kelly to look over and give suggestions. We also need to start our video, but that can always be added later if we want. We can always put 3 pictures in and then replace one of the pictures with the video.