Adoption 101

I have had several people tell me that I need to update my blog. And I know! It's been way too long since I have given the update on what's been going on in our home. Well, we are adopting!!!! Yay! Most of you probably already knew that, but for those who didn't, Surprise! Lol! We are actually almost done with the process. :) Let me brake it down for ya quickly, since most people are interested on how it is done. We are going through LDS Family Services, which has been AMAZING so far by the way. We initially went in for the orientation back in January to get more info even before our third round of invitro. We felt really good about it then, but still had 2 frozen embryos that needed to be used, and we needed to get that done before we were fully 100% invested in adoption. After we lost the baby in March, we gave it a couple months before the next step, which was getting a reference letter from our Bishop. Well, Brad is the Bishop of our ward now, so we had to get it from our stake president. Once they got that, our caseworker called us in and talked to Brad and I for an hour. Pretty much just getting to know us, and making sure we were mentally stable. Haha! After we met with her we paid our deposit and started phase 1 of the paperwork. Phase 1 included getting medical releases from Brad's, Kassi's, and my doctors, getting a background check, getting Brad's work to fill out paperwork, copies of our drivers licences and social security cards, (we had both lost our social security cards, so we had to go get copies of that,) birth certificates, (Brad had lost his,) marriage license, (yes, we had lost that, too,) and a fertility evaluation from my OB. We had to get 5 reference letters, fill out personal info about us, marriage info, info about Kassi, Brad's employment info, and church info(callings, etc.) Phase 2 was a doozy. Holy cow. They delve SO deep into your personal life. You have to give them financial documents, tax returns, etc, and insurance info. Then they ask you info about your parents. Their age, their address, their education, their occupation, their physical description, their hobbies/interests, and then you have to give all that info for every single one of your siblings. Continuing on you then have to do a matching sheet. For each of us. That includes the same thing that we just did for our family members, just a little more detailed. Oh, and then we needed to do one for Kassi. Then came the questionnaire. This was insane. There were 12 topics, and each topic had up to 6 questions each. These weren't yes or no questions. These were detailed essay questions, and it felt like it took FOREVER to answer them. But we did it! And I'm SO relieved. After finishing phase 2, we had 10 hours of classes we needed to take. So a couple weeks ago, Brad and I went on a Friday night and all day Saturday to the classes. They were so great! We learned a ton! Now we are in phase 3. That consists of your preferences, (age and race, and we will take any race in case you were wondering.) :) Then it asks you about birth conditions. I don't need to bore you with that, but it goes into detail about lots of diseases, deformities, physical and mental retardation, etc. There are 20 getting to know you questions, and this phase is where we write our birth parent letter, and do our profile. Also contact info, and where we upload a ton of pictures. There are a couple other things, but that's pretty much it. We are hoping to have our profile up in a couple weeks! We just need to write it and get our home study done. Hopefully I can post again before then. Things have just been so busy between getting all this done, church stuff, babysitting, and family. I hope you found this post very informative. LOL! Sorry it was a little boring. I will go into more personal experiences next time!