Home Study Almost Finished

I'm starting to get excited here. Daryl came out today with our "completed" home study for us to review. Now that we have approved it, he is taking to to his editors. While they have it, he will be putting our profile together with our picture and basic info. Then, when he gets that done and the home study comes back, we will become certified!!! Our profile will go into the system and we'll be ready to accept kids into our home.

In our home study, we are stating that we are specifically looking for one to two girls ages 0-5. I asked Daryl about the age, because in my mind I was thinking more like 6 and under. But he really doesn't want to disrupt the birth order for even our six year old. I thought that was interesting. And once again, I am so grateful that the people at Koinonia are just as, if not more, concerned about making sure that our family comes through this process intact as they are about finding good homes for foster kids. I really appreciate their commitment to whole families.

I think I mentioned this before, but if I haven't, I'll take the time to explain it a little more. There are two ways to work within the foster care system when you want to adopt. One is called concurrent placement and the other I can't remember the term for. But it is adopting kids whose parents have already lost their rights to them. So they are "adoptable". Concurrent placement, on the other hand, means that the kids are still in the process of either being restored to their parents, or having parental rights terminated. So we could get someone into our home, but then mom and dad get their act together and the kids go back home. We had a choice of whether or not we wanted to do concurrent placement, or only look at kids who are adoptable. We chose to be open to concurrent placement, because we don't know exactly how God wants to use us in this process. And if he wants us to minister to some kids for a short time and then send them back home, we want to be available. So, that being said, there is a good possibility that we will get one or two kids who may or may not become a permanent part of our family.

In a couple weeks we are going to attend a picnic with social workers from the area and also kids that are currently adoptable. There are two reasons for us to go to this. The first is obvious. We will have an opportunity to meet some kids so that if any stand out to us we can pursue the possibility of adopting them. The second is so that the local social workers get a chance to meet us and get to know us a little. So it advertises us a little. Regarding the first reason for going, Matthew said that the only problem about going and seeing all these kids is that he'll want to say, "We'll take them all!" I love his heart.