I thought it might be time for a little update. 🙂
Many of you know that we completed our home study this week. Actually – it’s not done, but we are done with everything we have to do for it. Now it’s all in the hands of our amazing social workers who say they will be done writing it in late January to early February. However, our goal was to be done with everything we had to do before Christmas, so mission accomplished.
What did we have to do? We had to complete a boat load of paperwork. Lots of it. No joke. We had to get fingerprinted, mental health evaluations, and we all (even Abram) needed to get physicals.

Seth and I️ also had to attend three all day trainings. They were all very helpful albeit fairly overwhelming. However, after all of them – we continued to feel that this was what God was leading us to do. There has been a lot of that – rechecking ourselves to make sure this is what God wants for us, and we’re happy to say that yes – this really is it. Yes – there are moments of feeling overwhelmed, but doesn’t that just come with parenting in general? And we are grateful for these trainings because they have really educated us on what could happen. They are overwhelming because of course they focus on worst case scenarios, but better to be prepared than not. We have also had three meetings with our social workers. The last one was at our house for the official home tour. Everything went smoothly and was very relaxed, and it just feels really good to get it done!

We plugged away at everything and are glad to take a respite during the holidays. But after that – we have to get to work on getting everything ready for our Dossier to send to Thailand. Sad to say – the Home Study looks fairly simple in comparison. We hope to get everything ready for that by April. Once Thailand receives our Dossier, the wait time is generally 6-10 months to get matched to a child and then 3-5 months before we can take her home. So – yes we are excited to get done with this step, but we also realize that there is much more to do and many hurdles to cross before we know who she is and before we can officially welcome her into our family. Although – she is welcomed into our hearts and minds long before that.

Thank you so much for all of your prayers and questions. We love to talk about it because it keeps it real for us – not just a crazy abstract thing that will happen who knows when in the future.

In the meantime, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Hopefully many exciting and wonderful things will meet us in 2018!