The great adventure begins...

In typing the title for this blog post, I couldn’t help but think of the chorus lyrics to the old Steven Curtis Chapman song, The Great Adventure:

Saddle up your horses we’ve got a trail to blaze
Through the wild blue yonder of God’s amazing grace
Let’s follow our leader into the glorious unknown
This is a life like no other – this is The Great Adventure

Come on get ready for the ride of your life
Gonna leave long faced religion in a cloud of dust behind
And discover all the new horizons just waiting to be explored
This is what we were created for

That is exactly what Steve and I are doing — following our Leader into the glorious unknown world of adoption and getting ready for the ride of our lives. Wowzers!!! Exciting but terrifying…

This past week we paid our application fee, signed the fee contract and registered for the Adoptive Parent Educational Training Seminar being held on Saturday, February 12th. I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to attend this seminar because of my mom’s upcoming surgery, but due to some insurance issues, it’s been postponed until further notice. I was a bit relieved to know we could attend this seminar since the next one isn’t offered until June or July. It’s an 8 hour Educational Seminar that is required of all adoptive families completing a Domestic or International Adoption through Bethany Christian Services and it must be completed prior to beginning our homestudy interviews. We will be scheduling a lunch meeting with our Intake Specialist within the next couple of weeks to get an overview of all the paperwork we need to get started and the timelines involved.

We’ll need to raise/come up with $5000 in the next few months to cover the home study and administrative fees. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am completely overwhelmed with the financial piece of this journey. I am trying to come to grips with the fact that we may have to finance 99% of this if we are unable to raise it — not our first choice, but a potential reality. What completely sucks is that we are still paying on a loan for the unsuccessful IVF we went through this past year. I guess that’s why financing this seems like such a large burden. Steve and I do not want to be drowning in loans as we start a family. We continually covet your prayers.

And in closing, let the ‘official’ adventure of a domestic adoption begin…