The First Approval

The journal entry is obviously much delayed, but within a week of submitting our application to our agency, we got the call we were approved by them on August 18.  That was the easy part!  Now we have to prove that we are physically, emotionally and financially able to support a new child in our family through a mountain of paperwork, interviews, physical exams, personality tests and another mountain of paperwork!

It does strike us interesting how much trouble both the United States and Colombian government go to in order to ensure children get a good family. Obviously every child deserves a loving family and safe place to live and especially those who are more vulnerable and whose biological parents can't care for them.  On the other hand, a lot people that wouldn't pass such scrutiny do have and keep their biological children. Things that make you go hmmm....

Anyway, since the last update we received our packet (about 30 pages) of instructions on the details of what paperwork is needed.  One of the scariest parts is a letter we have write to the Colombian government explaining why we want to adopt and why we are good parents. Some of the paperwork is fun though, like making a scrapbook of our family to be given to our future daughter.

Part of the documentation process is a home-study.  Since our adoption agency is in another state (St. Louis, Missouri) we can't use them to do our home-study as they are only licensed in Missouri.  So, our next steps are to simultaneously start gathering our documentation and pick a homestudy agency here in the Des Moines area to work with for that part. Also on the top priority list is finding a good way to start learning Spanish.  This is a requirement of the Colobmian government and something we want to do anyway.  We want to be able to learn as much as can to speak with our daughter so that she can become bilingual and hopefully we will too (at least a little)!  Also, it will come in handy when we spend 4 weeks in Colombia for the adoption process.

Thanks for following our journey.