No – we don’t have awesome, concrete news yet, as might have been suggested by the title. But, I wanted to do a little better job at providing something, so here you go.
Over the past 4-6 weeks, it has been pretty slow. For those new to the blog, or have just forgotten due to my mental wanderings, I will give a brief on how our agency works.
We completed the piles of paperwork, passed the home study, paid our initial fee (without selling any non-vital organs!), and became an officially-recognized, adoption-ready family back at the first of October. After that, Jaclyn put together a profile book that expectant adoptive moms could take a look at in making their decision. Fortunately, we are working with a great, faith-based agency that attracts lots of really cool couples from Kentucky and Tennessee. Unfortunately, that means any of those families can look at the precursory information the agency provides (usually consisting of due date, parents’ ethnicity, and any history of either drug/alcohol use or abuse or mental health issues with either parent) and say “yes” and the agency will include their profile in the stack the mother gets to go over.
Fair enough, but with at least 25 families usually in the pot, a 4% chance isn’t that great. So, while we have said “yes” ourselves many times already, we have yet to get that call that says the mother is interested in us back.
A little disclaimer for those of you who truly are new to the Scottish Invasion experience, start from the beginning blog and spend a couple of days of your life (that you’ll never get back) catching up with all of these details in much greater expansion.
OK, so since the turn of the new year, we have only been presented with a couple of actual situations. The first one, the baby was already five months old before the mother decided to put him up for adoption. While putting a child that you are expecting to have must be hard enough to do, and really, really difficult for me to imagine, I cannot even begin to wrap my head around taking a child into your home for months and then deciding that you just don’t have the time (which was her actual rationalization) to take care of your latest – she already has three others.
Digressing. . .we put in for him, but the agency chose to place him with the couple that had been waiting the longest. Fair enough. Less than a week later, an agency from Iowa contacted our agency to say that they had several birth moms that they just didn’t have adoptive families for. We contacted them to say we would love to be considered. Things moved forward after we sent in our application. We even spent an hour and fifteen minutes in a phone interview with the case worker from Iowa. We are truly trying to step out in our faith and trust that God has a great plan for us through this adoption. And we know without a shadow of a doubt that our baby has already been chosen by Him. But, we want to be reasonable and smart with how we approach each situation. Without giving any details here on the S.I., we left the phone interview with some hanging doubts about some of the financial guidelines and practices that this new agency worked under. We both prayed and came away with the same reservations and called to have our name removed from consideration. A hard move for us, but what we felt was right.
Forward to this past week. Another agency, this time from Arizona (a state that prides itself of the nation’s largest ditch), contacted ours to say the same thing – we have birth mothers, but not enough willing adoptive families. As usual, we looked into it. I called the phone number given and talked to the case worker for about half an hour, going over their procedures and asking questions of one another. By the end of the day, they had enough of our paperwork in their possession to send us a list of eight (8) birth mothers from their state. While they had a few procedures that were different from our agency’s, we still both felt urged to move forward. Even better, they provided the birth mother with no more than four profiles to look at. Which moved our chances from 4% to a minimum of 25%. We kept watching our online group from the original agency and watched frustrated adoptive parents say that they couldn’t get through to this Arizona agency or couldn’t get a good response. More confirmation in our minds that God may be moving in this direction for us. (And no, I didn’t offer the rest of them any help. . . go ahead, judge me.) We took five of the eight birth mother situations and asked for additional information, of which we are still awaiting. We hope that one or two of them can see our profile book very soon (was overnighted to them on Thursday) with even more hope that moving forward continues to happen. We also understand that the doors could close quickly, as they have before, and we then are back to the waiting game again. If it does proceed, these mothers are due in June and July, so it would not be a complete scramble. Maybe we are just so desperate to see a little progress that we are truly grasping at just a little light. Even so, we covet your prayers for our patience, our discernment, but most of all our peace in knowing that we are still inside God’s will for our family.
And now you know. . . .
Scottish Invasion 