This is where the blog and the waiting combine and become dangerous! Unfortunately all of you who read this will now be subject to my thoughts when I decide to blog randomly. Sorry in advance!! I have thought A LOT this weekend...it really is funny how things change on the weekends. Monday through Friday, for the past 11 days or so, the house phone and the cell phone are within arm's reach AT ALL TIMES. Just in case. Friday night comes, and the phones mysteriously end up laying on the coffee table until Monday morning. There is no urgency to "have the phone" on the weekends, since the agency is closed and we know no one will call us from there. It is true what they say; you look forward to the weekend because  you can relax and know that you will not get a phone call, but you dread the weekend because you know that you will not get a phone call. I know I have a lot more waiting to do, but I definitely feel that saying coming true already. 


I have also been thinking a lot about our baby's birthmother. Even though through international adoption there is rarely, if ever, openness so that both parties know who the other is and exchange pictures and even visits, there is still a birthmother involved. If you let yourself, you can almost forget about the birthmother, because she does not pick the family that the baby is referred to, she does not know when or where the baby is adopted, she knows nothing starting at several hours after delivery. She recovers from the delivery and goes home. No one notifies her when the baby is brought to a loving family. No one updates her on how the baby is growing and changing. I really started to feel that, in international adoption, birthmothers are sort of forgotten. The joyful adoptive parents go to pick up a baby that was spontaneously generated and now is theirs? Not exactly, but lots of adoptive parents start out trying to think this way. It makes me very sad to realize this, because without this woman who carries and gives birth to our child, and carefully makes an adoption plan for our child, we would not become parents to that child. I may never know who she is, or what she looks like, what she likes and doesn't like, but I pray for her and for the child she is almost certainly carrying right now who is our child. I pray for a healthy pregnancy, a healthy delivery, and most of all a sense of peace about the adoption plan she has made so that the child can be part of a family. Our family. I have asked you all for your prayers for us, for our process, but I have to ask you for prayers for our birthmother. Please pray for her and all that she must be going through right now. 


Hopefully we will have another update email from our agency in a couple of weeks....maybe three weeks at the most. I can't wait to see how many referrals came this month!!!!  Love you all...thanks for your support and love!

We have officially been placed on the waiting list for our child!!!! We will never really know what number we fall at, but we will receive monthly updates on how many families are waiting and how many referrals have been sent over that month. This month, our first month on the list, there are only 13 families waiting!!!  We are one of 13!!! That is not many...AND get this.....FIVE referrals were sent over in July!!  That is a big number..the list went from 18 to 13 in one month! We are completely over the moon....I never expected to be on a list of 13. I only prayed to fall in the top 20 to 30 families..God HEARD and IS SO GOOD!!!!  Thank you!!!!  Thank all of you for your prayers!!!!! We will be receiving monthly updates from the agency, and of course you will all find out about those updates through the timeline and blog. Love you guys!!!!

Slow but steady has been our progress even from the beginning...I tell lots of people now, slow and forward is better than none and certainly better than backwards. We have filed our I-600A documents with the immigration department, which is our formal request to bring a child of another country into this country. We received our fingerprint appointments and have to appear in New Orleans at 8:00 am on Friday August 21st!! They will run our fingerprints, review our homestudy and supporting documents (birth certificates, marriage certificate, etc) and hopefully send us an approval document in the mail in 2-3 months. This document says that we are allowed to bring the baby here !!!  It's like the beginnings of applying for their visa and eventually their U.S. birth certificate. On the waiting list front, our homestudy arrived in Baltimore, MD at our placing agency last Monday morning...I have not heard anything from them as of yet, but hope to hear soon that they have approved us and have sent the homestudy to Korea. It is then that we will find out how many families are on the waiting list and how long to expect to wait (approximately). It looks like families right now and the past few months have waited somewhere between 10 and 12 months for a referral, some less and some more. We can only pray for our child and his or her birthmother, that they are safe and well cared for, and that the birthmother feels a sense of peace with her decision to make an adoption plan for our child. Based on that timeline alone, it is almost definite that the birthmother is pregnant with our baby right now...so he or she is growing and developing already! God is so good....I'm going to be a Mommy!!