Searching for God's Plan...

For those of you who don't know, we had quite a curve ball thrown at us last week concerning our adoption.  After looking through our dossier, the Colombian Government decided not to approve us based on age.  As soon as we heard this from our agency, our hearts broke.  We have lived the last year of our lives planning, dreaming, and working so hard for our kids and now we lost them.  We have prayed for our kids everyday, we built bunk beds, we "kid-proofed" our home and now they will never see any of it.  It breaks our hearts to not be packing for our trip to get them right now.  We just wanted to hug them and kiss them and now we will never do that.  We are mourning the loss of our family right now and we would deeply appreciate your prayers through this time.  Thank you to everyone who has reached out to us...it truly means so much.  It is so hard for us to know that there are kids out there who need love and we have so much of it to share but for some reason right now we can't do that.  We are searching for God's plan in all this.  Someday I hope that we can see that plan.....

We knew that adoption is perhaps not the easiest way to grow our family but we still believe deeply in it.  We have by no means given up our dream of adoption...it is just on hold for the time being.  There will be kids for us and when the time is right God willing we will bring children home to our house that is all ready for them.  In the mean time, God has laid on our hearts some ways to help make adoptions an option for some who could not do it on their own.  Perhaps God will provide the opportunity for those dreams to play out.  Well I have had about as much as I can handle right now...we will continue to keep you all updated. 

It's in the mail!!!!

Well we just got an email from our social worker that our dossier is officially in the mail to Colombia!  So the next time anyone hears anything will be because we got approved....hopefully at least :)  We are praying this wait will not stretch on for months and our social worker is hopeful as well since we are adopting three kids at once.  Anyway not much news other than that but this is a very exciting day for us!  Hopefully it won't be too long before we have more news to share with you all!

And The Wait Begins...

This morning when we checked the mail we had received our FBI appostilles!  I know that does not mean a lot to most of you but to us it means that our wait just went down by 3 weeks or so!  They have been taking about 5 weeks or so to come back and ours arrived in just 2...so this morning was a mad rush around our house to finish up the picture books we had to finish to send to our children so we could overnight this paperwork to our agency by the time we both had to get to work today.  Our social worker has everything ready to go and was just waiting for these last couple things so now she can send out our dossier to ICBF(the Colombian Government).  This means that there is actually nothing else we can do to push this adoption along.  It is so exciting yet in the same breath this wait is going to be so hard and so long.  It was crazy for us to be making those picture books and putting next to our pictures   "mama y papa"  We are both so ready to just actually see those little faces and hear those little names.  Well anyway we will have plenty to fill our time with...probably the biggest thing still is just working on our spanish.  You can all be praying for us in that area! 

On a different note, we did get hooked up with a really neat organization called Village to Village International.  They are an organization that helps adopting families raise money to help with the financial side of things.  They set up an account for us and leave it to us to send out the information to friends and family.  All donations that go through their website...through our page....are tax deductible and go straight to our adoption agency to help with our costs.  We have added a link on the right side of our page that will take you directly to our families home page.  We are trusting in God to provide all our needs through this adoption and are just taking every step one at a time. 

Thank you to all once again for following along with us and hopefully very soon we will have more excellent news to share with you all!

We're Almost Done!!!!

We finally received the last of the paperwork that we needed to complete our dossier.  YAY!!!!  It's so great to be done with the paperwork side of things.  We are currently just waiting on our apostilles....just an extra step above notarization.....to be sent out to us then off goes our packet to our adoption worker!  Our social worker told us that it should be 2 or so more weeks then our dossier goes out for translation.  So we are really on our way!  There is so much paperwork involved in this process so it is nice to be able to just sit back and wait.  Although in the same breath, without all the paperwork to fill our time it makes the wait so much longer.  As far as a more final timeline, our social worker told us to maybe expect a referral in a couple months.  Of course everything depends on how the government is working over there so we will just have to wait and see.  Thanks for following along with us through this all!  We will keep you all updated!

Hey All!

Hey everyone!  We figured it was about time to let everyone know about our newest addition....or to be more exact--additions....to our family!  We are almost done with our part of the whole adoption process.  We are just waiting on paperwork to be returned to us so that we can get our dossier sent over and we can finally begin the wait for our kids!  I guess we should give a little background for those of you who don't know what is going on with us.

Life is great for the Curtis family right now.  We both really enjoy our jobs and we are really settling into life around here....only a year after we moved over here.  :)  But we have decided that we are ready for the next step.  We have always wanted to start our family out with adoption so on Feb. 11 we officially started the adoption process.  In just the few short months since we began, we quickly have realized that this would be quite the journey.  We went back and forth about specifics for the adoption and finally came to the final decision to adopt from Colombia.  Colombia is a great country to work with for adoptions.  They specialize in adopting sibling groups to families.  After much thought, many discussions, and lots of prayer we felt that it was very important to us to be able to keep a family together.  So we will be getting an instant family.....and that means that in a fairly short time we will go from a laid back family of 2 to quite an adventure in the form of a family of 5!

Anyway we wanted to start this blog so our family and friends could be a part of this journey with us.  It is going to be a big change in our lives and we want to be able to keep everyone updated.  Stay tuned for updates and exciting info as this adoption progresses!