Checking things off the list.

It feels SO great to be able to check things off of this massive list of things we have to prepare to send to Haiti. Earlier this week we did our home study visit. Now we just wait for our social worker to write up the report. Today we got our finger prints done and we met with our psychologist to get a psych evaluation done. Well, not "our" psychologist. We didn't know him before today. But he was a lovely man I and would highly recommend him to anyone who needs a psychologist. Tomorrow we (Avery included) have to get a complete physical. Who knows, we may even drop by the police department to get our letter stating that we don't have a criminal record. Probably after we drop by the bank to get a letter stating we do, in fact, have legit bank accounts with money (not much though, HA!) in it.

It is amazing to me all of the things one has to do to adopt a child. Yet, there are no requirements for people to have their own kid. Pretty sure if we enforced some of these requirements on any person that wants to procreate, we would have a lot less crazies running around the world. I mean, you have to have a license to drive a car, why can't you make people pass a parenting test to have a kid?? I'm sure that infringes on somebody's rights. And we wouldn't want to do that.

Home Study

Today was the day our social worker Kristen was coming out to spend 3 hours at our home. It was our first time to meet her. All of our correspondence so far has been via email, so I was glad to finally get to meet her.

I went back and forth about how to clean my house for this event.... Do I really clean, so she thinks we are tidy people? I mean, I would hate for her to get out her magnifying glass and white rag and discover all the dust on our baseboards. What if only a quarter inch of dust is acceptable and we have half an inch? Big decisions to be made over here.

So I went with picking up all the "stuff" and lightly cleaning. No scrubbing of the toilets but I did windex the counter tops off. And I did mop the wood floors.... there were the footprints of dusty, barefoot children all over and what appeared to be remnants of when the dog puked on the floor as I was walking out the door and I didn't do a very good job wiping it up. I know, disgusting. But a little dog puke is not going to make me late for dropping off Avery to mother's day out at church....

I digress....

So Kristen came. She interviewed all of us together and then each of us seperately. It was basically the same questions from the form we had already filled out. The usual "what was your childhood like?"..... "what is your parenting style?"......

During Brandon's solo interview, they got to talking about college and he was telling her about how he went to ACU for undergrad. Turns out, she went to ACU also. Not only that, but her brother and Brandon were good friends!!! How crazy is that! Small world!!


During Avery's interview, Kristen asked her what her dad and her do together for fun. The only thing my daughter could come up with was "watch tv." Watch tv?? What about all the campouts he takes her on? What about teaching her to ride bikes? What about taking her swimming? Nope. I wanted to jump in and throw all that out there. But I didn't want her to know I was standing around the corner eavesdropping, so I kept my mouth shut.

After the 3 hour of interviews, she toured the house and we were done. Pretty painless. I think the worst part was when she asked me what my weaknesses are. Why is that such a hard question?? I thought about saying that one of weaknesses is telling my daughter to go turn on the tv and get a pop tart out of the pantry while i roll over and get a few more minutes of sleep. I didn't though. So I went with the ole "I don't tell people 'no' so I end up being on PTA, hosting parties, and countless other things that sound like fun at the moment but then overwhelm me and make me crazy." That sounds good, right?

Ah, one more thing to check off the list. Only 3 more things to do this week. Thank goodness none of them require cleaning or someone coming to my house.

James

So it was killing me that I had no idea who James is. I don't know what his precious little face looks like. I don't know anything about his personality. So I did what anyone who wants to find out about someone does....

I got on Facebook.

And put an SOS out there to see if anyone knew who this child is. And even better, if anyone had a photo.

Just so happens, one of the girls named Ashley who was with our group is a hair stylist. And she happened to have been playing with James and noticed his hair was really long and back in braids, kinda looking girly. So she rescued his hair and gave him his first haircut. AND She had pics documenting it!!!

I think it's kinda cool that I have pics of his very first haircut!!

We are approved and a HUGE surprise!

So, we got the approval email we were waiting for!!!!! YAY!!!! We were "officially" approved to adopt Jovanika!!!

SO EXCITING!!!!

And then a few minutes later, we got another email.....

The subject line was "Jovanika has a brother".......

WHAT?!?!?!?!?

After picking my jaw up off the floor, the email said that after starting the file for Jovanika, they realized that she has a little brother, who is 1, also at the orphanage. They do not ever seperate siblings, so we needed to decide if we want to adopt both of them or if we prefer, they can match us up with another girl when one comes available.

Wow. Just wow.


Introducing....

James and Jovanika Whitaker



They are exactly 10 months apart (!!!) and completely adorable. I am just about heartbroken that I didn't know about James when I was in Haiti. I would have loved to have gotten to know him as well as Jovanika.

We planned on getting one little girl. But as my friend reminded me, sometimes God has a better plan than we do for us. I am quite certain this is the case. Although it does nearly blow my mind to think that we will go from one to 3, I know this is all part of the plan and can hardly wait to see what this journey entails.