When it rains, it pours!

Get this - our first home study visit is TODAY! It turns out that we both were available this afternoon so at 4pm our home study starts. 24 hours ago I was wishing this would hurry up and now I'm amazed at how fast things are happening.

I'm not as nervous as I thought I would be. Today's appointment will be at their office and will only take about an hour. I think its mainly to give us more forms to fill out. I will probably be more nervous as the day goes on.

Oh, and it is literally pouring rain here, and has been since 4am, so at least if I look all frazzled at the appointment I can blame it on being wet :)

Good News!!!!

We got the call from the social worker today!!! They want to get us in this week to start the first visits! Everything else with the county has taken a full month ahead of time to schedule so I'm thrilled to know we can do this so soon. God is so good.

I tried calling our county social worker today but they were closed for Columbus Day so I was going to try again tomorrow, but now I don't have to.

I'M JUST SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW!!! (can't you just see me dancing around my living room with excitement:)

Blessings

"From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another." John 1:16

I'm a little embarrassed about my last blog. It seems as though I only get on here to vent about the wait. We really have so many great things going on in our lives. God has truly blessed us. And I don't mean blessings by material things, although I believe everything we have has come from the Lord. It's the intangible things I feel most blessed by- the close relationship we have to our parents and siblings, wonderful friends, the restoration of our marriage, and most importantly God's grace and His sacrifice for me.

I read John 1:16 last night as a part of my Beth Moore study "Beloved Disciple". I highly encourage anyone who can to go through one of her studies because it has been so moving for me. I was feeling down after writing my blog and decided it would be a good time to spend some time in the word. This was the verse of focus for yesterday's study and she went on to explain that original word for "blessing" in the bible is "charis" which is often translated to grace.

Charis means "grace that which affords joy, pleasure, delight, sweetness, charm, loveliness: grace of speech, good will, loving-kindness, favour of the merciful kindness by which God, exerting his holy influence upon souls, turns them to Christ, keeps, strengthens, increases them in Christian faith, knowledge, affection, and kindles them to the exercise of the Christian virtues"

Isn't that beautiful? God is blessing me by keeping me strengthened.

Charis is a name Alex and I had picked out if we have a daughter. So this verse was inspiring because I felt like the Lord met me where I was at. I don't know if I would have been as into it if she hadn't gone into detail about the word Charis. And I could have read that study another day and not felt the same as I did last night.

I don't need to feel happy, or be optimistic to know that He is walking with me, encouraging me, and pushing me forward. I'm so grateful for a God that meets me where I am.

Patience

I always had to have a plan. Alex is opposite. He is so patient and has no concern over what's ahead. He embraces the fact that God is in control, while I'm always trying to plan our next step. I'm learning that God usually has something different in mind than my plan A or plan B and that my planning is just an allusion of control. I'm not what one would call a control freak, but when it comes to certain things, like this whole adoption process, I tend to want things to go at my speed. This process is going even slower than they said it would and that's when I get all caught up in the "what if's?". What if they lost our paperwork? What if I wrote down the wrong phone number? What if the trainee who did Alex's fingerprinting screwed up? And why do all these questions only come to mind as soon as I try to fall asleep?

It has been two months since we did our fingerprinting and we still haven't heard anything. it doesn't sound like very long but they told us 4 weeks. So we waited and then they said 6. So I decided to wait an extra two weeks without calling because I was sure they were gonna call last week while I was in Fresno. Nope. So I'm going to make calls again tomorrow to politely ask if there is anything else we can do while we wait to hear from the home study agency.

In the meantime I've attended a few parenting and bonding classes, worked on our profile, read up on transracial adoption and children born exposed and addicted to drugs. I'm feeling like I'm on information overload. Not to mention that I'm constantly on Bethany's web forums and Adoption.com reading about other people's adoption experiences.

I'm officially my classes, so I'm doing my online orientation this week and my Foundations for Leadership class starts next week. On top of that I still have two independent study classes I'm working on and I've been leading a small group at church so these this should keep me a little more preoccupied. Hopefully it will make the time go by faster.

Strength will rise...

I could just say I've had an incredibly busy summer, which I have, but that wouldn't really be truthful about why I haven't blogged lately. The last month has been transitional for me. The bible study I was leading ended, I finished the two classes I was taking (A's in both- Theology wasn't as scary as I originally thought), and one of my best friends moved to start seminary. I start my new classes and my new bible study this week, as well as a few optional foster classes I signed up for. But the last few weeks have basically been spent hanging around the house trying not to think about how slow this process is.

It's one of the frustrating things about the adoption process... all the waiting. And with all the waiting I really have nothing new to write about except how my mind is constantly thinking about babies and children, and how I feel like this is taking forever. OK its only been 3 months since we started. We have everything done but the homestudy. And now we have to wait to be contacted by the agency that the county subcontracts homestudies out to (did you catch that?) Since the State made some big budget cuts, our county is down to 3 placement social workers, so they are having to subcontract their homestudies out to a private agency. Just means more waiting for the extremely impatient me.

I have managed to get the kids room done, and have spent quality time quilting so the bed and crib could have matching bedding. Plus it keeps my hands busy and makes time go by faster.

I keep being reminded by everyone that once we have our children, we will look back and think this time went by so fast. I know there right. I look at my sister with her son Ben and she practically has no recollection of pain of they 3 years she waited for him. Its taking dedication to try to focus on that rather than the wait. The Lord is streching me.

I'll wrap this up with song lyrics from Everlasting God by Chris Tomlin that inspired the title of my blog:

Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord
We will wait upon the Lord
We will wait upon the Lord

Our God, You reign forever
Our hope, our Strong Deliverer
You are the everlasting God
The everlasting God
You do not faint
You won't grow weary

Our God, You reign forever
Our hope, our Strong Deliverer
You are the everlasting God
The everlasting God
You do not faint
You won't grow weary

You're the defender of the weak
You comfort those in need
You lift us up on wings like eagles

I'm an Auntie!

Today was Kristi and Doug's Gotcha Day! They are now offically the proud parents of Bao Fu Gui now known as Ben. Here is what Kris wrote on her blog:

It's official. I got the cutest boy in the whole world. He has been running us ragged. He cried really hard & was a "touch me not" for about 1/2 hour, & gradually warmed up to us. It's been really neat ever since. He is very 2. All energy, but a total sweet heart. He wants to climb everything in site. He loves his Good Night Moon book & Tonka fire truck. We are exhausted all. But when we won him over, oh boy. He called me mama, & Doug Baba. He even kissed Doug before we left the CCAA building. He laughed all the way to the hotel, & has been charming everyone he meets. The hotel staff are shocked about how easy going he is. He hates the crib, loves bananas & chocolate chip cookies. He started clinging more to me at first, but later attached to Doug as well. We couldn't be happier. I feel like I've found myself.

Here are a few pictures of them:

Busy Summer

I can't believe I haven't posted a blog in almost a month... oops!

So here is a bullet point update about what is going on here:

- We finished our PRIDE training (the 27 hours of training necessary to adopt through the state) last Saturday. Now we are just waiting for a social worker to contact us to do the home study and live scan. I called our contact person with the county this week, but unfortunately (thanks to budget cuts) we now only have 3 licensing workers for the entire county so it could take longer than we want. I would love to have everything done by the end of July so that we could be licensed by September, but that may be a little overly optimistic :)

- We've set up the "kid's room"! My sister gave me her beautiful crib and we bought a toddler bed that extends to a twin bed at Ikea so the room is "homestudy ready". We are hoping to be approved for up to two children (siblings) between the ages of 0-4. We don't have a lot of kids stuff, but the beds are a start! Here's a picture of the bed we bought:


- Speaking of my sister, Kristi and Doug are in China right now! They left yesterday morning from San Francisco and will be returning home on July 17th. Here's the email they sent me today:

Hi all, We are in Beijing. We arrived on 7/2/09 @ around 1:30 PM Beijing time. The flight was fine with us getting an emergency exit row. We were served three meals. We cleared health inspections teams with no problems. About 6 department of health ladies came abroad the plane at the gate and took the all the passengers temps with a thermal scanner (about two inches from our foreheads). They were wearing gloves, masks and goggles. We made two shopping adventures and ate at Yoshiko's Fast Chinese Food for dinner. We are leaning the art of negotiating with Chinese teenagers for a watch and belt. Also went by McDonald's for a shake and Dairy Queen for Oreo Shake. It's 100 F here (but a dry heat like Fresno). The natives are friendly and helpful. They put up with our attempts to speak Chinese. We will update the baby blog tomorrow (in 12 hours) Love you, Kris and Doug

They will be getting Ben on July 7th, so the next few days should be fun just sight seeing and taking tours. Please keep them in your prayers as they travel!

I hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July! We were invited to join some friends on their houseboat on Lake Trinity near Shasta, so we'll be headed out tomorrow. We are looking forward to the wonderful relaxing weekend on the lake with our friends.