A Bump in the Road

We got an email from our social worker today asking if we could have a conference call with her and her supervisor at 4pm. I immediately had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a good phone call. I called her right away and asked if we could make the phone call a little earlier so we would be able to pick up the boys at 4:15. I asked if I needed to be concerned about this, and she said, “We can just talked about it this afternoon.” Ugh, that was definitely not good.

Eric came down to my classroom right after school and we waited for the phone call. Our social worker (from Lutheran Social Services) started off by saying she had her supervisor on the phone and this was a very difficult call to make. She told us they were discontinuing their international adoption program, so as of January 1st they would no longer be doing home studies for international adoptions. Cue the tears! I knew this was going to be a bad phone call, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine them saying they were going to end the program.

So what does this all mean? Lutheran Social Services (LSS) has been doing our home study, which we were almost done with. They are our home study agency and AAC is our placing agency that works with South Korea. Since our home study was not completed yet, we need to figure out if we will have LSS complete our home study and another agency update it before sending it to Korea, or if we will just scrap what we have done before and start over with another home study agency.

We will continue working with AAC as our placement agency, but there is still a huge question mark on what to do about our home study agency. We want to make sure we are doing things how Korea expects them to do done. We are waiting to hear back now from Bethany Christian services, and we will go from there. Bethany has a really good reputation as a home study agency, so we are hopeful they will make the drive to our small town to help us finish up our home study and do our post placement visits.

Right now it is just a waiting game, which is really hard for us, but we are trusting that God has a plan for us. We believe this was meant to be part of our path and there is still one special child that is meant for us in South Korea. Stay tuned for an update on what happens next. We are still going to attend a two day training next week  for adoptive parents, so that will help us at least feel like we are a step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk.