International Adoption – Bringing Home Baby Stoyk

I was listening to a podcast by Rachel Hollis when I was on the treadmill the other day. She said something that really helps describe where we are right now in our journey. She said, “Nobody will ever care about your dream as much as you do.”

This might sound negative, but please do not take it that way. We are currently in a stage of waiting. Waiting for home study approval, waiting for people to write reference letters, waiting for financial clearance, and waiting to take the next step to bring our baby home. In our hearts and minds all of this is to bring OUR BABY home. To everyone else, this is part of their jobs, something they do every day, and they do not have the personal connection that we do. We totally understand this, but boy it is hard to give control over when the stakes are so high.

When I was pregnant with my boys, I was sick, I could feel their tiny movements inside of me, I went to doctors appointments and was told what I could do to keep myself and my babies healthy, and I could talk to my friends who have had babies and get advice. Right now, I am not experiencing morning sickness, like I did with my pregnancies, but I am experiencing plenty of worry over this sweet baby that is waiting for us. Currently, everything is out of our control. We hurry up and get all of the paperwork done on our end, and then wait and pray that other people are getting things done on their end. We understand that this is our dream, our baby, but it sure is hard to help others understand the importance/urgency of deadlines in the adoption process.

It has currently been over two weeks since we have heard anything related to our adoption. We have multiple emails and phone calls out about different things, and we haven’t been getting replies. It has been a really tough couple of weeks, and we are trying to turn over our worry to God and remember that He has a plan for us and our baby. We appreciate all of your prayers. We are praying we hear some good news soon, so we can finally take our next step to bring home Baby Stoyk.

We had our FINAL home study visit this week. What a relief! We spent all of Monday night cleaning, and when I say cleaning, I mean under the fridge, the oven, the junk drawer, and inside cabinets. Because she was totally going to look in all of those places right?

I was worried all over again for these two visits (one Tuesday and one Wednesday) because we have a new social worker, since we are now working with Bethany Christian Services. We had only ever spoken to her on the phone one time, and now she was going to come and decide if were were suitable parents for a sweet baby from Korea. I didn’t know how thorough she was going to be, but I was pretty sure she was going to judge me on my socks-with-no-matches basket.

Our first meeting was on Tuesday night after school. Thanks to an awesome coworker, I was able to leave school a little early to make sure everything was ready. The boys came home, and we all played Play-Doh while we waited. Once she arrived, I felt better right away. She was very kind, sympathetic to all we had gone through with our previous agency closing, and has a great connection to Korea. We got right to work on a mountain of paperwork while the boys continued to play. She was here for about 2 1/2hrs. She spent some time talking to Eric and I separately, and interviewed the boys. Gus’ interview didn’t last too long. He won her over right away with his sweet smile and by holding her hand. When you have three boys ages 6, 3, and 1 you never really know what they are going to do or say, but I am happy to say they all did great! She left us with a bunch of paperwork to do, so Eric and I sat down for a few hours after she left and worked on that to be ready for the next day.

Eric and I took half-a-day off on Wednesday morning, and she returned to finish up our last visit. We had a few more things we needed to go over, she needed to check our fire alarms and extinguishers, and she needed to do a walk-through of our house. She left us with more paperwork and some education hours we need to complete before our home study can be completed.

So what is next?

We have 5 additional education hours that we need to get in before our home study can be written up. We have a book to read for that and will be writing up a book report on it. If you know Eric at all, you know he is not the biggest reader, so he is super thrilled about this assignment. 🙂

Once we get our education hours done and submit the final paperwork, our social worker will, hopefully, approve us and write up our home study. After she writes up our home study, she will send a copy to our placing agency, AAC, and they will need to approve it. Once the home study is completely approved, we will be ready to get I600 approval (immigration approval). This might take a month or two, but once that is approved we will be ready to submit everything to Korea and wait for a match! It finally feels like we are getting closer to getting to see our baby!

We are so grateful to everyone for your support and prayers. A lot of you have been reaching out and asking to donate to help cover the high cost of agency fees and travel. We so appreciate this, and we are looking in to the best way for people to do this. We are doing everything we can right now to save every penny for this along with working on applying for adoption grants. The cost of adoption is one of the largest reasons people choose not to adopt, and we have said from the beginning that we will not let it be a barrier for our family.

Thank you all again for your love and support. Keep the prayers coming, and I hope to be able to update everyone again soon. We are one step closer to bringing home Baby Stoyk!

Category: International Adoption

Control

Progress… Finally!