Tag: Adoption

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.

My house has literally NEVER been this clean. Our social worker came over for our first home visit today. We were up late last night and early this morning making sure everything in the house was perfect. We dusted, scrubbed, and I even cleaned the top of our cabinets because she would totally climb up on the counters and check them right?

The boys were really excited to meet her and were running around like crazy all morning. We prepared them the best that we could, but knew that Cal was going to want to show off all his cool tricks. Max was crying because he thought she was going to bring us our baby today, and now he is devastated that he has to wait longer. I think the wait might be the hardest on him.

I got up really early this morning, and as I was having a cup of coffee, I was watching a video of a family bringing their baby home from Korea. I was a mess. A sweet baby just like the one in the video, is the reason I cared so much about the house being clean. I am already so in love with our future child that I want everything to be perfect. I can picture them here with their brothers running around like crazy, and it makes me smile just thinking about it.

Our visit went really well, except for the fact that I was still in my pajamas cleaning when our social worker arrived. We had a little misunderstanding about what time she would get here. She was here for about 3 hours, and the boys gave her a tour of the house, told her how excited they were to get a new baby, and showed off all their cool tricks.

Tonight, as I was putting the boys to bed, we prayed for our baby in South Korea. We don’t know if they are born yet, but we already love him/her and are doing everything we can here to get them home as soon as possible. This child is going to be the missing piece to our family puzzle, and we are now one step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk!

Who doesn’t love a psychological evaluation on a Monday? We had our psychological evaluation via FaceTime today. Having a psychological evaluation is a requirement that South Korea has for all prospective families. We were really thankful to be able to get it done before school started, but I am not going to lie, I was super nervous about this one. We heard about this doctor through one of our Korean adoption support groups, and were thankful he could do a FaceTime interview. There are not a lot of psychologists that meet Korea’s requirements in our small town.

The interview was actually very laid back, and the doctor was pretty funny. We spent about an hour on FaceTime with him asking us about our family and relationship history. Have you ever had someone taking notes while you are talking? Well when someone is evaluating your sanity, it sure does feel like they must be thinking you are all kinds of crazy when they are feverishly writing down everything you say.

Now we have to complete two addition paper and pencil tests to send back to him. After he receives those tests, he will write up our results to send to Korea.

Update: We ended up spending about 6 hours completing the tests  he sent to us, and are ready to send them off to the doctor. Let me tell you… the amount of paperwork that comes a long with an adoption is UNBELIEVABLE! Aside from this pyshc evalutation, we spend at least 2 hours a night working on paperwork for one of our agencies. It does feel really good to be able to check things off the list, and having this evlauation done means we are one step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk!