It's Home Study Time!!!

Our next major stop on the adoption train is the completion of our home study.

What is a Home Study?

The homestudy is a major part of the adoption process.  It allows our adoption agency, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Office (USCIS), and foreign government to assess our ability as parents to provide a loving and stable home for our adopted child.  It can be intimidating in the beginning to know that you and your family will be asked very personal questions and have every crevice of your life analyzed for someone to make a determination about whether or not you're a good parent.  At the same time, I'm anxious to get started because this is such a big piece to the puzzle.

In order to start our home study, we must finish saving for our home study fee and what I've called Phase One of the adoption process. 

Phase One

Application Fees:  $250 (PAID)

1st Installment program Fee:  $1,500 (PAID)

Home Study, Training, Background Checks, & Miscellaneous Documents:  $3,863 (Still Saving)

If you'll remember, we estimate that the total adoption cost will be around $25K.  What we are doing so that we are not overwhelmed is eating the financial elephant one bite at a time...so to speak.  By breaking this number into smaller goals, it definitely feels more attainable.
So to-date, we have saved $1252.02 towards the $3863 home study part of this goal.  We've already paid for the other two items in this phase.

I'm using this blog so that our supporters can cheer us on and so that we can chart our progress.  At this stage of the process, we are holding off on asking for support until we complete the home study which we feel gives us more of a green light to move forward with the adoption.  So what do we need from you???  Simply cheer us on and pray for us.  If you'd still like to donate towards the adoption prior to the completion of the home study, feel free to do so...ya know we won't turn that down (smile).

So here's our cute little Ethiopian piggy bank where we place our savings.  I try to go to the bank each week so that we can see our savings amount move up frequently....isn't it adorable???

 To help feed our little piggy because we definitely want it to get nice and fat (smile), we'll be doing a number of things.  We are:

• continuing to dramatically shrink our household expenses.
• selling some items on Ebay, Craigslist, and online garage sales (be on the lookout for some great deals!)
• taking some side work job assignments such as Tony fixing computers and me doing some administrative work (typing, organizing files, etc.).  If you know anyone who would like either of these services, please let us know.

We'll keep you posted on how things are going but before I let you go, I have to tell you how stoked I was when I saw the below image.  I've been with our staff in Leesburg, VA since last Thursday (I just got home on Sunday afternoon).  We were snowed in with 35 inches of snow on the ground.  As I was passing through the lobby, I saw the flight board.  It caught my eye so much, that I backed up quickly to do a double-take....can you see, can you see???  Pretty much all of the flights out of Dulles Airport were canceled except this one...

Hopefully, the next time I see this flight on a board again, I'll actually be getting ready to board it with my hubby en route to pick up baby girl!

Much love!