2nd Meeting/Blog additions

We had our second meeting with Nancy today, and I feel it went really well. This time there was a lot more Q&A, which was actually quite nice. I really felt like we had some good conversations. Only two more meetings to go! I'm nervous about the in-home meeting, but I don't feel TOO bad about it. We'll get our house nice and clean before then :)
I added a few features to this blog - just to jazz it up a bit. I've added a clock showing Taipei time (just because I think its neat) and a break-down of our timeline. I know I always love looking at other people's timelines, so I thought I'd get ours started - someone may appreciate it someday!
Tomorrow is my 27th birthday, so I get the day off work! I'm just going to bum around and go collect all the free birthday food I've been signing up for all year long. Probably have to do a bit of homework, too, unfortunately (I'm working on my Master of Liberal Arts degree). Mostly a fun day, though.

Meeting results

So I think our first meeting went really well! We went to Nancy's house (nice place, not far from my work) and she gave me iced tea, and she did most of the talking! She gave us tons of hand-outs (articles, lists of adoption resources, etc), talked to us a lot about various adoption issues, etc. Chris and I actually did very little talking! She made us feel very comfortable, I'd say. It lasted a little over 2 hours, and we are going back next Tuesday for our second visit. Then our third visit will be on Monday the 30th, and our final visit (in OUR house) will be on Wednesday July 9th! We told Nancy we are hoping to finish as soon as possible, and she said she'd go ahead and start writing up her portion so it will be done not long after our final visit. So it looks like we're doing pretty well time-wise. We are just so anxious to finally get on the waiting list and be able to kick back and relax for awhile....

First meeting with Nancy

So tomorrow we have our first face-to-face meeting with our social worker, Nancy. I've really been looking forward to this day, because I feel like we've really gotten something underway now! We are hoping that we may get two meetings in next week, in which case our final meeting (in our house!) would be done before the 4th of July. It would be nice to have it out of the way before the holiday, we have relatives staying with us, etc. Plus we are anxious to get on the waiting list. We just got the username/password combo to log-in to the "ASIA families only" section of the ASIA website, which is neat. They let you really follow how many families are logged in to the waiting list, when people get referrals, etc. It is nice to see, but frustrating because we feel the wait will be very very long for us. We are anxious to get on the waiting list, because I know there are other families pushing to finish homestudies, too, and the sooner we get on the better. So wish us luck...I'm not really worried about the meeting going poorly or anything, but it's just an important meeting so I want it to go well!

5th Anniversary

Yesterday was our 5th wedding anniversary! I spent the morning doing a heart-walk with my mom, sister Kachina, and her kids Theo and Ellie. It was pretty fun! Then we went to our favorite windery (Pirtle winery: www. pirtlewinery.com) where we drank mead and fruit wine and ate a tasty cheese/bread/apple basket under the grape arbor. We also visited Daddy's house for a bit since we were in the area, ate some ice cream cake, and went to see the second Narnia movie - Prince Caspian. It was a fun day!!

We have been working hard on our homestudy documents - the autobiography is tough. Mine is probably going to end up being 10 pages long or something. We have to fill out a lot of forms for different clearances and request a lot of letters from people (reference letters from friends, verification of employment from our workplaces, etc). It is a lot of work (and takes a long time!) but we are anxious to get it all done so we can get on the first waiting list (the one with our agency to wait for the privilege of sending our homestudy to Taiwan - we are guessing it will be at least 1 1/2 to 2 years and possibly even more). It will all be worth it eventually :)

Ready...set...go!

Well, we've done it! For several reasons (primarily because of reports that Taiwan adoption wait times are growing rapidly), we decided to just go ahead and start our Taiwan adoption! I emailed Marci with ASIA, and she sent us the application form. The first big step.....!!

First we went out to dinner at Dragon Inn, a local Chinese restaurant, to celebrate. Then Chris painted in the first eye of our Daruma doll. Then we filled out the application! We are officially on our way!! I just got done emailing Nancy Bean, who is a local social worker I've communicated with before regarding doing a home study. I am a bit worried about the home study portion, just because it is going to be rather indepth (and means we will have to do a LOT of house cleaning soon!). So we will start working on that portion, as well.

Wish us luck!!

Getting closer....

We are now only 20 days from starting the adoption process! During a recent trip to Epcot we purchased a Daruma doll for our bio baby and one for our Taiwan baby. Daruma are Japanese wishing dolls--they have blank eyes, and one is supposed to fill in one of the eyes when one makes a wish (in our case, when we start paperwork for our Taiwan baby) and then fill in the second eye when the wish comes true (when we bring her home!). It is something I have wanted to do for a long time :) I'm glad they still had the Daruma dolls at the Japanese pavillion!
On a side note, I have been hearing rumors that some Taiwan agencies are switching to SN only. I am going to email ASIA to make sure we are still cool to move forward in just a couple of weeks!

New start date

So we were thinking about our timeline, and realized there really isn't any reason for us to wait any longer to start the adoption process than our 5th anniversary (May 31). Once we reach that milestone, nothing else is really going to change for awhile. We figure we'll have saved enough money for the initial costs, we're already starting way before we need to, we kinda want to get the initial homestudy out of the way anyways, etc, so why not? So we're going to get things rolling earlier than we had previously anticipated. We will still have to wait until our future bio baby is at least 6 months old before the homestudy can go to Taiwan, so our overall timeline isn't changing any - we just get to start earlier :) I updated our ticker, which was quite satisfying - what with jumping forward in time considerably!