1st Mailing to Agency

Another purpose of this blog is to let everyone know everything that goes into the adoption process. For both of our families adoption is a brand new thing, I don't think any of us are familiar with what goes into an adoption. I can't remember what details I gave you in earlier posts, but here is an update on where we are and what we've done so far....
January - Attended adoption informational meeting. Mailed in pre-application the next day. Agency called us back and said they'd let us know when we could send in the official application, probably 6 months to 1 year.
May - Received letter from Agency letting us know about their new Networking Program. Families on the waiting list can go ahead and go through the homestudy process so that when they are officially accepted to the program they will already have that done. In the meantime their profilies will be on the internet and possibly shown to birthparents. When we called the Agency to find out more, they told us we were next in line to be accepted into the program anyway, so we had 2 weeks to decide what we were going to do.
June - Mailed in official application and received the packet back for our homestudy.
June 25 - Mailed our first bunch of paperwork back to the Agency:
Affidavit of Health Insurance (signed by my employer)
2 consent forms
Release of Information for our employer and C daycare so the Agency can contact them
Adoption fee schedule and Adoption Services Contract
Statement of Faith - To put it simply, this states we believe in God. It actually says much more than that, but it's hard to condense it down here
Adoptive Family Information - This is the physical characteristics of the three of us
Family History Data - This repeats our physical traits, but also asks for our parents and siblings full name, city and state of residence, age, education, occupation, and religion. A humerous part of this form is that it asks for Family Characteristics (Interests/Physical Characteristics). That's exactly how the question was writen. We really had no idea what to write because we only had a very tiny line to write it all down in. When you think about our families how do you condense something down like that? We scribbled down a few things, but it just seemed a little odd to us. We also had to check off the diseases that are in the family just going back as far as our parents and list the areas where our family, relatives and friends reside or have strong ties
Copies of our last two years of tax returns and birth certificates

This packet was large (it took 5 stamps to mail it) because it contained a lot of stuff, but none of it was the really hard paperwork. We're still working on the questions, but everything was pretty much on hold last week because of VBS. Our goal is to get everything done before our vacation. We leave in 18 days....I'd better get off of the computer and get to work!
Be joyful in hope, patient in afflication, faithful in prayer - Romans 12:12