Fedex is my new best friend!

I can't explain it, but for some reason 2018 has been the fasted, and the slowest moving year ever.  February was the longest month of my life, followed by march that I think was only one week long.  We still still feel like we spend most of our days in flux.  Trying not to make too many permanent plans for later in the year and being cautious about getting our hopes up and setting time lines, and wanting to make every plan and buy everything that we could for our future family.

This past week, we finally got the news we have been waiting for.  The Pinal county courts have approved our home study! We have spent months waiting for that little stamp on a piece of paper from a judge.  No kidding, it's just a stamp that said "Juvenile courts." We've had a completed home study since January, but now we have a home study that we can actually do something with!  The state has approved us to be adoptive parent's.  Our chance of finding our family will now be put in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security, and the children ministry of Hungary.

On Wednesday we drove into Phoenix to meet with our social worker and pick up our official notarized copies. She told us that the courts actually kicked back our home study twice before they even reviewed it.  She has been so great to work with, and even she didn't understands why every government agency has been against us in getting this finished.  From there, the first thing we did was google "Fedex" and went strait to send copies to to our placement agency so they can send them to be translated, and another copy to USCIS with our I-800a application to get that approval.

In typical google fashion it took us to the most random Fedex ever.  It was actually attached to the airport.  You drove all thew ay around to the shipping side of the airport, and were convinced we were in the wrong place. we timidly walked in, expected to be yelled at by someone official (it shared the same building with boarder patrol, it seemed so official.) only to find the nicest lady ever, and a mostly normal looking Fedex store.  We got everything packaged up, used the Delta shipping discount, and they were both overnighted.  It was the perfect location, because it saved us the travel time from a normal Fedex store to the airport, meaning we were able o overnight for even cheaper! I've never been more excited to hold sealed envelopes.

Both of our packages have already been received.  All of our documents should be getting scanned and sent to Hungary today to be translated, and we're waiting USCIS to generate our fingerprint appointments (for the 3rd time).  We are realistically 6 weeks away from being able to accept a referral for our child or children! We know there is no guarantee of when one will come, but just knowing we're ready for it when the time is right is a huge relief!

One step forward, three steps back.

It's amazing to think that we are already a month into 2018.  It has been a whirlwind of a month in the Gifford home.  We started this year with the mantra of "everything happens for a reason" and have been determined to stick with it, even though my patience is thin.  

All in all, we've already had quite the year.  We started January off with a trip to see our family in Utah, which ended with a fundraiser at Pizza Pie Café in Layton.  We can not thank everyone enough for all the support you gave us that night!  As we walked into the building at 5:30pm, I told Cory how afraid I was the no one was going to show up.  As luck would have it, people had already beaten us there!  There were so many people who showed up that night, later in the week, or just reached out to us letting us know they wished they could be there. So many took time out of their busy lives to come see us and tell us you're behind us. People we hadn't seen in years took the time out of their day, and it means so much to us. 

We sadly didn't remember to take picture till the end of the night, so this doesn't even represent 1/4 of the people that were there! 

The following week we were able to do a fundraiser at our local Someburro's here in Queen Creek, AZ.  As worried as I was about the Utah fundraiser, this one I was sure no one would attend.  We're still new here and feel like we know no one.  Once again I was amazed at the friends, family, and co-workers that showed up just to show us their support.  Just as the other one, people we hadn't seen in years were there to have a burrito and help us start our family.

Between the two fundraisers, we were able to raise enough to cover the last part we needed of our next set of fees.  I know I've said thank you a million times, but truly, thank you. We appreciate and need your support more than I think anyone who hasn't done this can understand. This has been a harder and lonelier process than we every could have imagined.  Our lives are in the hands of unseen faces.  We're waiting for people we've never met to decide if we're fit parents, to decided if we're worthy, and just take the time to put a stamp on a piece of paper.

We were told we would have a finished home study by the end of November, and here we are, February 12th with still no home study.  We finally were told it was finished in mid January, only to find out we were missing a few documents.  Since I had paid taxes in California in 2010 (My one semester doing the Disney College Program) and Georgia taxes in 2014 (2 months living in an airport Marriott for Delta training) we have to go back and submit child abuse clearances for those two states.  Each of those can take up to 6 weeks.  From there, we still need our national immigration clearance which takes between 4-8 weeks, but an average of six.  Our hope of being all finished with our adoption by the end of this year seems further and further away.  It has been heartbreaking.

Everyday we just remind ourselves "everything happens for a reason."  We are still so far away from meeting our financial goals, and currently don't even have enough money to finish the adoption.  As painful as each day without change is, it gives us more time to save and prepare for the child or children coming into our home.  We often feel out of control and in a life that just refuses to move with us.  What a test of patience this is becoming, and I feel like we haven't even gotten to the hard parts.  Some day's I feel like The Little Engine that Could; "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.... not lose my patents and beat up government agencies." At least I think that's how the story goes, I'm just paraphrasing here.

When Social Workers Come Calling.

This week has been stressful and irritating, but filled with a huge milestone in our adoption journey!  This week we had our home inspection visit as part of a home study.  A big part of the home inspection is baby proofing your house for a baby that probably wont be there in a year and will probably come as a 4 year old. Here is a list of some typical things we were told would be checked in a home inspection:

• Working smoke detectors on every floor and near child's room
• Covered kitchen trash.
• Evacuation floor plan and emergency contacts visible. 
• Covered outlets
• Medications and vitamins in locked cabinets.
• All cleaning products in locked cabinets, or placed at least 5 feet up
• All soaps, lotions, and shampoos over 5 ounces must be locked up, or placed at least 5 feet up. 
• First aid kit and fire extinguisher easily available
• House clean and free of mold or harmful bacteria. 
• All blind cords and cables wrapped and hanging no more than one foot. 

This is just a small sampling.  It's pretty safe to say that I've been a nervous wreck since the date was set.  We know it was coming, but it didn't get real until we had the date on the calendar.  Lucky for us we live in a newer one story home and don't have a pool. That took out a lot of the others things we would have had to stress about.  I have to give a huge thank you to my mom and sister.  Not only did they help me obsessively decorate (yeah, probably not the best time to do that.) They spent so much of their own time cleaning and making sure my house was safe. I couldn't have done it without them.  

The only other time our home has been this clean, is when we first moved in and it had no furniture in it. 

The day finally came for her to come.  I was still walking around finding things to clean.  I Vacuumed the floors 3 times and started picking up individual cat hairs off of things. I was ready. The visit went really smoothly.  Our cats were even well behaved enough she thought we only had one.  You should have seen her face when we told here there were actually three running around here! It was mostly interviews and a little home tour.  The entire visit took about 2 hours, and we passed. Here are a few tips to help you if you every decide you want to be insane and complete a home study too. 

1. Know where your family lives, where they work, and what their job title is.
• We didn't expect this one.  It sounds simple, but we truely didn't know the job titles or actually locations for work of some of our siblings.  Facebook to the rescue! 
2. Have a snack prepared.
• Our social worker didn't have any of my purchased with love cookies (even gluten free ones!) but Cory and I did.  We had been such obsessive wrecks, we had essentailly starved ourselves. It was nice to have a little something to fill our nervous stomachs
3. Use quirky decor. 



Who wouldn't obsess over these? They're adorable. 

• Maybe this isn't a real tip, but one of the first things she said when she walked in was "Wow, you guys really like Disney." Followed by a "Me too!!"  She then spent a good 10 minutes obsessing over these Disney are postcards my sister helped me put onto canvases. She was even trying to convince us we should sell them for a fundraiser.  Sure, it's not essential to the process, but it was a fun distraction.
4. Don't obsess over showing them all the work you've put in.  
• Our home tour and walk through took literally 5 minutes of the entire visit.  She walked into each room, asked what we used it for, and moved on to the next.  As much as I wanted to follow behind shouting "shake that bookcase, feel how stable!" and "Just try and find the chemicals in the room!" I didn't do it.  Did i feel a little cheated for all the hard work we did, of course.  In the end was it a relief because we were actually short one blind cord wind and I just hoped she wouldn't notice? Of course it was!
5. Relax
• They want to help put children in good homes. They aren't there to stop you, but to help you.  I was so worried about failing our first one, and in reality we just needed to have a few things around the house done. Most of the meeting was just getting to know us more.  So remember to stay calm, and remember, your social worker is on your team!

Now that it's all over, i'm thinking "this isn't too bad." though I definitely wouldn't want to do this again in the near future! We have one more visit scheduled for next week, and we'll be done with our home study.   Despite all of the stress, our social worker left us with great news.  Our home inspection has passed, and we have been approved to bring 1-2 children, between the ages of 0-7 into our home! Just to know that we have taken another huge step in the process makes all the work worth it.  We're hoping for a child that's more toddler age, but now we've been approved to accept a sibling group.  Some days I can barely imagine bringing one child into our home, but the thought of possibly two has me all kinds of excited.  To get to start our own family, while still keeping another together seems like such a beautiful prospect.  In the end, whomever and however many children we get, I know they will be the ones that are perfect for our family!  

Reasons to Celebrate

 August 30th, is always a special day in our house.  It's this hansom man's birthday!

32 never looked so good!

Usually, I like to have birthdays be big events; Cake, tons of food, going out all day, and just an all day party! Well, poor Cory this year had more of a low key birthday.  We had super fallen behind on our adoption paperwork. After we got back from Berlin, we went strait back to work. On my 2 days off for the rest of the month, we found out my grandmother was sick and I ended up in Southern Louisiana on my only days off.  Because of all of this, Cory's birthday was spent running around getting our last minute paperwork done.  We started at the doctors office getting physicals, followed by state finger printing, and rounded it out with our FBI fingerprinting.

We were just finishing up with our final (for now) round of finger printing, and I was bragging to person doing the fingerprint that we were FINALLY done with our home study paperwork.  I was so excited, it was so much work, and I was done! Just as we were paying, and getting ready to head out, we both received emails at the same time. We opened it, and were in for a nice surprise.

We are official!  We have been accepted into our agency's Hungary program, and we are 1/4 of the way through our home study.  The best part about it though? We now have even more paperwork to do! Silly me for being excited that the first round was done.  Though, the real exciting part about this round of paperwork, is it is a lot of stuff that will get set directly to Hungary with our Dossier.  Every day this gets more and more real.

when we woke up the morning of the 30th, I told Cory 32 will be the best year yet.  After getting to celebrate both him and our adoption on the same day, I think it's safe to say i'm going to be right. Be on the lookout for an official announcement soon!

On Your Mark, Get Set, Paperwork!

It's happening, and it's real.  We are officially in the Home Study phase!

We had our first meeting with our home study agency last Thursday.  Though the meeting almost didn't happen. I always thought the concept of "If you're doing something right, it'll always be hard" was a joke.  Why would something right be hard? Well, This must be the most right thing we've ever done! We had gotten over the problem of choosing domestic or international, and decided on a country through trial and error, and found a country that will let us adopt with depression, we thought it would be smooth sailing.  It turns out my job had other ideas.  

Now, you know we live in Phoenix, but what's fun is I actually work out of Salt Lake City.  The airline I work for doesn't have a base in my state.  Luckily this job does come with some great benefits and the ability to commute across the country if you need to.  It's all done on our own time, and it's our responsibility to have a place to stay in the base, and get there on time.  So next time you complain about your 40 mile commute, remember mine is 670 miles.

Of course our meeting was scheduled for the day after I got done working.  Usually, no big deal.  Oh no, this time it was different.  My trip ended up changing, and I ended up getting done too late to catch a flight home. I was a complete mess.  Thank goodness for an amazing crew who kept the trip fun, calm, and helped me see that it wasn't all hopeless. After a night in the airport, I luckily was able to catch a very early morning flight home on another airline.  I landed just in time to drive the hour home and pick Cory up, then head right back to the adoption agency.  Turns out the agency was right next to the airport!

Meeting with our social worker for the first time was great.  She was calm, focused, and laid everything out for us.  She went over the home study process, and made sure we knew all of our options.  We once again discussed the prospects of switching to infant domestic adoption, and she was a great resource for finding out how it really works.  We still feel very strongly about going internationally even though it costs us more, and means we will adopt a toddler instead of and infant. It felt good to talk it all out with someone that didn't know us, or what we've been over so far. Now we are getting down to business, and there is a lot of work ahead of us. The first step in all of this is a ridiculous amount of paperwork! I was expecting it, and I knew it was comings, so I had my binders and dividers ready to go!

I never thought i'd be so proud of a binder.  I am not the most organized person, and this little book is my pride and joy!  Now we are in the process of getting our fingerprint and FBI clearance, filling out monster amounts of paperwork, and getting our certifications of health.  I was mentally prepared for all of the paperwork, but I was not prepared for what was actually required in the paperwork.  In addition to the regular financial, work, and basic lifestyle questions, we have some other fun ones to answer.  Here is a sample of some of the harder ones:

• What age of your childhood did you like most, and why?
• Growing up, how did members of your family show happiness/love/frustration/stress/etc.
• What was the main reason you married your partner?
• what would you most like to change about your partner? what would they most like to change about you?
• How important will grades and school performance be for the children in your home?
• How do you handle privacy and nudity in your home?
• How will you discipline you children?
• What do you think will be your least favorite part of parenting?

The questions just go on, and on, and on, from there.  Some of the ones that are hardest to answer, are all about being a parent.  It's hard to imagine how you'll parent when you've never been faced with it before! For now, we do a lot of googling, and a lot of asking our families what they would do in a situation. 

Our current task is to get this all finished, and in about a week we will apply to our placement agency to start our dossier and USCIS approval! We're estimating about 3 months to finish our home study, and once that's done less than a year until we have a referral for a child! It's still a long ways away, but getting closer with ever piece of paper we fill out!

Wish us luck, and please send help if we drown under all this paperwork.