Adoption Orientation

So we have finally made it to our Adoption Orientation at BCS!! YAY! There was really nothing to surprising, we got a TON of handouts that we went over, all of the information was really a lot that we already knew, so nothing new to report there. Mostly gave instances of behaviors and the like to expect, went over the legal rules and regulations, mostly for foster care but because in the state of Michigan the licensing process is mostly the same it was still useful, at BCS they license adoptive families for foster care to help speed up and smooth out the process so that if you get a child from across the state they can come live with you sooner while the adoption paperwork is still going through.
We got our application and are going to be filling it out tonight and scheduling our fingerprinting for as soon as possible, hopefully sometime this week. We got a little nervous because they discusses how long placement can take....they know some people that have been waiting years....but that really was more for people with really specific criteria for the children they are willing to adopt. For Mark and I if things don't work out with Sarah we are open to any children up to age 10 or 11 (we're slightly flexible on that top age, but don't want to get to the point where any child we have would be less than 10 years younger than us because that would be a bit awkward haha....but we'd have a lock on the 'cool parents') we don't have any expectations for gender or race, we're just looking for the child that we feel a connection with and feel God prompting us towards. So as you can tell by the picture we got a lot of papers from them, including our application that is 6 pages long plus the fingerprinting paperwork which is a page long also....after that there is a LOT of paperwork we'll need to fill out during the homestudy, but we're expecting that to go smoothly since we don't have any children or pets they would need to interview (yes they do interview pets!!) plus our home meets all the expectations already *except I'll have to turn down our hot water tank :-( no more super hot showers, water must be less than 120 degrees, which I'm guessing ours is higher than. But outside of that we need to figure out who our 5 references will be and get our doctor to fill out a paper saying we're healthy (glad we both did physicals recently) so hopefully because we plan to be proactive and aggressive about getting our stuff done we can get licensed within the next two months than be praying for a quick placement, but it will all work out in God's time! So love you all can't wait to tell you how our application process goes!