...and now we wait.

Our home visits are complete, our references are in, and our piles of paperwork (for now) are done. The home study is being written and submitted to the court for our official certification to adopt.

“I won’t see you again until you have your baby!” Our adoption consultant gave us this answer after we asked her when we’d see her next. In what can often be an exhausting, long, and tedious process, Scott and I consider ourselves lucky to have assembled an amazing team who has guided us through the last several months with ease. We are especially grateful for our consultant, our shining star!

What’s next? Well…certification, submission of our profile, and a lot of waiting. We always knew that waiting came with the adoption territory, and it is proving itself true. You submit a piece of paperwork, you wait for processing. You send an email, you wait for a response. You work, then wait, work, then wait. This tune quickly becomes a familiar song because each step in this process leads to another, then another. Each pushes us one step closer to bringing home our baby…which will be, as they say, worth the wait.

While all of this waiting will eventually pay off, I don’t think we will ever be completely “done”. When the day finally comes when we bring home our little one, an entire new season of waiting begins. We will wait for the day we get to sleep again. We will wait to see our baby smile for the first time, walk for the first time, speak for the first time. We will wait for their first day of school and their high school graduation. We will wait for them to get home for Christmas after having moved away. We will wait to see them become a kick-ass adult who is lifting people up and making their community a better place. We will wait.

So here we are, waiting. We can stress about the slow pace of getting to the finish line, or we can find peace in knowing there is no actual end…just a life of waiting and living. We choose joy. We choose hope. We choose to soak in the magic of this time of wait.

Cheers…Daniel & Scott