My First Blog Ever

This is new to me. I've never blogged before and I have a feeling that I will be quite slack with my postings. However, I'm going to give this a try.

My husband and I have known for a long time that our journey to having a family would be through adoption, though we had no idea it would be via Poland. We originally planned on adopting from Korea. We had been informed that we could request a girl because of Mike's Korean heritage. When Mike called the agency in January, he was told that Korea no longer allowed even those of Korean heritage to make requests regarding gender unless they already had boys in the family. We have had our hearts set on adopting a little girl first, so we had some thinking to do. After a lot of talking, we decided that we still wanted to adopt a girl first. So we looked into domestic adoption, but we decided that international adoption was best for us.  We had no clue that there was a Polish adoption program here in the U.S.. One day, before Mike had even called about the Korean adoption, I was doing a an international adoption search online. At the top of the page in bold letters was 'Poland'. I didn't think much of it until we started to reconsider our adoption options, but it was there in the back of my mind. So after deciding to look at other countries, I googled Polish adoptions and found that we could adopt from there. I got a little excited. My paternal grandfather was born in Poland and we have very dear friends who live in Poland (they have become part of our family). We have visited them twice in Poznan. I told Mike about the Polish program and we started looking into it. We found a couple of agencies that handle Polish adoptions (and thank you to the people from the Polish Adoption Forum for their help and input). The agency we decided to go with is conveniently located here in Charlotte.

We are quite excited and nervous. We had our first home study interview yesterday. To be honest, I was a wreck up until our social worker arrived and we started. It was quite painless, actually. For the most part she just clarified some of our information, asked some questions to expand on the answers in our paperwork, and discussed more of the adoption process (including answering some of our questions). She was at our home for about 2.5 hrs. And she included our "2nd" interview (the individual interviews) while she was there. So, we only have one more to go for our home study.

Now we need to finish gathering the rest of our info and documents for the home study and dossier. If Mike and I can get on the ball, we could probably have it all done in a couple of weeks. Though a couple of things are out of our hands. We are still waiting for my apostilled birth certificates to come back from Michigan and we are waiting for our fingerprints to come back from the FBI. I would be great if we could have all our other stuff done by the time my birth certificates and our fingerprints arrive in the mail.