It’s official, we are through every single required step necessary for us to adopt!!  We have successfully navigated the international pre-adoption process!

We have been approved in our province in Canada for a while now.  But now we are also through all the necessary steps in the USA as well!  We have jumped through every single hoop (no matter how ridiculous it seemed) and our profile book is done!

We are now waiting adoptive parents!!!!  

(I don’t think there are enough exclamation marks in the world to adequately illustrate how excited and happy we are about this).

So the plan now is that we:

• Wait for our phone to ring.
• Try not to obsess about the potential of our phone ringing.
• Keep preparing for baby to arrive into our lives.
• Hope that a birth mother likes us and entrusts us with the life of her child.
• Live a normal life without focusing on waiting for an unknown amount of time.
• We answer every single phone call, including the ones from numbers we don’t know (i.e. potential telemarketers) because we cannot miss that phone call.
• Try not to hound our lawyer – the lawyer does not need to spend his time answering my useless questions, he needs to spend his time matching us.
• Prepare for more upcoming adoption bills.  We do seem to bleed green these days.
• Try not to panic about why we have not been chosen yet (I expect this to become a problem for me in a few months time).
• Not obsess over our biggest fear – a failed adoption.  Rationally, I know that we cannot prepare for that type of an outcome and we will just have to deal with it if it happens.  Part of me is afraid of having an adoption fall through in the end, but I do believe it is a birth mother’s right to choose to parent.  As we cannot change this possibility, for now needs to stay focused on the hope that our match will work out perfectly.
• Try not to worry about the international match process that we will navigate while being in the USA with our baby.  It’s going to be complicated and it’s going to be stressful.  But we cannot change it so we might as well not worry about it.
• Celebrate that we made it through the entire approval process.  The adoption approval process is no joke, I’m proud that we made it through everything in a decent timeline.  When we started in December my optimistic goal was the end of June and we did it!!

We anticipate being matched with a birth mother in any of the US states.  We expect that we will be matched with a third trimester pregnancy or with a baby that has been born that day or the day before.  We have been told to expect a match time anywhere from a few months to about a year.  Of course, there are no guarantees as the timeline is dependent on a birth mother falling in love with our profile – this is out of our hands.  So now, I have to put my faith in the universe that our profile will fall into the hands of our birth mom sooner rather then later.  I have to really back away from doing anything, and just let it be.  I have to practice being patient because there is absolutely nothing I can do to speed this up.

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