adoption

Still Waiting

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adoptionwaiting

It has been a while since we have written an update regarding of our adoption process. We are still continuing to wait, which is something we are totally fine with. Our Adoption Agency is showing our profile to potential birth parents and one day, one of them will choose us or we will get a call from the agency that there is a child waiting.

In all honesty the wait has been long and we are grateful that we’ve had this time to prepare our home, our hearts and our lives to receive the kid that is meant for us. As you recall, last month we shared about the grief of a situation we were in a sense connected with (you can read about it here), and while we did receive word that the mother decided not make an adoption plan, we are grateful we were a part of that little baby’s life, even if we never get to meet her. We prayed for her and for the mother, we prayed that she would make the best choice she could for her baby and we hope she did.

You may have noticed that our adoption updates may have become less frequents these last few months and the reason is because there really is less to update you about. We completed our home study, we are listed, we are in a good track funding-wise (still working on a grant though), and really just waiting for what is next. Family and friends have been an incredible support to us through out this whole journey and we are so grateful for each and every one of you and we honestly could not do it without you all.

We both really hope the next big update is a big one, but in the meantime we continue to wait.

Love,

The Guerreros

 

Hearts, home and bags ready

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We had a difficult week last week. Without going into much detail we heard of a potential opportunity that seems to have fallen through by this point. While last week was definitely hard for us, we felt that if the time was right, we were ready to receive a child in our home.

Our baby room is pretty much all set. Obviously it will forever be a work in progress as we add and as a child grows in it, but we have the basics of what you need to welcome a child. First few months, the baby would sleep in our room obviously, but it is definitely good to know that we have everything pretty much set and ready to go.

One thing that we have learned and has been the hardest for us is that with adoption there is no time frame, it isn’t like having biological children that you know you have so many months to prepare for a child, that has been one of the hardest things for us. Yes, we could get a call that a pregnant woman wants to meet us and she may be half way through pregnancy or close to giving birth and that would give us some kind of hypothetical time frame, but we could also just get a call and have to take off. We are grateful that we have both had that talk with our employers that we may just need to leave suddenly one day and start our leave at work, we are both blessed to have understanding bosses that are perfectly OK with that happening.

We are more ready than we have ever been, our home and hearts are so ready for this!

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And what a year we had!

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First of all, Happy New Year to all! We hope that this next year brings you what you want and hope for, and while 2016 may have been a rough year for many of us in many ways, the hope of a New Year means a fresh and clean start.

This last year was huge for us as we saw many things fall into place in our road to becoming parents. We started 2016 thinking maybe “this would be the one”, only to be reminded that adoption takes long and is a lot of waiting. This is not without saying that we knew for sure that we would have a baby this past year, but maybe with some hopes that things would move a little faster, and while things did move in the right direction we were reminded that all that is good is worth the wait.

We were however able to make some huge leaps in our journey:

  • We attended an incredible training with our adoption agency in which we were re-assured that we are doing the right thing and learned so much about the process. You can get a refresher of that by clicking here.
  • After much waiting we (FINALLY) were ready to be taken off from the waiting list for the waiting list and then became a listed family and are officially waiting (hopefully soon) for a call that either a birth family has picked us or the agency got word from a hospital that a baby has been born and they believe that should be our baby.
  • We are thankful that we were connected with such a great Social Worker to do our home study this year (click here to read some about it).
  • The baby room is turning from just being our spare/overflow room into a real room for a child (still a work in progress though). We purposely wanted to wait until all the other steps mentioned above were met to start setting up the room.

As you can tell, 2016 was a year that saw a lot of good moves in our life, and while we are still waiting for whatever comes next, we are grateful that things have taken the time they have. It is easy for people to say “it shouldn’t take this long to adopt” or “why does it take so long to adopt?”, but for us this has been perfect timing as we have had other things happen this year (Danielle starting Grad school!) and even still working on some fundraisers (as we finally started paying for some of the expenses that come along with adopting.

We don’t know what this new year will bring but we are sure this crazy and wild adoption adventure will continue, and we are excited to share it with you all!

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Happy New Year 2017 from the Guerreros!

Hope in what comes next

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Well family and friends, this is it, the moment we have been longing and waiting for. Agency paperwork has been sent to have a profile, homestudy approved and completed, adoption book mailed to the agency. Now we just wait for the call.

We have been waiting for this moment to come for a year and a half almost, there is nothing left for us to do but wait. Until now we had a goal in mind like “OK, well now we need to do this, or send this document, etc…”, we had stuff to do, but now all we have left is to wait. At any given time from now on we could get a call from the agency that a birth parent is interested in our profile and would like to meet us or we could get a call that a baby has been born and they feel we would be a good home for him or her. At this point all we have left is to wait and be patient and hope.

 

Things are actually finally moving

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The theme of the majority of 2016 for us has been WAIT, be patient, this is a theme that whether we wanted to or not, we learned we had to embrace, we had to do it and we had no way around it. Waiting has been the major theme for us, from moving from a waiting to wait list, to a waiting list and now we officially are an active family with our agency.

The last couple weeks we finally received our completed home study and this was submitted to the agency yesterday, meaning that in the eyes of the State of New Mexico we are fit to adopt parents. We also had to fill out lots of paperwork and go over things that we would be OK and not OK in a child, this last part was hard as we had to go over a list of things that we would be willing, consider or not be willing to parent. Some things we would not have a problem and others we had to cross out the list. We say weird because this list really is something we would even have to think of if we had biological children, and we kept being told that “there is no wrong answer”, but it still felt a little strange to go over what we feel comfortable.

So at this point we basically are finishing up the paperwork (of which there is a lot when you are adopting) and mailing that back to the agency so they can officially show our profile to birth parents. We also just a couple days ago received our photo album, which we will be giving to the agency as well. Once that happens we literally could get a call in a matter of weeks or even months, it is out of our hands completely as we wait to get a call from the agency.

Again, we wait, but this time this could be the final waiting before we become parents.

Just keep on waiting…

Nesting and other fun stuff

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targetSo far we have been slightly slow on the “getting the baby room ready” department, this is mostly because of the fact that we have been on the waiting list to be on the waiting list, and then on another official waiting list. We didn’t want to get too excited about buying baby things, assembling furniture and preparing the room because we figured “it’s going to be a while”.

That is until now of course! If you scroll down to our previous blog post (as in this one right here), you will remember that we FINALLY got taken off the official waiting list and are now ready to be moved to being an active family for potential birth parents to view our profile. We have been careful with not setting up the baby room and getting too much baby stuff until this point. We’ve been given a few things like a crib, bassinet, high chair and a few necessities. Today we bought a few other things to set up “the room” and feels great to be nesting.

The time is coming close for us…well at least we would like to think it is close. Yesterday we got to fill out some paperwork (some of it hard to do, more on that in a later post) and our home study is just about finalized. We are about to officially become a “listed” family with our agency, Adoption Assistance Agency. The Agency we are working with only works with 10 families at a time and we are getting moved up to being one of those active families that they work with. This means once everything is set to go we could get a call in a matter of weeks or it could be months (or longer) that either a birth parent is interested in our profile or they could call us telling us a baby has been born that fits our profile. We are being proactive and trying to be as ready as we can for when the baby comes because as we have said before, when you’re adopting there really isn’t a specific time frame to wait, it could be from one moment to another that we could be parents.

We want to be ready for you!

Love,

Future Mom and Dad!

 

The strange task of creating a photo album

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We’ve started working on our photo album, also commonly known as an adoption profile that will be shown to potential birth moms, dads and families in hopes that one chooses us to raise the child they are carrying.

Wait…What?!! We are already doing that?!

Yes, we are currently working on getting our photo album done so hopefully by the time we are done with our home study and ready to be listed the agency can start showing it to curious birth families that are considering adoption for their baby. This task so far has proven to be something fun to do, but also a little strange because we are basically creating a catalog about our lives that someone we don’t know gets to glance at, study and see.

It is also difficult too because while there are tons of resources for ideas online, there really isn’t a cookie cutter way to do an adoption album because every family is unique. We know that our family is not the same as even friends we know have adopted, we are all individuals and that is what you want to show to birth families. You want to show them who you are and give them an idea of “if my baby ends up with this family, they will get to do ______ or go to ______”. This task has definitely proven to be something that is pushing us out of our comfort zones of what we want to show to a perfect stranger and it is one of those things that unless you are or have gone through the process of adoption through a private agency you would never even consider doing.

Because this is a private part of our adoption we won’t be posting it online, but here is a preview of the cover:

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Again, what we have so far is just part of the first draft. We want to show simplicity, yet a good picture of who we are as a couple, as a family and the community we are a part of. We want to show that we will love this child and are excited about bringing him or her into our world, into our daily lives and most importantly, into our family. Through this process of adoption we have learned so many lessons and there has been so much that we didn’t anticipate, but we are getting ready, we are preparing for the day when we get a call from the agency that a birth family liked our profile, or that there is a baby that was born that is ready to go home with us. We are just one step closer to the day that Baby G becomes a reality born from our heart into a member of our family.

Bragging about my wife

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This week, our social media was flooded by pictures of proud parents posting pictures of their children going back to school. While we are years away from that on our end, I do have to brag that a student went back to school this week as well…

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It might be a little hard to read but it says “1st day of graduate school!”. Yes, that is correct, my beautiful wife is now pursuing her Masters of Social Work. While she actually started with a couple summer classes in July, this week marked her official return to full time school. Danielle is part of the advanced standing program at NMSU, which means she will be getting her Masters in one year instead of two, while still juggling a job and an internship. I am not sure how she has so much energy and determination, but I am so proud of her!

Ever since she graduated with her Bachelor Degree, it has been her dream to go back to school and get her Masters but when we first got married we were not in the right place or time for that to happen. I know our child will be very proud of having such a hard working and smart Mom to look up to because Danielle herself was raised by a very strong Mom who always worked hard and put her children above everything else in life.

I am so proud of my love!

Luis

We’ve officially started our home study

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A thing we have learned through out this adoption process is that when things are slow and silent, patience is the key to survival. Then when things are moving they are fast and they happen right away and there is no slowing down.

We won’t give too many details on exactly what happens during, but today officially marked the start of the home study process! Today we had our first home visit from our social worker who is conducting the study, which is huge. As we have said before, the home study is a 90 day process that is required for every adoption, after that we will be ready to be listed and have our album shown to birth mothers in hopes to picked by one to adopt their baby.

We’ll keep you posted as things progress, but this means we officially are taking the next huge step to meet Baby G!

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More on the home study

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Smile-thumbs-up-clip-art-clipart-image-0Things are finally moving along, and a lot sooner than we expected too! Today we spoke with the social worker and we scheduled our home study, which will take place soon. There are some things we need to start working on before we get started, but we have all the confidence that we will get it all done and take care of.

For those of you who are not familiar with the adoption process, the home study is the first real step towards adoption, this is basically a study done on our home (that is where the name comes from), our lives, and basically how we would do as parents raising a child. This to many may sound intrusive or even unnecessary, but it is something all families adopting have to do as it is a requirement across the board for any type of adoption.

We’ll keep you posted as we actively get to the process, home studies typically are a 90 day process so we will be doing a lot through out the next few months but once that is completed we should be good to go for the agency to show our album to birth moms and be one step much closer to being parents!