baby

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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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.

 

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!

 

Guerrero summer and upcoming things

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Hi everyone! We fully acknowledge that we have not been very good at keeping you posted on what has been going on in our journey this summer (so far, of course!). This is in part because things have been a little busy here at the home front, Danielle is full gear back in school pursuing her Masters in Social Work and I (Luis) have been very busy with work and being a full supporter of my wife and her education.

We have been meaning to update the blog for some time now but the lack of news and other things made it difficult to sit down and do it, but we have some great news moving forward with our adoption that we have been holding on to for a few days as we decided what to do exactly.

So early this week we got an email from our adoption agency asking for an update on how our fundraiser is going and letting us know they have been considering moving things a little bit faster and asked us if we would be interested in starting our home study early through a contracted Social Worker that they work with here in Las Cruces. They told us to discuss it and think about it as this would definitely save us time because then we could get listed sooner and they could start showing our album to birth mothers a lot sooner if we do it now as we are so close from being off the waiting list and becoming an active family. Doing this could potentially save us around 3 months as the home study is a 90 day process and they can’t start doing it until we have completely been taken off the waiting list, which is why they recommended we contacted this social worker that they have done a lot of work with and is based here locally (remember, our agency is in Albuquerque, which is about 3-4 hrs from here).

After talking about it we decided that yes, we would like to move forward with it so hopefully we can start working on our home study soon. This is a crucial part of the adoption process as it gives the agency, the state and birth mothers a bigger picture of who we are as individuals. Our agency works directly with birth mothers and some of them get to pick who they would want raising their child (in some cases they prefer the agency choose for them), so making sure we get all of our ducks in a row is very important.

The agency gave us the contact information for this social worker, although we will probably still hold off on calling her for a couple weeks as there are some things we need to prepare for around the house that we weren’t expecting to have to do for another 2 or 3 months at least, but we will soon!

We will keep you posted on how this goes soon, again sorry for the lack of posting and updating lately.

Love,

The Guerreros

Another beautiful story

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Please take a moment to watch this video. We have no idea who this couple is and have never met them, but we loved and cried with their story. Something about hearing the experience that others have with adoption is extremely touching and relatable to us.

Autobiographies are hard

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One of the tasks we are working on for our home study is write an autobiography about each other (individually, of course!) describing our strengths and weaknesses, upbringing and even personal beliefs. This is hard and a task that people tend to leave for the last, but we decided we can get a headstart on this.

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It is easy to tell our story, it is even easy to share what is going on in our lives and this adoption, but thinking about the past and writing things down is actually harder than it seems, but fortunately there are guidelines in place for what to write, specifically when asked to describe likes and dislikes, family upbringing, relationships, etc.

Have any other adoptive parents struggled with this?