Biographies

Well...we finally did it!! This past weekend we finished up our biographies, and then the two of us sat down and read through the whole thing (16 pages!) to make sure it made sense and we finally sent it in. Now we're just waiting for our next visit with our social worker when she'll have our rough draft of our homestudy available. This is exciting! Now we will start to work on gathering our Dossier documents and knock that out of the way too!!

Formal Application

This weekend, after weeks of gathering and saving, we finally got all of the pieces, and the money, together to send in our formal application to Adoption Alliance in Dever, CO. We signed all of the required forms; fee schedule and agreement, confidential information release, privacy protection agreement, medical risk statement, disclosure statement, statement of risks, and our FedEx account number. We also sent in two recent family phots, as well as a fairly large check to cover the first part of our adoption fees! Now we can officially start to work on getting the paperwork started for our Dossier. We are also continuing to work on finishing our biographies for our Homestudy, and making sure we have all of the pieces for our social worker to write our Homestudy. I learned this week that Social Services from two of the counties we've lived in have yet to return our information to our agency...I mailed it to them in the beginning of December!! Very frustrating. I called and talked to managers at both places and they both gave me their word that they would be in the mail by Wednesday (tomorrow). The last piece that we have to provide for our Homestudy is our biographies. We are going to put a deadline on ourselves - THIS WEEKEND! It's so easy to keep pushing things off, but we'll never move ahead if we don't just get it done. I've had all of the other paperwork, except those Social Service reports, in since December. We had our home visit late December and that's when we got the assignment to put together our biographies. Ryan was writing an extremely large grant for the Boys & Girls Club the whole month of January so he wasn't even able to get started on his portion until February. Now, we're just about finished and just have to do it!

Big Powderhorn

This past weekend Ryan and I went on our second annual ski trip to Big Powderhorn in Bessemer, MI. We opted out of renting snowboarding equipment this year and brought our cross country skis instead. This was so we could save on the lift ticket, as well as our rental costs for the equipment we don't have! It was an absolute blast and we had such a good time catching up with everyone again. This was our first "real" cross country ski trip, and boy, we didn't realize how much of a workout it actually is. The first day I did a 6K loop and Ryan did an 11K loop. It felt good to get in that workout, but when we set out again the next day we realized how much we were working muscles we didn't know existed ;) The second day we were able to go longer and I did 11K and Ryan 16K.

We're very much looking forward to the trip again next year. The weekend just flies by so fast!!!