Adopting Grace-The beginning.

I guess I'll start where any story should start... the beginning. 

May 2004: Ed and I wanted a child. We tried several different options, but we were unsuccessful. (I'll skip the personal stuff and leave it at that.) We had already decided that we would adopt a child, we just had always assumed that it would be later. Well, it didn't quite turn out the way we had planned. 

June 14th, 2004: We received some disappointing news from our Doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Hosptial. There were a few days where I was very sad and upset, blaming myself for our problem and thinking that I would never be a mommy. Well, after Ed and I talked about it we decided that we would move ahead and adopt. It was not a hard descision to make since we had already talked about it before. It did not take us long to choose Russia as the country that we would adopt from. The only request that I had was that I wanted to adopt a little girl. After letting everyone know, we started looking for an agency. It took about 3 months to finally decide on one. We chose Frank Adoption Center(FAC) in NC.

Sept. 2004: We drove the 2.5 hours to visit FAC for an seminar. On 21 Sept 2004 we officially sent in our application to FAC. 

Oct 2004: We chose Coordinators 2 in Richmond, VA to do our home study.

Oct 2004-Feb 17,2005: One word sums of this time in my life-PAPERWORK. Since I had done so much research earlier, I was prepared for the amount of paperwork that I was going to be doing. The problem I had was waiting on things to come back from the various agencies-the VA State Police, our marriage certificate, updating passports, fingerprint appointments, ect. I would have liked to hand carried everything and had it done on the spot. The waiting, at times, was terrible, I would rush home to check the mail hoping to find the things I needed. I wanted to get everything finished so we could be placed on the waiting list at FAC. Along with all the PW needed we also had our home study to do. That included even more paperwork and visits from our Social workers. On Dec 7, 2004 our home study was completed:). It only took a little over 3 months to complete our paperwork and on February 17, 2005 we were officially waiting for our little girl.