Where to begin...

Well, this blog has been in my mind for quite a while now, but I have been waiting for just the right time to start it. I guess now is just about as good a time as any! If you found this blog I will assume you figured out that we are in the process of adopting. It has been a long journey so far and we are still figuring out just where God is leading us through this process. One thing is for sure... we are learning a lesson in PATIENCE.
I guess the best place to start will be with a little background about our journey to where we are now. Ben and I had felt for a while that we were being called to adopt but we didn't know where to begin. We knew that an international adoption was out of the question because of the travel involved. It would have been nearly impossible for Ben to take the time off to travel to another country during his time in command. We prayed a lot about it and in December of 2010 we finally took a leap of faith and decided to contact a local adoption agency which arranged domestic infant adoptions. Due to the holidays we actually had to wait until January of 2011 to contact the agency, but once we did they helped us gain a better understanding of the whole domestic adoption process and what we would need to do before we would be eligible to adopt in Washington state.
We began by getting fingerprinted for an FBI background check, signed a lot of consent forms for background checks in all FIVE states that we have lived in during the past five years, and finally attended PRIDE training. If you are not familiar with PRIDE it is a 30 hour, four day course that covers lots of adoption and foster care related topics. It was painful! But, we knew that it would all be worth it once we had the newest member of our family home with us.
During PRIDE training we began to be interested in pursuing an adoption of a child who was a little bit older and had been in state foster care. Because we don't know for sure when we will be moving again we are not good candidates for foster-to-adopt, but we are eligible to adopt a child who is legally free. This basically means that they have been in the foster system for a while and their birth parents no longer have any rights, the child belongs to the state. So, this opened another door for us.
In May or June we found out from the agency we had been working with that they were overloaded with families and probably wouldn't be accepting applications for new families until sometime in 2012. That definitely wasn't going to work for us since we can't predict when we may be leaving Washington. So, the hunt was on for a new agency. At least now we knew that we could look for one that also provided the option of adopting legally free children from foster care. Again, God quickly provided us with the name of a wonderful agency called Antioch Adoptions. We loved everything about them from the beginning! I won't go into it all here, but you should take the time to look at their website and read all about how they got started (http://www.antiochadoptions.org/). We knew we HAD to be a part of this amazing adoption story!
So, in June we attended their introduction class. We quickly returned our application and began speaking with the agency. They graciously agreed to take us on despite all of the challenges of working with a military family. We were thrilled!
Now we are working on background checks, getting ready for our homestudy, doing interviews... and generally just preparing our hearts and home for the wonderful little family that God has in mind for us! (Oh, and did I mention that we said we would take TWO kiddos?)

Thanks for following us on this CRAZY ride!
There is a lot more to tell...but you will just have to wait for a little while on that part! :)

Love,
Ben, Emily and Hunter