Progress and Quandries!

Big progress! Our homestudy update is COMPLETE. I will be driving to Portland today to pick up four official copies (and a couple other dossier documents). Our USCIS (immigration) I800A (application to adopt internationally) will be mailed TODAY. The wait to get permission is about 12 weeks, but we’re praying for shorter. Once we get that application, we hope to be ready in every other way to mail off our dossier to Eastern Europe! Honestly, after that I don’t know the time frame.

As Brian is fond of saying, everything is written in jello. We try to be flexible.

About the quandary. If you hadn’t noticed, Brian helped me update our sidebar a bit. It has a link to Reece’s Rainbow, will soon have a link to “our” page on Reece’s Rainbow and there’s also a summary of the expenses associated with our adoption. It costs around $23K to adopt (I’m hoping for closer to $20K, but planning for $23). We’ll get a tax refund in 2012 when we file our taxes of about 13K if we are able to complete this adoption before 2011 is over. That seems a very reasonable ransom to very probably save the life of a child or at the least, change their life radically for the better. To adopt a second child at the same time, the cost is $0-$4000 more. That’s it. And you get the $13K tax refund for them too, which puts you in a much better financial position for your future.

So how do you balance what you feel capable of doing against saving the life of a child, but going farther out of your comfort zone? Right now, our rational side feels much more comfortable with adopting one, not two. It definitely is safer…. in the sense of feeling like we can provide emotionally and physically. But it breaks my heart to leave behind another one that has need and that we are prepared to bring home. Pray for us. Pray that God’s will would be clear to us and that we would trust Him, WHATEVER His will for us is.