From Hope to Reality

• The Asst. Director of the agency we are using just returned form a trip to Uganda. She is our contact person for the Uganda program. If you care to read about her trip and see a few pics of some adorable kiddos from the baby's home they use there, the blog is called From Hope to Reality. Many orphanages in Uganda are referred to as baby's homes; even though they have children many years older than what we'd consider a "baby".

• Not much new here other than waiting for appointments later this week to get our physicals. After our physicals are turned in, our home study will be assigned a social worker and she will begin our interviews. They are very in depth....she will interview Nick and me separately for about an hour and a half each and then the following day or two, she will interview us together for another hour and a half. She will also interview one of the families that wrote us a letter of recommendation. At our intake interview, we were told that once we have a social worker assigned, we are near the end of the home study.

• We began working on our adoption education a few days ago. The state of Maryland requires 10 hours at a minimum before our home study can be released. We are using an e-learning program from Adoption Learning. I think I started with the most depressing module of all 5....It was called Adopting the Older Child and it pretty much pointed out every possible issue we could have in doing so and failed to mention many of the negatives. While I know this is the right thing for us, I've had to do some reading about fear and overcoming that today.