In the meantime, we're so blessed to have had the opportunity to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary on 9/25/09 with a little getaway to New Mexico (Santa Fe and Taos) and Colorado (Pagosa Springs). We took a flight to a tiny airport in Durango, Colorado then rented a car to get to our 3 destinations and take in all the scenery.
It was the perfect time to visit Northern NM and Colorado because the Fall colors were just starting to peak, especially the abundant Aspen trees with their gold leaves. We took side roads (that's often bumpy) to optimize our chances of catching the spectacular views and even got a glimpse of some wildlife along the way.
We pretty much had the road to ourselves most of the time so we decided to take some pictures with our beloved tripod. We're hoping to use a couple of the pictures (below) in our adoption profile book because the moments were so meaningful for us. Overall, we had an amazing vacation...and a much-needed one, too! :)
After we got back from vacation, we totally fell into "procrastination mode" for a few weeks. But, we're back!! So far, we completed our First Aid and Adult/Child/Infant CPR certification and two online courses on adoption. Steve finished his physical and I'll be finished with mine hopefully by next week. We're also scheduled to have our FBI clearance Live Scan at the local police station on Tuesday. We're almost done gathering all our letters of recommendation. We feel the most draining aspect of the home study is the questionnaires. All the questions that really require us to take an in-depth observation into every aspect of our personal lives and thoughts -- from childhood to our hopes and goals for the future. We'll be so relieved once those are done. Then we'll have to sign various release forms and get a few of them notarized. The goal is to submit at least two-thirds of the required by the end of November so we can get scheduled for another interview and home visit/inspection. We'd like to finish our Home Study sometime in January.On the adoption facilitator side, I started working on the design and layout of our Profile book a couple of months ago but haven't really focused on just sitting down and getting all the pages done. But, I was so determined today and spent the whole day just working on it and finally we're DONE!!!! Our Profile book consist of 9 main pages plus a couple more pages of letters of recommendations. I also bought ribbons and embellishments for the binding and I'm excited to see how everything will come together once I have the pages printed. But here's a little preview...(click on picture for larger view).
I plan to get the pages printed and bound on Monday then mail one sample hard copy to Lifetime Adoption for review and approval. Once approved, we'll have the fun task of making 50...yes, f-i-f-t-y...more profiles. After that, the exciting part happens...we will start getting presented to birth mothers!! *so excited*
