Waiting on the Puppies and Adoption Stuff

Copper is due any minute.  Today is Day 63, if my calculations are correct.  Puppies are usually born between day 62 and day 64 gestation.  We should have puppies today or tomorrow.  Or we could have them at the most inconvenient time ever, on Monday.  She's getting pretty restless today, so we may see puppies later on this weekend.  I'll be sure to post pictures once they're here.

Our 9th anniversary was Wednesday.  Mike took off work that day and we all went to the health department to get TB skin tests and then took Rachel and Porter, along with Mike, to get physicals.  We had to get all that done to finish up some paperwork items.  That afternoon, I told Mike we needed to get some stuff taken care of in the back yard, including taking the swings down from the swingset because they had been chewed by the dogs and couldn't be used.  He heard, "take the swingset down."  So we spent a good hour taking down the swingset.  It's amazing how much faster you can get that stuff down than it takes to set it up!  We'd been planning on taking it down anyway.  The wood was not good and the kids got lots of splinters nearly every time they played on it.  It wasn't horrible and didn't need to totally come down before our home study, but it did. :)  Oh well. Then the kids and I cleaned up sticks, various little trash pieces, and dog poo out of the back yard.  What a lovely, romantic way to spend our anniversary! :)  Then Thursday was our home study.  It went great, I think.  The lady that did it was the one who did our training these past several weeks and she also goes to our church, so I was not nervous at all for her to come over.  I feel very comfortable with her.  We have to do a couple more things before we're finished with licensing, including getting Mike in for CPR and first aid training, but once we've got all that stuff done, we're good to go.

At first, we thought we would want a boy that was younger than Rachel - preschool age for sure.  The more we've been in our classes and the further we've gotten in this process, our age has progressively increased.  We really feel like God is not calling us to foster an infant.  He may not even be calling us to foster a preschooler.  We look online at some of these kids who are ready to be adopted now and our hearts are stirred by the elementary age kids.  Those kids who have so much of their lives in front of them, but are so unlikely to be adopted, simply because they aren't babies.  Because we're more open to older kids, there's a chance that we could be able to go directly to adoption rather than having to foster-only first.  With the way the states go, the children have to be in our home for at least 6 months before we can legally adopt them - even if their parents' rights have already been terminated.  If we take a child who's parents' rights have not yet been terminated, we risk having that child go back to their bio parents.  That's pretty much going to be the case if we wait for a preschool age child.  If we choose a child who's on one of the Heart Galleries in Arkansas or anywhere in America, one who is a bit older, the parents rights have been terminated already and therefore negates the risk of them going back to their bio parents.  That in itself is a strong pull for us to consider adopting an older child.  We are looking constantly at all the kids who are ready to be adopted.  We wish we had enough space and financial means to take a hundred kids!  Our hearts break for all these kids!!  We are just in prayer right now that God will show us the plan that He has already laid out for us and that we'll have eyes to see and ears to hear what He has in store for us.  We want to be wise.  We want to be obedient.  And we can't wait to meet the child God has already chose for our family!