Little Update!

So as of Wednesday November 28th, we will have ALL our paperwork done. We'll ship off the last final documents to our social worker so she can complete the writing of the home study. In the meantime, we are scrapbooking, profile making fools. These books take a lot of time...and every freaking time I get one assembled...I find a typo. That really sucks. Anyway, by the end of next week, we shuld be mailing out several books, and we expect to match sometime in the next 4 weeks to 3 months. It could be longer, it could be shorter. After our match, we'll likely have about 2 months to go till delivery. We are really hoping for a delivery in the early part of 2008.
The other birth mother we submitted on has decided two things. She want's an African American Couple, or at least a biracial couple. That's fine, that is totally her choice. She also decided that since they couldn't find any of those (AA and bi-racial couples have almost no wait time to match, unless they are gender specific because they are in high demand) she wasn't going to choose at all. If the baby is born, and they still haven't found a couple that she likes, she will let the agency choose. We'll just have to wait it out I guess...we could be matched by the time she has that baby....
AND we thought of another girls name we like, but no middle name yet.
Ella.
I love it :)

It's Really...REAL!

So today Mike was at home. He took vacation time today and tomorrow, so he could work on the house before the home visit on Wednesday. He took EVERYTHING out of the garage, and put it in the driveway. It's only been two years here in this house...how do we have that much stuff in the garage??? He decided to lay a cement floor in the back of the garage (our garage is two cars deep, and the second one back was a dirt floor) He mixed and poured 16 80lb bags, and he was only half done the floor, so him and Brad ran to Home Depot to get more. It is almost 8PM...they just got back, and everything is still in the driveway. I hope it doesn't rain.
On the adoption home front, the most wonderful, amazing thing happened today! I know I said I "gave" Mike the financing ball and expected him to run with it...but who was I kidding? Everyone that knows me even a little knows that I am control freak when it comes to things that are important to me. This adoption is very, very important to me. He wanted to wait the 10 days to hear back from a loan we applied for. I basically said, if they are taking 10 days to get back to us, we didn't get it. We were looking into personal loans at this point, because we were told we didn't have enough equity in the house for a home equity loan, since the real estate market has gone down so much. On a whim I went on to Bank of America, and checked out their programs, and started talking with a rep on line. They had two programs, a Home Equity Loan (where they put all the money right into your checking account) or a Home Equity LINE....meaning you can write checks from it, or use a special CC, and then as you continue paying it back, you can use the $ again. For the first 10 years, you can only pay interest if you want to. So she encourages me to apply, and this equity line sounds so perfect for us (we really only need to carry the amount till we get the tax credit, which would be in 2009 most likely) I explained that I wasn't sure we had enough equity and gave her the whole run down of what the other place (who we have our actual mortgage through) said. Turns out the other place told us that a home equity loan or line was a standard 25K minimum. We didn't quite have 25K in equity, BUT with Bank of America we did get approved for....
$20,400.....
Enough for the actual adoption. The home study fees we have in savings, and the travel (if we have to) and post adoption monitoring we'll have to pay another way....it was still very, very good news. I had been getting worried about the financing. Now I know...we WILL be adopting. I can really start to look at situations in our price range. I actually started crying when we were approved. Sometimes it seems like this is going to good to be true. I fully expect we'll have a disruption or two, but I can know for sure now. We will be bring home a baby to this house :) It was a very good day. I'm going to go have some chocolate and watch the guys pour cement.

Good News on the Adoption Front!

After a delay in getting started our social worker is pushing us through super fast. We are already half done our home study appointments, and we'll be done the other two by October 28th at the latest :) It will take time to write it all, and get all our background checks and everything back, but the visits will be done, and that means we can start looking for adoption situation...well right after we get the financing squared away. Mike is taking the ball and running with that one, so hopefully we'll have some answers on that next week. Just thought I would let you all know we have moved forward on the homes study. :)