How is it going? That is a question that I have been asked quite a bit lately. I will say at this point it is pretty tiring. We have been spending nights working on paper work trying to get it done as quickly as possible. It seems as though the questions will not end. We are slowly working our way through them. Two weeks ago we had our first Homes Study visit. It went very well and Linda and I both liked the social worker that we will be working with throughout the process. She came and sat down at our dinning room table and pulled out a big thick folder with about 2 inches worth of paper in it. At that point my heart sank. I thought "How are we supposed to get through all that paper work?". Fortunately that was just reading material. The other stack that was about 3/4 of an inch was the actual paper work. I thought to myself "That's no problem, we will knock that out in no time!". Little did I know that in that stack of paper lay every thing anyone ever wanted to know about me or even think they want to know about me. As you can imagine that smaller stack did not turn out to be as quick and painless as I would have liked, however we are moving through it. Today was a very productive day for us.
Yesterday Linda and I went to the post office to give them our passport applications. Its official, they have been turned over to the Government and we should be getting them back in 4-6 weeks according to the website that appeared to be updated daily. After lunch we all loaded up to get our pre-adoption physicals. That turned out to be pretty painless and was another thing that we were able to check off our list. It is fun marking stuff off.
Today was our second home study visit. This visit contained all of the training that is required by the State of Illinois in order for us to adopt. It was a pretty long day however it was much less painless than I thought it was going to be. We turned some papers into our social worker and she gave us some back. Below is a picture of the paper that we have received to this point minus the 20 or so pages that we signed and gave to her today!
Many people have asked if there is anything they can do to help. Honestly the first and probably the most important thing we could ask of you is to pray. Please pray for us through this process, that we are able to get everything accomplished in a timely fashion. Also pray for him as he does not yet know that we are traveling down the path to bring him into our family forever. We have estimated the costs of the adoption being between $35,000 and $39,000. The range of the estimate is due to the three trips overseas that are part of the overall costs and those costs fluctuate. As you can see above we are on our way financially to bringing him home. We had no idea what God had in store for use when we chose him out of a photo listing last fall. We did not think that we would be led down this path. With that being said, we have not been saving up for the day that we could one day adopt a child. We were able to come up with $15,000 of our own money to get the process going. To date we have had $5125 donated to our effort to bring him home. It is very difficult for us to ask for this financial assistance but we know that we will not be able to bring him home on our own. If you would please consider making a tax-deductible gift on our behalf to help offset the cost of our adoption.
Click here to contribute online or by mail. Please specify in the designation box that the gift is for the Ryan and Linda Henry Adoption Fund, doing so will insure that it goes into our account.
Susan Dack if a Mary Kay consultant that we met during our host training. She has offered 100% of the proceeds of any order that has "Henry" in the "Promo or Event Code" box. There is a $5 shipping charge for every order. If you wish to order from her you can do so by
clicking here!
We will also be having a Pampered Chef online party as well during the month of march, so you can stay tuned for that.
Thank you all again!
