"It is my recommendation...."

Today we had our home study review, in fact I just walked through my door. It will be 12 weeks tomorrow since I had my individual, and final, interview. Let me tell you it has been an immense amount of waiting.

We are blessed to be here, and to have the amazing support system that we do. Kathy, our adoption coordinator, has been (and will continue to be) our guardian through all of the classes, certifications, stacks of forms, the brightly colored stickers indicating a required signature, phone calls, questions, emails, the waiting, ext. She was our instructor through our classes and she wrote our home study. I guess the benefit of having and abnormally long process, has been getting to know her for the past year of our lives. I have to admit I was a little sad leaving that final review, at the prospect of not speaking to her anymore. So I asked if that was the last time I would be seeing her and was pleasantly surprised to find out she will be with us through out most of the rest of this process. From matching us to our children, to disclosure, to visits, and placement, all the way through as far as the mind can take me. I am unbelievably relieved to have her help us through the rest of this. It's like finding out a beloved Aunt is going to see us through. We know (and have now been  v e r y  reassured after reading the home study) that she wholeheartedly supports us, believes in us, is excited for us, and wants us to adopt.

We don't have the official approval yet, but have been reassured that there is nothing in our file that makes denial remotely possible. Other than this blog and a few text's (to our parents and biggest supporters) we are not posting this day all over social media, making this day full of questions we wouldn't be able to answer. We are are letting our hearts be content with our news, and we'll tell the world when we have something firm to tell them.

As of today we are on the waiting list for our children. We have to potential of receiving a call tomorrow, yet I don't think I am fully wrapping my head around that possibility.
 A t  a l l.

A part of me has felt this entire time like our children are hypothetical. That they are my dream and that after every other delay this may never actually happen. Yet we have never been closer and even as I type this a warring side of myself is reminding me that they are out there, at this very moment, somewhere.

Waiting for us.

We are almost to them.

And the real journey starts.