The Smoly Adventures

Hey everyone.  First off, life just plain gets in the way of posting blog entries with any sort of frequency. Between grad school for me, an inordinate amount of paperwork that we had to complete for our adoption, multiple family visits between October and January, time has gotten away from us. So where are we with in our whole adoption process?

We finally turned our paperwork into our agency in December, but due to Christmas and New Year's, we didn't start the actual interviews until January.  After three interviews with our social worker Rachel, and a bit of waiting, we got the formal notification yesterday that our home study was approved and that we're now in the waiting pool. But what does that mean...

Simply, we will start being shown to birth parents as soon as we complete our profile book and provide copies to Hope's Promise. We're about 75% done with our book (no thanks to a Shutterfly hiccup), and we're hoping to press the order button here in the next week or so. Once Hope's Promise has them, its truly a waiting game, but as a good friend told Janet on Facebook this morning "You know what this means? You're expecting :)"  We're just blessed that we get to experience the true depths of God's timeline for us in this process. We are trusting completely in his perfect timing for us and our future child. We're both so excited to have made it to this point in the process. It has been a long journey and we are so blessed to have all of you alongside us during this journey. 

Hey everyone! Since its almost the end of the month, its time for us to provide an update on where Janet and I sit in our adoption process.  In a word: paperwork. There is just so much of it. We're working our way through the last set of documentation that we need to provide for this round of paperwork (I'm expecting that there will be others), but we are making progress. We're presently hoping to have all our paperwork by the mid- to end of September. Even though we've been stuck in this paperwork phase, we have managed to make some significant progress.

As of this afternoon, we've secured the necessary funding for the second half of our adoption costs.  What this means is that our goal for our Denver Rock & Roll Marathon fundraiser just became that much more achievable. We're just under a month away from race day and our new fundraising target is $7000. It is our hope and prayer that you, our friends and family will be able to join us in our journey toward bringing our little one home.

For those of you who are able, here is the link to our fundraising site: http://fnd.us/c/3L2v5

Alternatively, if you so desire, you can send us a check in the mail.

We hope all of you have had a blessed summer with your families and friends.

Hey everyone. It's been a couple of weeks since our last update, and Janet and I have been incredibly busy. First, both of us got the flu shortly after our last blog entry and we were in bed for the better part of a week each, including the Memorial Day long weekend. Second, the Wednesday after Memorial Day Janet's sister and brother-in-law, Laura and Brian, flew into Colorado for the start of our family vacation. Laura and Brian stayed with us at our house until Janet's mom and stepdad flew in late Friday evening. The collected family (minus Cindy and Tim; We missed you that week!) spent the week of June 4th at Janet's extended family's cabin up outside Estes Park (Janet will post that update soon). It was such a great week to spend time with everyone! As we were preparing to leave last Saturday, Brian spotted something quite unusual and unsettling:


Little did we know at the time, but we imaged the High Park Fire (#HighParkFire for you Twitter followers) when it was only 200 acres. By the time we returned to Colorado Springs and check the reports, the fire had already grown to nearly 3000 acres. Now a week later, its sitting at over 54,000 acres, and is presently the 3rd largest fire in Colorado state history.

As far as our adoption paperwork goes, we haven't had an opportunity to work on it with all the business of the last couple of weeks. We're planning to get working on that today.

Janet and I had our first official home study appointment with Hope's Promise this past week. Wow... I (we) knew that there was alot of paperwork, but neither of us had a full appreciation for the level of detail we would encounter. While we were able to complete some of the required forms right there during the meeting, we still returned home with a 1.5" thick binder of additional paperwork we needed to complete. Needless to say, we are going to be fairly busy over the coming months.

On a related note, Janet and I have decided that we will be conducting a fundraiser for our adoption. More to come on this in a future blog post.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”