A Setback...or Not?

On Monday, I thought I'd email our adoption worker to see if we'd made any progress as we wait for our fingerprint clearances.  She beat me to it, though.  She emailed because our clearances are still taking their sweet time and she wanted to follow up on as many as she could.  And, she was missing the receipt that showed that Jeff had been scanned for the foster clearance.  Back when we got this done at the turn of the year, each of us had to fill out three forms in triplicate (yes, nine forms apiece) and have our prints scanned.  As I looked through the copies of all these forms in my file, I realized that we had somehow missed this one for Jeff and he hadn't gotten that particular scan.

I couldn't believe it.  After all this work, and trying to be so careful and double-check everything, how had we missed-for more than two months-that Jeff needed one more fingerprint scan?  I was so upset.  In my mind, that set our clock right back to where we had started in December-starting from scratch on waiting to be certified as a waiting family.  I ate more than a few Hershey's kisses that day and shed a few tears, too.  Most of the time, I've been OK with the setbacks, but this time, I didn't take it very well.

Jeff talked all the details over with Sangeeta and got his foster scan the next morning.  He found out that our clearances are taking an unusually long time, especially mine, although I got my prints scanned first.  Grrrr!  He also found out that this setback won't actually set us back as far as being certified as a waiting family so that birth parents can look at our profile-so that's good and we're thankful.

Sangeeta also emailed yesterday and suggested that the staff at Bethany show our profile locally, right now, to prospective birth moms who are early in their pregnancies, with the understanding that, by the time they give birth, we'll be cleared.  So that's great news.  Of course we said "yes" to that!  We have been praying that God would hurry our fingerprint clearances through, and he hasn't answered the prayer in the way that we had hoped, but maybe this is his own way of answering, and getting our profile in birth moms' hands anyway.  Our hope is that, soon, our profiles will be seen by birth moms in our state and on the Internet, too, and this is a happy step in that direction.

Thank you for all your prayers, and we hope you'll pray along with us that our fingerprints will clear and we'll be matched with a baby soon.  And we continue to pray for our birth parents, although we haven't me them yet.  However, there is a couple we know of that had a failed placement-the birth mom changed her mind after they had had the baby for some time.  As you can imagine, that nearly broke their hearts.  We don't know them personally, but our paths cross with some of the people that they also know.  As much as we're hoping to welcome a baby into our family soon, we hope and pray that this couple has a match before we do.  We don't want to increase their heartache if we can help it.