Welcome to our Journey!

Hi to all of our friends and family!!

Joe and I wanted to start a web page to help journal our adoption journey, and thought it would be a lot of fun to share it with all of you, and with having family and friends in multiple states we figured this would be an easy way for everyone to keep up to date on our journey. I have to admit though, I have never been any good at keeping up journals, so if you visit the site and there has not been an update in a while please bug me to update. So here we go with our first blog......


Joe and I have chosen to do a domestic adoption, and have chosen to use an agency located in both Nevada and Utah. The reason for choosing an out of state agency was based on two reasons, the first is Utah and Nevada's adoption laws are more in favor of the adopting parents, and agency fees are on a sliding scale, which means they base our fees on our income. Joe and I breezed through the application and home studies, we both were shock at how fast we completed this because we were told to expect it to take several months, well it really only took a little over a month, but it was a stressful month. Joe and I have been officially waiting for our referral since the end of June, and when I say we are waiting for a referral we are waiting for a birthmother to select us to be her newborn baby's adoptive parents, and she does this by looking through what is called a lifebook, which is a scrapbook that Joe and I have made of our life, which includes pictures of us, our family, Sargent, and all our friends, and a Dear Birthmother letter [a personal letter written to the birthmother telling her about us]. Isabelle [our social working] stated that it can take an average 5 to 18 months to receive a referral. We recieve bi-weekly emails from Isabelle informing us of all the birthmothers that are currently with our agency and which ones have our lifebook, which I absolutely love because it gives us something to look forward to and helps break up the what could be a very long wait. So while Joe and I are waiting for our referral we are keeping ourselves busy by slowly starting to work on the nursery and have been doing a lot of discussing on what changes we are going to need to make once we bring home baby Marleau.

Along with working on the nursery we are planning our next fundraiser, which is being hosted by my mother Lisa. This fundraiser is a scrapbooking fundraiser and will be held on Sept. 26th. Please email me or my mom for the information if you are interested. There is also a ton of you that have asked us to do the caramel pretzels again, so we are tentatively talking about doing this for Halloween, I will keep everyone updated and let you know when I will need pre-orders by. We want to again thank everyone for coming out to our bowling fundraiser a few weeks ago, it was such a huge success and we all had a lot of fun, also thank you to everyone for all your garage sale donations, and to those who donated there time to help, we do still have a long way to go, but Joe and I feel blessed to have all of our family and friends to help us.

Till our next update..............

Love,

Joe, Traci and Sargie