We started gathering all our documents and information that we would need to start the adoption process in January 2006. The process seemed incredibly daunting at first, but I had the gift of an unofficial “personal adoption consultant”, in my good friend Stefanie, who adopted last year and was the seed of inspiration for our family! She was a wealth of knowledge and support, and we could not have done any of this as easily, quickly, and stress-free as it turned out to be, were it not for her and her endless patience with all my phone calls. Stefanie and Chris had adopted again this year, and strongly recommended their agency, Lifeline Children’s Services, which became the agency through which God brought us Grace. Karla, our social worker at Lifeline, also held our hands through the entire process, fielding my many, many emails.

We needed to collect new birth certificates, marriage certificates, letters of reference, medical reports, employment verifications, State criminal background checks, FBI background checks, child abuse registry reports, fingerprinting, income statements, write nurture plans and autobiographies, get a fire inspection done, and read oodles of material for both the homestudy and the adoption agency. Because I was born in Canada, it looked as though finding my birth certificate and then getting it certified and authenticated would be the most stressful part of the entire process. As I started to freak out over this, Stefanie pointed me to Pam Eidson, who ran a dossier service out of Florida and was an absolute gift from Heaven. She took immeasurable stress off of me and I could go back to just a normal level of excitement and minor chaos.

We went through our homestudy, and then the nail biting process of waiting on the USCIS to process our application to adopt an orphan, all the while waiting on news from China that we had received our PreApproval to come and adopt Grace.