I haven’t shared much about our second adoption process and that’s because there just hasn’t been much to share. If you can believe it, we’re not even “officially” waiting for a referral of Lil’ Cowgirl yet.

Bleh.

I don’t know if it’s because things have changed so much in the three years since our first process, or if it’s that our agency doesn’t feel the need to woo us a little now that we are a returning family, but we have been a little disappointed by the lack of details we’ve been given and the delayed responses we’ve been getting.

After submitting our application in early June, we were notified that there had been some changes made to some of the forms and we had to redo them. We submitted those and then we were notified again that there was a change that they didn’t catch and a different form had to be resubmitted.

Finally, over a month later, our application was complete and our clearances were received by our agency and they let us know that they were ready for our next payment so we could begin our homestudy. A good chunk later, our homestudy fee was paid and we waited to hear from our assigned social worker.

That took a month.

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And finally, nearly three months after our application was first submitted, the first of our three homestudy visits was scheduled for this week. We hope to be finished with our visits by mid-September and we hope our homestudy will be written and completed by mid-October. Once our homestudy is written and completed, it will be sent to Korea and we will then be *officially* waiting for a referral of a sweet Lil’ CG. When we handed in our application, we were hoping to have our homestudy in Korea by now and were wishing for a very special Christmas present in the form of Lil’ CG’s picture and referral, but at this point, we’ll be lucky if we have a referral by Valentine’s Day.

We’ve tried to be very zen about our second process because we knew from the start that it would take at least 2 years. We’ve resigned ourselves to waiting because we know that in the end, we will have Lil’ CG home (and we’ve certainly got our hands full with Lil’ CB in the meantime!), but it’s rather irritating that the initial process before the wait is taking so darn long.

I suppose small steps are steps nonetheless, but we thought our process would begin with a slow jog (or at least a leisurely walk!) before the long wait to bring Lil’ CG home really began… there’s nothing we can do though, so we’ll take those steps, no matter how small.

Lil’ CB is waiting for his little sister, too… he paused on a recent walk and said, “I’m picking flowers for my baby sister, mommy!” My heart is mush.