More Good News

We have been on a roller coaster ride for the last week and a half! When we started our journey of adoption we thought it would take 1-2 years. I should have known that the Rutlands never take the boring route on anything.

As I stated in our last post, we put together our dossier in 24 hours. We have seen the hand of God at work in some amazing ways over this last week. First, in order for our dossier to come together that quick we have had to have some big obstacles overcome. Can I just tell you that when God is for you (and we know He is always for adoption), things happen that cannot be explained in any other way than by His Hand and His almighty power. Last Wednesday everyone who we needed to help us out was off work or in the place we needed them to be. We heard the phrase, "We don't normally do this, but..." more times than we could count! One of my favorite stories was about the lady from Texas who works at the Department of Family and Children Services. We met with our social worker on Monday to finalize our home study and she told us that it didn't look like we would be able to finsih the H.S. in time because she had forgotten that we needed the child abuse/neglect form filled out from Texas since we had lived there in the last five years. She said that it usually takes around 7 days to get back. Knowing that Texas has a reputation for being "difficult" and strict on everything, I felt completely defeated. I decided to call and I got Josephine on the phone. I explained our situation and asked her if we emailed the form or overnighted it, could she expidite our report. In a nutshell, she basically told me that she didn't know who I thought I was, but that she legally had 30 days to complete the report and that she could not help me because it would be unfair to all the 100's of others who also had requested this report. In the next breath, literally, she said, "This is what I am going to do for you. Get your forms notorized, scan them and email them to me and then overnight me the originals. I will go ahead and pull your info with the scanned copy. After I receive your originals I will email the results to your social worker and then mail you the originals." Are you serious? Her attitude changed in a matter of seconds. Now that is God's hand at work! We had the results in 24 hours exactly!

Pics above of ALL the paperwork we have had scattered all over our dining room for the last week. I was so proud of it when it all lined up across the table with no "gaps"! I had to take some pics of it. I had another set of paperwork on the other side that was going to our home study. It all looked so pretty lined up nice and neat!

The biggest story of all is the story of our dossier being submitted to court. Our director of our agency told us that she thought she could submit our case with scanned copies of our dossier. The plan was to finish everything we could minus our home study and send it over to be translated with a note that the scanned copy of the H.S. would follow via email later. There were things out of our control that we were waiting on in order to complete the home study. One form we needed came from an office in downtown Nashville that was affected by the flood. I am happy to say that God is bigger than all we can see and understand. Our case was submitted to court yesterday with our scanned copies. We got an email from our director with the word "wow" yesterday in the subject line and a short message saying we had indeed been submitted. There is still a possibility that it could get thrown out because of some things I do not want to write on our blog, but I am believing God on this one! We have seen Him work in too many miraculous ways this last week to not believe him.


We are now trying to "process" that we are about to become a family of 7! We are so excited to meet "S" and "J". We should know our court date in about 4 weeks. If all goes according to plan, it should be sometime is late June and if we pass the first time then we would travel in August to pick them up. This is the hard part...WAITING. I'm not good at it! For those of you wondering, I can't post any pics until after we pass court. I can tell you though that they are precious!