4plusmore

Look at that - it's been 9 months since you've heard from us! Turns out that's exactly the same amount of time it's been since we've heard anything from Jamaica.

We'll be honest - we have no idea what's going on over there. And while we've found at least one super nice lady who does actually return my emails there at the CDC, the answer is always the same.

"No we haven't found a child for you and we have no timeline or idea when that will be."

We understand that international adoption is a long process, and we've never expected it to go perfectly. We just thought - you know - we'd be contacted by someone without us having to make phone calls and emails just to get a response.

To be fair, you can't work with an agency when adopting from Jamaica so all communication is directly with the government. And it sounds like they really have their hands full.

The last thing we want to do is start spreading rumors about timelines and processes and things we don't really know for sure about so I'll just say this: It's going to be a while before we can bring home a child (or children) from Jamaica.

Finding the line between patience and action is really hard with adoption. Do we try to adopt from another country? Do we wait it out in Jamaica? Do we try something else? Do we give up?

One reason we haven't written anything in so long is that we literally didn't know what to do. We talked with other people who had adopted and fostered, researched other countries to adopt from, talked to agencies and prayed a lot.

No other countries felt right and none of the agencies we talked to really clicked with us.

It was time to step back and re-evaluate. We both still felt like Jamaica was where we should adopt from. But we wanted to help kids now. Not years from now.

So what are we doing? We're going to start fostering classes in January to open our home to kids here in our area. Yeah it's a totally different thing that adopting internationally (that's probably a subject for an entirely different post), but it lets us help kids now while we wait on our adoption in Jamaica.

Right, we're not giving up on that. At least not now. Who knows - we may end up adopting one of our foster kids. And then our kids from Jamaica. Or maybe not. It's useless to predict the future. We're just along for the ride.

So in the meantime we need all the prayers you can muster for us to make the right decisions and that the right kids are brought into our house. Hopefully once we finish our fostering classes we'll have more to share on a regular basis!

Thanks guys, we love you all!

Jonathan, Ashley, Adali, Jett, Jax & Ada