Kellen’s Story: Approved

A long time ago, in fact over a year ago, Spencer and I started discussing when to start the adoption process again. We thought about it, prayed about it, and eventually decided that we would try to get approved shortly after M turned one. LDSFS requires that adoptive couples wait one year from the time of placement to be approved again (though couples can begin the approval process before the year mark, their profile will not be published until the year is up).

Deciding when to add to your family is always a personal decision, and we didn’t say a lot about it until we were well in the midst of the approval process/practically completed it I think (which, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, is quite extensive and time consuming, especially when you add a busy toddler to the mix of the piles of paperwork). Therefore, the approval process took us several months longer than the first time around. Our caseworker told us that our wait would likely be longer than last time since we already had a child. We were fine with that, and decided that we would just do what we could do on our end to spread the word.  

We had our home study in the very beginning of August when Mason was about sixteen months old. The home study was pretty much the last step of our approval process and we anticipated that our profile would go live shortly thereafter. Our caseworker told us she was going out of the country on vacation right after she completed our home study, and let us know it may be a few weeks before she could get everything finished up and post our profile online. Therefore, we were surprised when our profile went live just a couple of days later. Our caseworker later told me that she had felt prompted that she needed to get our profile posted right away, so she actually did some work for us while she was on vacation with her family, something she never usually did. I’m so grateful that she followed that prompting, because we were contacted by Kellen’s birthmom just four days after our profile went live.

I know that’s really fast, and really unusual, and I know how blessed we are that things happened so quickly. I even waffled a bit on whether or not to share the exact time frame, but decided that it was an important part of our story because it reminds me just how much the Lord had a hand in Kellen’s birthmom finding us.

We were shocked that we had been contacted so quickly, but excitedly began emailing back and forth with Kellen’s birthmom. It was funny because we had only recently told our family that we were approved and asked them to share our profile before it was gone! I had even begun a blog post announcing that we were approved, but our profile was taken down before I could share it. We had several curious family members who noticed that our profile was missing and had asked us what was going on. My sister, Shari, was the first one to notice and I knew she would be! She always seems to know these things before I even tell her. We are grateful that we have always been so supported throughout our adoption journey and that friends and family have taken such an interest in helping spread the word. 

We continued communication with Kellen’s birthmomma and got excited every time we had an email from her. She was easy to like, fun to chat with, and we enjoyed getting to know her little by little…