Starting our Homestudy!

Our second adoption just seems to be going so fast for us! We sent Holt our initial application on Sunday, January 27th and heard that we were given approval to begin the process on Tuesday, January 29th. We were surprised to get a call only two days later!

It took us until March 24th to complete all of the homestudy paperwork. (This is mostly all of the paperwork required to adopt from Korea since there is no dossier process for this program.) The paperwork included questions about our respective childhoods and our parenting styles, physicals, an FBI background check, sex offender check, birth certificates, etc. Sara's parents had to watch Aaron one Friday night into Saturday morning for us to get enough time to complete everything. Thanks, Mom and Dad!!

We completed our first 4 classes of Adoptive Parent Training on April 4th and 5th. It was fun to meet so many other couples who were adopting from Korea through Holt. It was an interesting class because the students all had so much experience with adoption related issues. Our class included students who were adoptees themselves, 2 couples (including us) who had adopted previously, a couple in which the husband had adopted siblings, and a woman who grew up in India who married an American man (She was able to provide some insight into living in a new culture). All of us could have practically hosted the class ourselves once we combined all of our unique experiences!!! We were able to attend this class because Chip's parents watched Aaron while we attended. Thanks, Mom and Dad!!

Tomorrow we officially begin our homestudy. We will most likely have two homestudy meetings, one this Thursday and one the following Thursday. It amazes me to think that we are already this far along in the process! I told Chip tonight that I wanted to begin thinking about decorating another nursery!! Yea!

We are so blessed that God chose us to be parents through adoption. It was His plan for us all along and we feel amazed to see what joy and fulfillment it brings to our lives. God chose Aaron as a perfect fit for our family and we can't wait to see who the new addition will be!

I would guess we may get a referral another year from now or so. We'll keep you all updated as we know more!

Salsa

Just had to share a funny picture... We went out for Mexican this week, and discovered that Aaron loves salsa! He will dip the chip in the salsa, suck the salsa off the chip and then re-use the same chip to go after more salsa!

Our Announcement!

Well there's been a lot of stuff happening around here the last several months. I know we haven't been very good about blogging, but hopefully that'll get better sometime!

But real quick, we wanted to share some exciting news with everyone... We've decided to start our second adoption process! We are in the midst of filling out the paperwork to adopt a baby boy or girl from South Korea. We sent in our first application form back at the end of January, but we're just now getting most of the paperwork going (it's a lot harder to find time to fill out paperwork these days!). We thought and prayed a lot about this, especially about which country to adopt from. We loved our experience adopting Aaron from Vietnam and he has been such a blessing to our lives. However, the U.S. and Vietnam aren't getting along right now (as far as international adoptions are concerned) and the whole situation is very unstable (and slow). In contrast, South Korea is a very stable program (and South Korea doesn't require us to compile a dossier - so there's a LOT less paperwork!).

One of the hard things about making that decision was that we have to use a different adoption agency (we loved using CHI), but this time we're using Holt. Thankfully, Holt has an office right here in town, so it does make our process a lot easier. We don't know much yet, only that our baby could be a boy or girl, typically 8-12 months old or so. We probably won't get a referral (picture) until January or February of 2009, and be able to bring him/her home around July/August of 2009. Aaron will be about 3 years old by the time he/she comes home, so there will be about two years age difference between them.

Oh yes, Happy Easter! Here are a few pictures of Aaron recently with some Easter presents from his grandparents. Hopefully we'll get a few more cute pictures tomorrow. :)

His t-shirt says "When God made me, he was just showing off". :)

Here's a quick slideshow of some pictures from this month (click on it to see the full size pictures)

Welcome to our New Blog!

Hi Everybody!

I hope you're able to find our new blog easily enough. Our old blog location had a yearly fee, so we decided to expand the scope (beyond just Aaron) and make a more permanent Needham Family Blog. We're pretty excited about some of the fun features of this blog (notice the picture gallery on your right and the family video section below!).

If you want to catch up on old news, our old blog is still at its old location, but I'm not sure how much longer they'll keep it up. Maybe we'll get ambitious and try to transfer the posts to this blog just for history's sake. :)