Some exciting news!

To Everyone who is reading this, thank you so much for your interest in this new step in our lives! Brian and I are exciting for the opportunity to begin this adoption journey and we look forward to keeping you up to date on the process. We will begin by telling you a little bit about how we came to this decision and where we are at in the process. Kristen has always had adoption on her heart, long before we started our family back in 2009! As things progressed with having our biological family, adoption took a back seat as we became slightly overwhelmed with the adjustment to having a new baby, then a toddler and a new baby, and then 3 children under 3.5! Lots of change and adventure in a pretty short period of time! To break that timeline down, we were married in November of 2008....363 days later we were blessed with our older daughter, Skylar Jane. 20 months after that our second daughter, Emory Margaret entered the world, and 21 months after that we had a son, Colton Christopher. Now, the kids are 6.5, 5, and 3. They definitely keep us busy, but we felt like we were at a point were we had a decent handle on our family and we could start to envision adding one more child to the crew! As soon as Brian gave the green light on learning more about adoption, Kristen had an agency and a country all picked out. That's a slight exaggeration, maybe :) We have been going to the Austin Stone Community Church for quite awhile (Brian since 2006 and Kristen since 2008) and adoption and caring for the orphan has always been something we have heard a lot about from the pastors at the Stone. Once we decided we wanted to look into this more, it seemed natural to start with the agencies affiliated with the Stone. We decided to go with Generations Adoption (headquartered in Waco, but they have an Austin office as well) and of the international programs the offer, Burundi, Africa seemed like the best fit! We knew we were not being called to adopt a new born, which is the only domestic option without going through the foster system. After researching both the foster to adopt option and international adoption, it seemed like international adoption was the best fit for our family. Burundi was the only African country that our agency has a history of working with, so that is how we came upon Burundi. So Generations is helping us prepare all of our documents and doing our home study, which is almost complete! They partner with the International Child Foundation (ICF) who is technically our primary agency. ICF is based in Arizona and they have been doing adoptions in Burundi for awhile now. They have a lawyer, Pierre, who is on staff and on the ground in Burundi to help with this whole process. Many families have gone through this process before so we have much confidence moving forward! In the next few months we will have our home study complete and will hopefully receive our I-800A Approval letter from USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). Once we receive those, we will send over our dossier package with all of the necessary documents to the Burundi Central Authority. Because Burundi is a Hague Country, all adoptions go through the Central Authority of the Government. This is a good thing because we know the children are protected from corrupt adoptions, but it can be slow! The Central Authority has committee meetings in which they match waiting families with available children (this is called a referral). The meetings do not happen on a regular basis, so we have no idea how long this process may take. There was much political unrest at the beginning of the year so the committee did not meet at all! The committee met again in June and we are hoping for more regular meetings coming up in the future, but there is no way to tell! Once you have a referral, you are matched with that child and we will travel to Burundi to meet him (that's right, him! We requested a boy!). From that point, we will come home and our son will remain in Burundi for 3-6 months while everything is legally finalized. Then we will return to Burundi to get our son, take him over to Kenya to finalize paperwork at the US Embassy, and then we will travel home! This process could take 1-3 weeks. So all in all, the referral could happen in the next few months or the next few years. We know the process can take quite some time which is why we are beginning it now. We want our adopted son to be close in age to our biological children so we figured if we start now, hopefully he will fall somewhere in the mix! We did request a 1-4 year old, so we shall see! Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we work through this process! We are so lucky to feel the support we have already felt and we will be sure to continue to add updates as we have them! Much love, Brian and Kristen