Our next step

After recently requesting and then studying the files of three waiting children in Colombia, Robby and I felt particularly drawn to one of them and ultimately made the decision to ask about pursuing this child. We have been in talks with our agency about what it would look like to ask the adoption authorities in Colombia to adopt this child and have decided to move forward. Due to certain circumstances, we first had to have the permission of the head of our agency to bypass a particular restriction before continuing and on Friday we got the green light that we needed. This week we wrote a very long, very detailed letter of intent (LOI) to the adoption authorities in Colombia asking for permission to potentially adopt said child. The letter had to touch on many topics, such as our financial ability to care for the child, what our motivation is, the type of support we have in our community and with family and friends, what our day to day schedule looks like, what adoption education we have received thus far, what types of resources are available in our community for the child we are pursuing, etc, etc. That was not a fun or easy letter to write, but we managed to finish the rough draft after about four hours of work. Right now that letter is with our adoption agency who will make notes on where it needs editing. It should be complete and ready to send to Colombia (electronically, thankfully) next week and we should know if it is accepted or rejected within about a week, possibly a bit longer. If “approved”, it is an unofficial approval until we are finished with our dossier and have been matched with the child. An approval of an LOI is really just Colombia saying that there is a strong possibility that they would be willing to allow us to adopt that particular child. Nothing is official until it’s official, right? That’s certainly what we’ve learned during this process over the past three years.


So right now we are waiting to send that LOI to the adoption authorities and hope for that pre-approval. We are (cautiously) excited!