For those of you that would like an update about our interview with the adoption agency. It went pretty smooth, I think. Like I said in the previous post we had two different interviews. One with a pastor of the church, Pastor Mike and one with the adoption office social worker.

It was one of the most relaxing batch of interviews I have ever have. The first one with Pastor Mike was awesome, I think that Merriann and I learned a ton about Antioch Church and the Adoption center. Like the church has over 3500 members, the church was started with the focus of being a inter cultural (nice way of saying inter-racial) church in the greater Seattle area where all God’s children could come together and worship him. And the adoption agency is committed to removing every child from the foster care system, and to end the adoption “selling” of children. Oh, one other thing is for those of you that wanted to adopt international Antioch doesn’t preform that function as of now. They are, like I said before, committed to placing all kids in the Washington State foster care system first , then all the kids in the foster care system in the United States. So until that is done Pastor Mike didn’t think that would be doing international adoptions yet, but you never know what God has planned for them in the future.

In the first interview, it was mainly about our family’s relationship with Christ. How Merriann and I lived our life in faith as a couple first, then parents, and finally a family. For me it was really good to recount the blessings that God the Father and Christ the Son have done for us and to see how he has changed my heart over time.

The second interview was with a wonder woman whom for the life of me I can’t remember her name, well anyway we talked to her about day to day things like work history, school, family history, how we plan on raising of child, if we would be willing to adoption sibling, special needs children, did we want interracial children (Which is funny to us, that they even had to ask!!), and so on, and so on. Both interviews where not as hostile as I thought they may have been. To tell the truth it wasn’t hostile at all. It took us about two and a half hours to go through both of them and by them end we were still in a pretty good mood. It was like a date! 🙂

The next step for us in this process is to receive the next round of paperwork, sign up for the PRIDE (I have no clue what PRIDE stands for.) parental weekend training classes that are required in order to become foster parents in this great state and go from there. I think!!

Well, again we ask for you prayers.
Greg T.

Today I was looking through some pictures that Zoe took with her very own digital camera. Yes that is right our little girl has her own High Tech Sony digital camera. You maybe wondering how this wonderful event happened. Well, earlier this year when we were getting the garden ready for planting Zoe was helping Dad with the rototiller. It was a great photo opportunity so, I ran inside and grabbed our camera. See? Isn’t that a great picture?

I discovered the camera was too large to fit in my pocket and allow me to continue working so I set it down. Now, I am sure many of you have just had the, “oh, no” reflex that I should have had. We continued our work and headed inside. The next day were were so glad we had gotten so much yard work done the previous day because it was pouring rain. Not our normal Northwestern rain but POURING…for three days straight. After our little rain storm had subsided I was on my way to the mail box and discovered our camera resting comfortably on the wet grass. “Good one,” I thought to myself. I brought the camera in and, to no ones surprise, it didn’t work. I took it apart hoping that it may dry out. When Greg came home and I told him the news he was not worried about it…after all what better way to get a new camera. We got our new camera and had a lot of fun playing with it (the zoom is awesome!) After a week or so I saw our old camera laying there in pieces and said, “What the heck. Let’s see if it works.” And it did. We thought (briefly) about returning the new one but decided the upgrade was good. The old camera had been through a lot and we had had it for a long time. It has been a lot of fun to see what a 3 year old takes pictures of. She has taken a number of pictures I think are really good.

We have also discovered she loves feet! She takes pictures of everybodys feet.

Today we went down to Seattle, to Merriann’s brother Martin and Sister-in-law Susan’s baby shower it was pretty awesome to get to see everyone. And the landed ton of really good stuff for the baby.
Like Mark from California whom we hadn’t seen since before we got married. We hope that next summer we will be able to go down to his neck of the woods and visit. But who know what the future holds.

It was equally as fun to see the next generation of the family playing and having fun together.