Definitely soulmates!

When Jeff and I were filling out the paperwork for our formal application, we both had to answer a cross-cultural parenting questionaire and a self-study questionaire. The cross-cultural parenting questionaire dealt with questions about our feelings about race, discrimination, being a minority, the country we are adopting from, how we will embrace her culture and traditions, and general issues related to parenting a child from another country/race. The self-study questionaire was more of an auto-biography and had questions about our childhood, our families, our marriage, our children, and the ways that we parent our own children.

We each had to answer our own questions and we did not discuss them with eachother until we were both done. I have to say, when we started reading eachother's answers, we were shocked! Except for the fact that my answers were twice as long as Jeff's (my self-study guide ended up being 20 pages long, his was 9 pages long!! LOL!), our answers were almost identical! I mean really exact! The way we described our marriage, our spouse, the strengths and weaknesses of both ourselves and eachother, descriptions of how we parent, our beliefs, the way we handle stress, our biggest challenges in our life, the descriptions of our children and their strengths and weaknesses, our fears or concerns of adopting.... seriously.... everything was exactly the same! We couldn't believe it! Its going to be hard convincing our agency that we didn't collaborate on these answers! After we got over our initial surprise, we started talking about how it shouldn't really surprise us... after 12 years of marriage, we really DO know eachother really well. We are eachother's best friends and DEFINITELY eachother's soulmates!