December 1, 2008 The Good the Bad the WAIT...

For all adoptive families, the day that your paperwork ("dossier") gets to where it needs to be to begin "the wait" is one of the best feelings a person can ask for! The the completion of the dossier is your Everest...and you made it! You are officially waiting to become a family. LET THE PREGNANCY BEGIN!

For us, it is a pregnancy for a 0-48 month old daughter and sister. Make no mistake, the wait is hard. Not harder than preparing the dossier, just a different hard. The busyness is gone and that is tough!

I am pretty convinced that AAI is the greatest adoption agency around. There are many reasons that I believe this, but, one of the main reasons is the "Snapfish" account. As adoptive parents, we have the LUXURY of seeing photographs from other families on a "shared" account. We have seen photos of the buildings, those who work there and the mountains of laundry it takes to care for all of these children where our daughter and sister could possibly currently be living. That isn't the best part. These children, of all ages, run, goof around, laugh, get into trouble, play soccer, eat, sleep and annoy one another, do each others hair and we get to see it. We get to see photos of friendship and feedings and we can rest assured, these children are loved. There is no doubt in any one's mind who has seen these photographs, these homes are filled with love. Our daughter is loved.

So we wait. Some days are good, some are really hard. It's funny actually, when we are able to laugh about it. Mostly, however, we just want her to come home. It is tough because everything is so uncertain and Americans love their time lines and absolutes, we are certainly no exception.

Although you have what can only be best described as a rough estimated timeline, the honest truth is, you simply do not know the when. I have spent an embarrassing number of hours trying to figure out the hidden formula, but I have never been good at math and I haven't found the mathematical key. We have done a few things to prepare, but, we are open to a pretty large age range and although we have been told that more than likely we will be adopting a baby, there is that possibility that she will be 2- 4 years old. We don't want to lock in to a mindset, we want to be ready for her whoever she is.

Once we receive the email containing her information including; age, whatever medical history is available, motor skills development, etc. ("referral") from the agency we will have to officially accept the referral. Once the acceptance is received back to AAI, the agency will work to secure a court date for us. At court, (currently 2-4 months to court date) an attorney will represent us and depending on the completeness of our file and many other factors, some unknown, we will pass or fail. There have been many failures and frustrations. If this occurs, a new court dates will be set (currently about 1-3 months, but that too is liquid). Once we pass court, we will become her parents!! YEA! Then an Embassy date is set and travel arrangement are made. Ken and I will be traveling together to Ethiopia and the boys will be at home with my mom.

I have made a commitment to try to maintain this blog and any information that I receive I will try to put here.

Thank you for caring about our journey and we are looking anxiously forward to our next step!

Here goes nothing........

February 19, 2009

I have been encouraged to create a blog for our adoption journey. My fear has been that I will have nothing of any interest whatsoever to say or share. My hope, on the other hand, is that someone may be helped or guided through their own adoption journey through my many mistakes and successes.

Here's the story of the start of our journey...

The first time I talked to Ken about my desire to adopt was Mother's Day 2007. He had other plans. I gave up surprisingly quickly and I moved on (or so I thought).

Then a year later, almost to the day, I started to bring it up again this time I was not so easily pursuaded. I wanted to do it. We discussed it, laughed about it, cried about it and waffled for about a month. Once he saw that I was serious, he got serious. We decided to adopt a beautiful little girl from China on June 10, 2008. That was the day we emailed our application in to our adoption agency and the day we found out that our application had been accepted. I was ecstatic!

We received our instructions soon after for the dossier and I was determined to get our paperwork done at lightening speed. Now, all of the mothers and fathers that have been down this road are laughing out loud right now....lightening speed is rare when dealing with any of the paperwork and just because you move fast doesn't mean anyone else will!

I read about everything from the building of The Great Wall to The Lost Daughters of China, to attachment books to books on parenting in an interracial family. I read any book I thought would help. I was on a roll. What could go wrong?

Nothing went wrong for a while and then in late August we hit a road block. A big, cement road block!

Our agency began to have issue with Ken's repeated run ins with the law in his youth. We received a phone call that our application was offically being withdrawn until further notice. I FREAKED! I was devastated and I played the "what if game" until there was noone else to speak to. It was during this month of complete chaos that we had our last meeting with our social worker to wrap up our homestudy. She calmed me down and opened my heart to other possibilities. She assured me there were plenty of orphans out there in need of a families love. With this, I moved on. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I will be forever grateful to her.

In the second week of September we were told that we had the green light to continue on with our adoption. It was about five days later that we told the agency that we had decided to withdraw our application.

On September 12, 2008 Ken and I Fed Ex'd our application to begin our journey with Adoption Advocates International (AAI) to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia. We could not be more certain that we made the right choice!