We’re still here

People told me, and it’s true.  They said that it takes about 6 months to compile an adoption dossier.  I thought, “Well, that’s a little slouchy.  How can it take that long to fill out forms and pull together documents?  Clearly those people haven’t my organization and motivation.”  Well, we are those people.  And, here’s how it can take that long.  You can’t work ahead.  Every form hinges on another form.  And, most forms hinge on some branch of the government doing something to "aid" in the process.  Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait.  We scurry to do our part just to send something off and wait and wait for a response so that we can take that piece of information and scurry through the next form and do the same thing.

All that to say, we’re awaiting an appointment which was scheduled on our behalf by the US Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services to get fingerprinted (again) for our child’s immigration clearance.  When we finally received the letter last week with our appointment time, I about fell over when I saw that it was scheduled for a date almost three weeks away.  Anyhow, it’s coming up.  Not quickly enough, but it’s coming up.

On another front, the Iowa Secretary of State is verifying that we were, in fact, born and married.  We’re anxiously awaiting his findings.  Once he adds his certification stamp to our birth certificates and marriage license, those are ready to go to the US Department of State, except that they have to wait for the rest of the dossier, which has to wait for the one form from Immigration, which has to wait for the fingerprints.  Anyway, once we finally get our Immigration form (which will presumably follow a few weeks after the fingerprinting appointment) from the USCIS, we will add that to the pile of stuff which will be certified by the Kansas Secretary of State.  Then, assuming everything passes his inspection; our adoption agency will take the reins and get the entire dossier to its various destinations in Washington DC.

And, in case you’re wondering, the current time spent compiling the dossier: 4 months…tick, tock, tick, tock.

Sarah

Our Kids Bless My Heart

As I referenced in a previous post, we had a “family meeting” back in November to tell the kids about our plan to adopt a baby.  We began by talking with the boys about how all kids need parents to love them and take care of them and keep them safe.  We went on to talk about how there are many, many children around the world, whose mommy and daddy can’t take care of them for different reasons.  But that God loves these kids so much, and that he wants them to have a family to take care of them.  As I paused to take a breath and plan my next sentence, our three-year-old broke in, saying, “Maybe WE could take care of them.” 

Yeah, buddy…maybe we could.

We talked a little more and told the kids that we were, indeed, going to bring one of these children home and that he or she was going to become part of our family.  We emphasized that this baby would be their brother or sister.  We talked about Ethiopia and about the lives of the kids who live there.  We noted that their new brother or sister would look a little different than us on the outside.  We showed the kids a short video on the computer to give them an idea of what Ethiopia is like and what our child might look like. 

After the video, our oldest asked, with a rather exasperated sigh, “How are we going to take care of all those kids?” 

He has a good heart.

Two days later our oldest was playing with his legos.  He was building a small legion of “hawks” (kind of square-ish looking creatures, but with a minimal amount of imagination you could make them look like little hawks, standing upright on their little feet with their wings outstretched).  Anyhow, he had built maybe a dozen small uniform hawks, and two larger hawks (which he explained were the mommy and daddy).  He had used up all the small square and rectangular legos that we had.  After a while, he set them all up in a circle.  He started talking out loud to himself, saying, “They’re having a family meeting.  They are adopting a new baby.”  Then, he quickly turned and grabed a curvy cactus-shaped lego and popped a “beak” and “feet” onto it.  He said, “Here he is.  You can see that he looks a little different on the outside, but he’s part of their family now.”  J

Sarah 

Checking Some Things off the List

Our home study is complete!!  We received the signed and notarized version in the mail today.  What a huge relief!!  Oh, and they recommended us to adopt our child.  J 

The home study was also the last piece of info we needed before we could send off the form requesting our child be "pre-approved" for immigration by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS).   That will go in the mail tomorrow.

I was excited to update the timeline on our blog, but when I tried to update it the formatting went all to heck.  So after at least 13 seconds of trying to fix it… I deleted it.  Maybe I will get it back up again soon... but here are the next steps:

Completed:

Mail Application to CHI

Gain acceptance into CHI Ethiopia program

Complete Home Study

Submit USCIS I-600A for Immigration

Next Steps:

Dossier Paper Chase (we are close on this one)

Get fingerprinted for USCIS I-600A 

Receive "Pre-Approval" for our child from the USCIS

Certification and authentication of dossier by the Kansas Secretary of State

Certification and authentication of dossier by the US Department of State

Certification and authentication of dossier by the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, DC

Submit dossier to Ethiopia (Target June 1)

Dossier received and accepted by Ethiopia

Ryan

Ethiopia Program Update

Last week we shared some news about the Ethiopian government announcing their intentions to reduce inter-country adoptions by 90% beginning in early March.  These changes wouldn’t affect adoptive families receiving referrals (being “matched” with their child), but it would potentially lengthen the time it takes for these children to be cleared by the Ethiopian government and granted a court date to process the adoption (ie- folks may be waiting for quite a while with a picture on their fridge but unable to go bring home their baby).  This change is so new that nobody knows all the implications, but we wanted to pass along a little bit of information we recently received from our adoption agency.  Our initial reaction is that this is positive news! 

·         Children’s Hope International (CHI) has been in contact with their in-country staff and has participated in several meetings with the US State Department, Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS), and other Ethiopia adoption agencies.  Initial conversations between entities in Ethiopia and state side have been positive, and it has been established that while the notice of going down to 5 cases a day has been issued, the Ethiopian government has not implemented any procedures on how this reduction would affect cases at any stage.

·         There are indications that the Ethiopian government may increase the daily number of cases reviewed, but at this time they have not issued an exact number.

·         Since the initial notice went into effect on March 10^th, CHI has had several court cases approved and has seen three families receive dates for their court cases.

·         Overall, the Children’s Hope Ethiopia Team is receiving encouraging and positive news and are hopeful that a decision will be reached that will best benefit the children of Ethiopia.

A Sigh of Relief and A Heavy Heart

Well, our homestudy visits are complete, and we have every reason to believe that our family and home found favor with the social worker (she hopes to have the thing written up for us by the end of March).  As far as I know, she didn’t notice the cobwebs in the corners of the cornice boards or the dried food in Ellie’s highchair crevasses.  The boys were on their very best, non potty-mouthed behavior.  Our unruly ogre dog refrained from her normal antics.  It was like us on our very best day (which thankfully only needed to last for about 45 minutes). 

While we are tremendously relieved to have our homestudy done, there is something that is falling like deadweight upon us.  A couple weeks ago, the Ethiopian Ministry of Women’s, Children's, and Youth Affairs (they’re the ones responsible for checking into the background and “clearing” each child who is referred to an adoptive family) announced their intention to reduce inter-country adoptions by 90% beginning March 10, 2011.  The Ministry’s plan for this dramatic change is reportedly based on their assumption that corruption is a systemic and rampant part of international adoption, and the belief that their resources should be focused on the children for whom international adoption is not an option.  This change, if permanent, has the potential to drastically increase the length of the adoption process in Ethiopia.

Lots of people in the adoption world are weighing in on this news.  Many of them see this action as an unnecessary and disproportional response to the current situation.  We are certainly the first in line to stand against child-trafficking.  There are some ugly people out there whose intentions are purely evil.  If even one family in Ethiopia has been incented or coerced to sell their child, that is too many.  However, we sincerely believe that there are a great, great number of ethical, servant-hearted adoption agencies at work in Ethiopia, and we believe that there is a way to allow these organizations to continue to work while simultaneously going after the bad guys.

In truth, this change is so new that nobody knows all the implications, and there aren’t good answers to our questions about how this will change things for us.  The Joint Council on International Children’s Services has started a petition to be sent to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia regarding this recent decision.  In a little over one week, it has garnered over 38,000 signatures (including ours).  If you are interested, you may access it here: http://betheanswerforchildren.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/emergency-campaign-for-ethiopia/

We are concerned and anxious about our lack of control in this situation and about how this decision may functionally act as a death sentence for many adoptable children in Ethiopia (a country were 1 in 6 children die before age 5 - these are just children in general, let alone orphans).  But, thankfully, we know that the God we serve is in control of the situation in Ethiopia and that he loves each one of these kids so very much.

We will continue to pray for the orphans in Ethiopia, and around the world, who so desperately need families.  And, we would invite you to so, as well.

Our Homestudy

We have been in the midst of our homestudy process for the past two months.  Basically, it has consisted of the following: our going for an initial consultation appointment; our completing three inches of paperwork; our getting fingerprinted, investigated and background-checked; our groveling before some friends (and family) regarding their provision of reference letters; our rewarding the aforementioned friends and family with ice cream; our meeting individually with the social worker; our meeting jointly with the social worker; our inviting the social worker to come inspect our home.

Now, I’ve been a parent for a while now (and some might even argue that I’ve been a moderately good one).  However, nothing will rattle your cage like having your childhood, your marriage, your parenting techniques, your children, and your home dissected scrutinized studied. 

I was telling the boys the other day that the social worker would be coming to our house on Monday (tomorrow).  I said, “Hey guys, in a few days an adoption helper will be coming to our house to check it out and make sure it’s a good place for a baby to live, and she’ll want to get to know us to make sure we can be a good family for a baby.”  Our eldest son said, “Well, I hope we’re a good family for a baby because we already have a baby.”  Good point. 

I went on to say, “When the adoption helper is here, I want you guys to do your very best job of being respectful.  She will have some questions for you, so look at her eyes when you are talking to her.  Use your kind words.”  Our three year-old  added, “Yeah, and don’t say potty-talk like ‘underwear, poopy, and toot’”.  I stopped him there, before he exhausted his entire list of “potty-talk,” and agreed that he was right on track regarding the impropriety of such language in this situation.  So there you have it…I don’t know what the social worker is going to ask the kids, but I’d say there’s about a 50% chance that they work some type of bathroom reference into their answer.

Seriously, we invite and appreciate your prayers for the visit tomorrow afternoon.

Sarah

Rolling the plan out

Forgive our blogging hiatus…remember at the beginning when I said that I didn’t have time to write a blog?  Well, that was before 15 hours of pre-adoptive training and a three year-old with a ruptured appendix (it’s been a whirlwind couple weeks around here!!).

So, for the final installment of our adoption backstory…by fall 2010, we had a new baby in our arms and another in our hearts.  We had told a few close friends about our plans to adopt.  And, the various friends and acquaintances we had “interviewed” (other adoptive families) knew about our journey; however, we hadn’t told our kids yet or our extended family.

In November 2010, we told our boys (then age 3 and 5) that we were planning to become an adoptive family.  Their responses were priceless and worthy of a separate post sometime later.  Suffice it to say, they were supportive and excited.

We went on to tell our small group and our extended family in November.  We were blessed by their interest, support, and encouragement.  We are surrounded by some good people.

And, that about wraps it up.  We met with an adoption outreach consultant for Children’s Hope International in December 2010.  We completed our application and it was accepted by CHI in January 2011.  The subsequent months were filled with paperwork and more paperwork.  And, here I sit in March writing a blog.

Sarah