3 Months Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks 3 months waiting for Sprout. Three months! Who can believe it? I make a monthly "check in" call to our agency on the 30/31 of every month. I have to laugh, because usually it is the extreme of awkwardness. I call, uber-enthusiastic, Stephanie answers the phone, and the following conversation ensues:

Me: Hi Stephanie! This is Christina ****.
S: Hello.
Me: Hi, I'm just making my monthly check-in call!
S: Oh, okay!
[awkward silence]
Me: So...is there anything else I need to know?
S: ....um.... [note the confusion in her voice, as she hasn't said anything]
Me: Well, um, you know [sheepish laughter], um...
[more awkward silence]
Me: ...I mean...is there anything else we need to do or anything?
S: Nope, I think you're good!
[even more awkward silence]
Me: Well...um....
[deafening awkward silence]
Me: So, um...can you, um, well, can you tell us where we are on the list?
S: Oh, sure! Let's see...
[sounds of papers shuffling; hey, at least it's not silence!]
S: Okay...14. You're 14 on the list. It'll still be a few more months, though.
Me: OKAY! Thank you! That's great. Okay.
[siiiiiillllleeeeeennnnncccccceeee]
Me: Well, good, then. I guess I'll talk to you next month on the 31st! I mean, wait, well, next month is February, isn't it? So I guess, yeah, the 28th, right? I'll call you on the 28th?! [insert maniacal laughter]
S: ...Sure?
Me: okaybye [and I hand up as quickly as possible]

Oh, the pain.

But, on the upside, yay for #14! We started out around 31 or 32, so it's nice to know we've moved more than half way in 3 months. Stephanie did say that most of the families waiting ahead of us are requesting 0-12 months, open to gender; hence the reason it will be a while longer. And that is totally fine with us. Now is a pretty hectic time anyway, what with school finishing up, our first famiversary next weekend, and on and on. Oh, yes, and enjoying this one-on-one time with D!

OFFICIALLY WAITING!!!

We are thrilled to announce that as of today, this family of three is officially waiting to be a family of four (or more)! Thanks to all of you for helping to make this happen. I have been experiencing the full range of emotions this past week: excitement, nervousness, excitement, terror, excitement, worry...and excitement. :) The excitement, terror, and worry revolve around feelings of inadequacy and unpreparedness: are we really ready for another little one, do we have the resources and the space, what about everything else going on in our lives? And I think to some extent, these are all valid concerns. But then I think of the million reasons why we were terrified of starting down this road the first time, and even though it is sometimes very hard, it is absolutely the best thing we have ever done. And that's when the excitement kicks in. And I know that this is the right time to start this process.

It's very important to me that our future child(ren) feel that our journey to her was uniquely hers, not some shadow of her big brother's journey. So I've tried and will continue to try to avoid comparisons. And I already know that this will be extremely difficult to do. But I did want to reflect a bit, just initially, on what I perceive will be a fundamental difference in this next phase of the process between our journey to D and our journey to sprout. When waiting for D, we had nothing to do but wait, wait for each painful step that would bring us closer to parenthood. This time around, we are parents, and our lives are full of...well, parenting. Playing with D, bath-times, books, illnesses, daycare, walks, bottles, diapers. There's really not a lot of time to sit around and wait - for anything. I do think there is more than enough time, though, for joyful anticipation. To me, joyful anticipation is the flipside to "waiting;" and with D here, the coin simply won't have time to flip. I hope this will enable me to approach this wait with a bit more grace and patience.

Oh, yes, and lest I forget to mention: we are still holding off on telling our families, as we would very much like to do it in person. Our current plan is to tell Chris's family at Thanksgiving and my family at Christmas. Thus, it may be awhile before you see an announcement on peep-eye. Until then, we'll keep you posted right here!

Just the way it goes (I guess)

Last time around, I physically drove our home study and power of attorney forms down to Indianapolis to receive state authentication. This time around, I thought I would take the advice of a fellow adoptive friend and merely overnight it down to Indi. She had done this and received the documents back in two days, everything a.o.k. Last Friday, I overnighted the docs down to the state office where they would be sitting, bright and early Monday morning. And yay, they arrived back at my doorstep today!

Great news....or is it?

Somehow, they managed to put my documents back into the return (overnight $$$) envelope and send them back to me....without doing a darn thing to them. That's right. Absolutely ZERO state certification. No rejection letter. Nada. I got a huge lump in my throat (hey, I'm emotional these days), and called the office responsible for certification. The woman who answered the phone only had the following response: "That has never happened in this office before." Um, okay, great. What should I do? "Resend them." Right, so now I'm out ANOTHER $40 to overnight the darn things there and back. I left a very nasty message on her supervisor's voice mail and a very nasty note in the package. I swear, if they come back with nothing on them again...

there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

*deep breath*

Roll with the punches, eh? This is not the worst thing in the world, although I really could have used that extra $40.

Anyone want to hazard a guess at my odds of getting the state to reimburse me for that extra $$$?

Yeah, I thought not.

Home Study: Check!

I am now the proud possessor of four notarized home studies for the Fabulous family (that's us :) ). Next step is to get those bad boys down to Indi for state certification, and then I think we're set on the dossier front. Originally we were hoping to be "waiting" by October 3rd, but I'll be pleased if we get on the list by Halloween. Watch for more updates!

Not officially waiting yet...

but I saw this on another blog and thought it was really sweet. To all two of my readers: enjoy!

Try 2

We have officially said our fond farewells to CHSFS and are embarking on our journey to Sprout(s) with Holt International. This also necessitated a change of social worker, which was probably a good thing. I called the designated social worker last week, and she came out to the house tonight, met us, took all of our paperwork off our hands, and gave us a reduced fee since we already had so much of the update completed. Please keep your fingers crossed that we will have our homestudy completed lickety-split, that way we can get our dossier submitted and be added to the official waiting list.

Deep Breaths

So here's the skinny: Our oh so on top of things social worker is not going to have our home study update drafted until the first week in October. After that, it will take about 2 weeks to have her boss approve it, at which point it will be sent on to our agency for approval. This should take another 2 to 3 weeks. Then they will send us the packet so we can finish up our dossier. At this rate, we won't get on "the list" until the end of November, beginning of December. On top of that, our agency just raised its expected wait time to 12+ months. The 12 doesn't bother me so much as the "+". I called our representative to ask about our wait, and she said since we "still" hadn't turned in our dossier, we should expect a wait exceeding 12 months. Based on some other comments she made, I was led to believe that our potential wait would be more like 14 - 18 months. That puts us up against court closure for the summer of 2010, and that is really unacceptable to me.

In a lot of ways, a referral in 2010 makes a lot of sense - we would finally know where we were going to live, I would (in theory) be settled into my new job, and we would have had time to find a much bigger home with a yard. The thing is...I'm impatient. I don't want to wait that long for a referral. Even worse, I feel like the Ethiopia program is going to explode and we could potentially be looking at a 24 month wait for referral. Or the program will shut down entirely, and we will be unable to provide Dinkeneh with an Ethiopian sibling. That's even more unacceptable.

What's my point? We are considering switching agencies. This is NOT something I want to do. I love CHSFS. I love their dedication to the children, their ethics, their humanitarian efforts in country, and their DVD lifebook, which is unique in international adoption. However, the fact remains that there are other good agencies out there. They don't have all the bells and whistles that CHSFS provides, but they are still ethical, still doing smaller-scale humanitarian work, still taking great care of their kiddos, but their wait times range from "somewhat" shorter to "holy cow that's unbelievable" shorter. The agency we're considering switching to has an average referral time of 2 - 8 weeks. That's right - weeks, with travel 2 to 4 months after that. This, of course, poses a bit of a problem. I hadn't expected to travel before graduation, and it could make an already tough spring semester even tougher. Not to mention all those other things - city, job, house (bar exam) - will still be up in the air.

So what to do? I have absolutely no idea. Feel free to weigh in.