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.

Homestudy Update Visit Complete

Last Wednesday. So clearly, I'm behind on the updates. We're slowly plugging away. I'm still moderately optimistic that we'll be officially waiting by October 3rd, but that hope is quickly fading as we wait for a long list of tedious medical tests (that didn't have to be performed last time - grrr!). So we'll keep everyone posted!

Slowly, slowly

Just that - we're slowly working on gathering the paperwork for Sprout(s). Given that the width of an entire continent lies between me and Chris (almost), it's just going to take a while to get everything pulled together. At least, that's what I keep telling myself so that I don't hyperventilate. Our last post-placement visit is scheduled for August 13th, and our social worker was kind enough to schedule our homestudy update visit for the same time. Sweet! She was also kind enough to send our paperwork packet to us in advance so that we can have it ready to go for the visit. Let's hope (fingers crossed) that this helps expedite the write-up time frame! Luckily, things are so hectic that I don't have as much time to sit and dwell on how slowly this process moves as I did when we went through the same thing with D. Still, I'm still hoping for an October 3rd officially waiting day!

Second Part of the Welcome Packet...

has arrived! Chris has promised me he will fax the relevant paperwork to me tomorrow. I can't wait to get going!

Gathering Dossier Stuff

We're going ahead getting things ready for the dossier stage. It's still a bit of a ways off, but we'd like to be ready the minute CHSFS says go. Of course, much of the paperwork has date restrictions, so we're performing a careful balance of "move quickly...but not too quickly." I spoke with two very good friends who are going to write our recommendation letters. There are so many wonderful people we could ask, but we'd like for Sprout(s) and Squirticus to have different recommenders (kind of like you usually give your children different godparents). These two friends are very special in our lives, and we're so thrilled that they are willing to speak on our behalf!

The other aspect of trying to move slowly quickly is that I'm thinking we might already be crunched for time. CHSFS is estimating a two to three week wait for homestudy approval. And the homestudy must be approved prior to receiving the rest of the dossier list. In order to be on the wait list on October 3, we would therefore need to have the homestudy approved by mid-September. This requires the updated homestudy to be written by the beginning of September, and our social worker is sometimes a bit lethargic in getting things done. So we basically need to have her be writing it asap. The plan is therefore to have her combine D's post-placement visit with the homestudy update visit. In that way, she should be able to start working on the update in mid-August. Surely we can have it written in three weeks since it is just an update?! Let's hope so.

Application: Check!

We received word today that our application is officially complete. Woohoo! As usual, I'm ready to get going on all of the paperwork requirements, but I'm trying to internalize that no matter how quickly we jump through the required hoops, we will still not be allowed to get on the official waiting list until October 3rd - at the earliest. So deep breaths, mama. We're in this for the long haul (but hopefully not that long!).

And We're Off!

Well, kiddo(s), you're officially a tiny apple in Mom & Dad's eyes (and maybe even in D's, although he's a little too little to appreciate the concept of "big-brother"hood). We sent off the application to CHSFS today. As usual, we squeaked in at the 5:00 pm mark, so I'm expecting that we won't hear back until Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. But it's great to be "getting the ball rolling," so to speak, and hopefully we'll be officially waiting on October 3rd! Here's how excited we are to start this journey to you: