Odds and Ends

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July weekend! D and I are still here in New Mexico and I really don’t want it to end. We’ve gone on some hikes, had fabulous food and just relaxed with my family. I am going to really try to savor these last couple of days of vacation. I’ll post some pics next week.

Before we left for vacation I stumbled across a blog post that I wanted to share. From what I can tell this family adopted a son from Ethiopia and then the mom went back when her sister adopted a baby girl from Ethiopia. She takes AMAZING photos and I just couldn’t stop looking at them. When you get to the middle of the post there is a photo of a boy running with all his might to meet her and get some crackers she was giving to the other children. It breaks my heart and I just sat there and sobbed. The photo is so powerful and in many ways speaks larger than any words could. Click HERE for the link to that particular post. She has posted other entries since then about her trip back to Ethiopia and those are also powerful.

I was in a Starbucks yesterday and noticed they have brought their RED products back for a while. If you buy coffee from Starbucks then please consider checking out the RED products. For every 1lb bag of coffee that is purchased they donate a $1 to the Global Fund, which helps people in Africa living with AIDS. They also have RED gift cards so if you go there frequently then you can just load the card and each time you use it money is donated as well.

I heard from our social worker last night that Gladney is done reviewing our home study and they are sending it back to our home study agency. That means we are VERY close to being able to send it to CIS for approval. We are so ready to be done with this first phase of the process. I am hopeful we will be able to send it to CIS soon.

Before I sign off I wanted to say Congrats to my new blogging friend, Sam. She recently got her court date for later this month and I am super excited for her. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Ethiopian adoption process, the courts there close in August for 2 months or so for the rainy season so it is great news she got a date for before the closure. I am hoping she passes the first time and can travel this summer to pick up her little girl. Congrats Sam!

My new t-shirt

Even though D and I are still early in the adoption process, our eyes have been opened to several companies and organizations that do amazing work in Africa. It really is shocking to me that just 6 months ago I wasn’t aware of some of this stuff and now it seems to have taken hold of me. Its crazy how fast life can change and how your perspective can be altered.

One of the first organizations we discovered was Mocha Club. I have one of their badges on my side bar. My Mocha Club t-shirt arrived this week and I am super excited to possibly sport it this weekend!

They support several issues in Africa including orphan care, education, Sudan relief, etc. And when you join or buy a t-shirt you can choose which cause to support. I am sure it isn’t a huge shock that I picked orphan care. If you join then you automatically get the t-shirt. You can join for just $7/month and it can:

Feed 1 person for a month

Educate 2 children for 1 school term

Save 1 person’s life from malaria

And the whole point is that can’t we give up 2 mochas or in my case 2 tall, soy, extra hot chai lattes to do something more powerful?

Mocha Club has a very inspiring video on their website that is the premise behind the words on my new shirt. The video speaks for itself. Enjoy.

On the adoption front, D and I finished our video training this week and just have the CPR to complete on Saturday. Once the home study report is finalized then we can send it to CIS to get approval. We also have our final packet of documents ready to send to Kate at KBS for our Ethiopian dossier and are just waiting to get our FBI clearances back from the FBI office in West Virginia. Hurry up FBI! We’re getting closer!!

Summer Reading Program

Did you participate in the summer reading program as a kid? Well, my mom is a librarian so if we hadn’t done it I think my mom would have been shunned from library world. I have really fond memories of having my little booklet and going to the library and getting stickers and then at the end of the summer getting a medal of some sort for completing it. What a sense of accomplishment! I seriously would probably read more if I got a medal after completing a certain number of a books. There is nothing like a little positive reinforcement to motivate me. So even though I am not a teacher or a student anymore and don’t get the traditional summer break I always tend to think of the start of a summer as a time to do some serious reading. Obviously my choice in books these days is influenced by our adoption. I just finished a book by Melissa Fay Green called There Is No Me Without You. I learned a remarkable amount of information about Ethiopian culture, the AIDS crisis, adoption from Ethiopia and most importantly the power of one person to make a difference. That’s a lot to digest, right? But the author tells it all from the perspective of this amazing woman, Haregewoin Teffara. The author finds a way to mix all the facts and statistics with the stories of Mrs. Teffera, who opens her home to orphans. So it reads more like a novel. Even if you aren’t knee deep in the process of adopting from Ethiopia, I think you would enjoy this book. I found a brief review from Booklist that I really think summarizes the book well.

“The horrific numbers behind the AIDS pandemic in Africa, "the most terrible epidemic in human history," have little resonance for most people in the West: "the ridiculous numbers wash over most of us." But this searing account humanizes the statistics through heartbreaking, intimate stories of what it is like for young orphans left alone in Ethiopia. Greene's story focuses on one rescuer, Haregewoin Teferra, who has opened her home and compound in a rickety hillside neighborhood of Addis Ababa and taken in hundreds of the untouchables thrown in the streets and left at her door. She cannot turn them away. Greene tells the stories in unforgettable vignettes of loss, secrecy, panic, stigma, and, sometimes, hope, even as she documents the big picture of "the human landslide," the history and science of epidemiology and transmission, and expresses her fury at the "crimes against humanity" of the multinational drug companies whose expensive patents have denied millions access to the life-saving medicines. Just as moving are the personal stories of international adoptions in the U. S., including two Ethiopian children taken into Greene's own Atlanta family. The detail of one lost child at a time, who finds love, laughter, comfort, and connection, opens up the universal meaning of family.” Hazel Rochman

I think I will make a little booklet and give myself a sticker for my first summer reading book checked off the list. Gold Medal here I come!

In personal adoption news, we had our final home study appointment on Friday and it went well. Our social worker is now typing our report that will eventually get sent to Citizen and Immigration Services as part of the approval process. In order for the home study to be finalized, D and I will have to watch 10 hours of training videos and take quizzes about them. We hope to have that finished by next week. We also have to read some articles and write short reports about them. The last bit of training we will have to do will be our infant CPR class on June 20^th. The goal is that D and I will be done with our part by then and it will just be a matter of waiting for things like FBI fingerprinting and CIS approval. There is going to be a lot of waiting in this whole process so I might as well get used to it.

Let me know if you have read any good books that I should add to my summer reading list!

Education

First of all, thank you to everyone for the well wishes for our first home study appointment. D and I both think it went really well. I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect but it was actually a very good experience. Our social worker is super nice and I am glad we will be working with her. We basically spent the entire two hours just answering her questions. She asked us how we met, about our courtship (if you can call it that), our strengths and weaknesses as a couple, what we see as our role as parents and other questions like that. But we also talked about adoption in general and how we will communicate with our child about his/her adoption. D and I had briefly discussed some of that but it was good to make sure we were on the same page. I had always assumed that we would talk about it from the beginning and would tell our son/daughter the story of their adoption. It’s not going to be a taboo subject in our household but something to celebrate. Our child will have a story, it will be the story of how our family came to be, and I want our child to know about it. Part of the conversation was about ways to incorporate the child’s Ethiopian culture into their daily lives, which is very important to us. That made me think about how D and I have been trying to educate ourselves about Ethiopia and have learned a fair amount thus far.

I thought some of you might be interested to know some of those facts as well.

*the capital city is Addis Ababa (it means new flower) *the official language is Amharic *the major religions are Christianity (mainly Orthodox Church) and Islam *Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest countries *Ethiopia was the original source of the coffee bean *the literacy rate is 42% *Ethiopia has only 1 medical doctor per 100,000 people *there are more than 3.8 million orphans in Ethiopia

Being a huge fan of the Olympics and someone who enjoys running, I had always been familiar with the Ethiopian runners and the success they have had at long distances. But I didn’t know anything about the history including recent studies that claim the present-day vicinity of Addis Ababa as the point from where human beings migrated around the world. Very cool.

D and I are obviously trying to soak up as much information as we can. We are going to have our first encounter with Ethiopian food this weekend as we will be going to the Blue Nile. I will give a full report next week.

I will leave you with a shot of a bumper sticker I just ordered from Etsy. I am super excited to proudly put it on my car.

Home Study

I just got back from a fabulous weekend home in Tulsa. My mom had a very important birthday and of course it was Mother’s Day. We took a trip to OKC to go to their art museum and to see The Lion King. It was FABULOUS!! I have a feeling that as D and I go through this adoption process I will need to remember the song “Hakuna Matata” on several occasions to keep from getting too stressed. Although, I am in many ways the queen of worry so living with “no worries” is somewhat laughable in my world but I’ll do my best.

While I was away, D spoke to our social worker and set the date for our first home study appointment – next Monday!! This is huge and makes me feel like we are really starting to move through all this paperwork and accomplish something. I am eager to find out what sorts of things we will discuss. From my understanding, they really just want to see our home environment and make sure it is a safe and healthy place for a child. It is a time for the social worker to interview us in person and just learn more about us. A lot of the paperwork we have been working on the past few weeks all goes into our home study. D and I have had physicals, filled out autobiographical statements, completed financial statements, asked various folks to write references and more! So once it is all complete it will be a pretty extensive packet of information about D and me. The U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services require our home study before they finalize approval to allow us to immigrate a foreign born child into the U.S. So as you can imagine the home study is a very important piece. Of course, the faster we get all of this done and get approved then the faster we get on the waitlist!

On a funny note, several weeks ago we were chatting with some of our closest friends here in Ohio about possible baby names for the little buster. One of the couples has a three year old and D and I just adore her. She has MAJOR personality and I think in her twos she had a little crush on D. She referred to him as “my D.” Does it get much cuter than that? Well, back to the original story. We were discussing names and asked for the advice of our favorite three year old. Her exact response was, “umm…. Arson.” Where did she come up with that?! D and I put it on the list but so far there are about 150 other names ahead of it. J

Send us good thoughts on Monday!

The Timeline

It seems that when we tell people we are adopting one of the first questions we get is, “how long will it take?” I wish I had an exact answer to that question, but in the world of adoption there is no exact science to the timeline. However, we do have a rough idea of what it will be like.

Here is what we know so far. We have picked our international adoption agency. We are working with the Gladney Center for Adoption. Their link is on the side bar. We are very confident in this decision as they have been so organized and kind as we start this process. They have so many resources, and it is obvious they do everything they can to keep their families updated on what’s going on in each specific adoption program. We are also working with Worlds Together as our local agency and they will help us through our home study. They have also been extremely helpful and have answered tons of our questions. We are currently working on all of the paperwork. We sent off our I-600A form, which is basically the request for approval to immigrate a foreign-born child into the US. We have submitted our initial applications to Gladney and Worlds Together, we got our FBI and Ohio background check fingerprints completed and we went to the doctors for our physical all in the past week. My arm is still sore from the tetanus shot!

We are told it will take about 4 months to get all the paperwork complete and that includes completion of the home study. Once all the paperwork is approved (hopefully that goes smoothly) then we go on the wait list. The average wait time in Ethiopia for a referral for babies is about 8 months these days. This could change of course by the time we go on the wait list. A referral is basically when our case worker gives us the information on our possible future child. Just because we get the referral it doesn’t mean that child is 100% ours because we then have to go through court in Ethiopia. Getting a court date and getting approved can take around 4 months (unless delayed by the rainy season). There are still things that can happen during that process that would derail it. We will hope that doesn’t happen to us but there are no guarantees. Once we pass court then we make travel arrangements to go to Ethiopia and pick up our baby!!

I find it is really easy to get ahead of myself, but in this moment D and I just need to focus on the paperwork and the home study and get it done. Once all the paperwork is done and we go on the wait list, then I feel like we can use that time to do the more fun things like get the nursery ready, shop for cute clothes, etc. But we feel like any free time we have right now has to go towards the paperwork. Thank goodness D is ULTRA organized because he has really tackled all this paperwork and keeps us on task. Those of you who know D well are probably not at all shocked by this!

Because I enjoy blog posts with pictures I thought I would share with everyone a cute shot of my first “child.”

This is Raney. We rescued her when we she was 2 years old. She was not a happy dog when we first got her and she had SEVERE separation anxiety. I am quite proud of us for pushing through and not giving up on her. It took her a while but Raney is a changed dog and is incredibly loving. She told me the other day that after having us to herself for almost 5 years she is finally ready to have a sibling. Yes, I am one of those dog owners. J