OFFICIALLY WAITING!!

We (and 6 other families) received an email tonight saying:

Hello everyone!

Your dossiers have been authenticated in St Paul and left our office today for Washington DC for processing. Once received by our office in Addis we will let you know. It should be about 1 week.

We are very happy for all of you. You are all officially awaiting your referrals!!!

Sincerely,

Angela Wagner

Program Administrator

Better Future Adoption Services, Inc.

Yaaaay!! They are estimating that we will be waiting 6 weeks until we receive a referral, and we may travel within 3 months of that, possibly longer. We're sooo happy!

DOSSIER APPROVED!

So, BFAS received our dossier on Wednesday and by yesterday at 5, they approved it (that was fast!). So, now it will get certified, then authenticated in DC and then it will be on its merry way to Ethiopia! THEN we should be officially waiting. YAAAY!
My friend Meg found a great blog about what happens once you reach the top of the wait list, written by a woman who is near the top of the list at her agency:
http://www.kevindhendricks.com/abby/2008/10/16/10/

Our Dossier is off to see the Wizard!

We're DONE with our dossier! I sent it overnight USPS this morning and it will arrive at BFAS before noon tomorrow. Then, they will review it and let us know if there is something else we need, or if they are approving it. If it is approved, they will send it to Ethiopia and then we just sit back and wait for a referral!

Parting is such sweet... its just sweet...

OK, so... we're switching international agencies. The agency we were with (CHSFS) projects that there will be 12 month wait from dossier submission to referral (and then travel within 3 months after that). CHSFS is a very popular agency. I have no complaints about them so far, except that we don't want to wait that long for our baby! SO, I've been reading forums and I came across one where the family waited only 4 months from dossier to TRAVEL.... they are called BFAS (Better Futures Adoption Services). So, I read everything I could about them online, called them, compared notes and discussed the decision at great lengths with Steve and my friend Meg (who is also adopting from ET) and we decided (and Meg did, too) to switch agencies! BFAS has a 4 to 6 month wait from dossier to travel. WOW. They are a much smaller agency. They have a care center called Kinkunt (sp) and it sounds like the children taken care of really well. For some reason, they have access to all of Ethiopia to receive orphaned/abandoned children, whereas CHSFS only has access to a small portion of southern Ethiopia. We will only lost our app fee to CHSFS by doing this. So, we're doing it.
We applied last week to BFAS and we were approved yesterday. Now, we are getting all the pieces of our dossier together and we expect to send that out next week.
We might have a baby by summer or sooner! YAAAAAAYYYYY!

waiting and waiting

We're all done with our home study and just waiting for our agent to send it to us..... it's been maybe 2 weeks now... I don't want to bug her too much, though... ugh! It's hard to wait! We're not even officially waiting yet! We have a lot of our dossier docs ready to go... COME ON! ugh....

Our Final Home Study visit was 08-21-08.

This time, our adoption agent came to our house! Needless to say, we made sure everything was clean and that all our smoke detectors were working and that all the outlets had safety plugs in them, etc… Our house was really already baby-proofed, but we just had to make sure! I remember our agent telling us that she likes unflavored, black coffee and unsweetened iced tea, so I made my favorite coffee (Organic, fair trade Lovebuzz) and I made fresh brewed iced tea and Steve went to the store and bought herbed cherve, some other kind of fancy cheese, and fancy crackers and iced ginger cookies. It might have been a little over the top, but we wanted to be good hosts.

Julie came over and we gave her a tour of the house. She made us feel very comfortable and she complimented us on how we decorated and the colors we chose for our walls. Then wee sat down and got to business.

We talked about the essay questions we had to answer for CHSFS regarding our cultural backgrounds and traditions we practice and how we will incorporate our new daughter’s culture into our lives.

We discussed how to deal with racism that our whole family will face. Steve thought we should take the “turn the other cheek” approach. I disagreed with this. Honestly, I think we will teach our children to deal with mean or ignorant comments by coming up with a calm, smart comment to say back to them, which points out the offender’s ignorance. I don’t know if this is the right approach or not. Julie reassured us that we will learn together how to deal with issues like this. We have zero experience dealing with racist comments now because we have never had to face them. We will grow and learn together as a family.

All we have left to do for this round of paperwork are our autobiographies, statement of net worth and medical exams.

Our first Home Study visit, 07-17-08

We started our home study on July 17th. We went to the local agency’s office and our case worker showed us a video about the Children’s Home in Addis. It was very touching and helps us to better understand where our child is coming from.
We also discussed the importance of keeping our child’s story private. Her story (whatever it is) belongs to her. Our case worker talked about how important it is to teach the child (and our bio daughter) all about Ethiopian culture. She gave us things to think about and talk about with each other. We are struggling a bit with what it means to incorporate Ethiopian culture into our lives. We plan on joining a group of ET adoptive families in Madison. From what I can tell, they get together for picnics, to celebrate Ethiopian Christmas, etc… I am looking forward to joining them once we have our child.
We know our children will be exposed to different cultures, because Steve and I have always enjoyed going to various cultural events and we love eating food from all around the world. But what more should we do? I know I have to learn how to do African hair (Steve, too), but what else? We are American. The cultural traditions we celebrate are secular American things… our daughters are American. Yes, we will, of course, teach our daughters about the beauty and rich cultural tradition of Ethiopia. When we go to ET, we will buy ET art to display in the house. What else? We do not want our daughter stamped “Ethiopian” her whole life. Just as we are not stamped “German” or whatever. She will be an African American, after all, right?

The beginning of our journey.....

My husband and I planned on having 2 kids. We never considered that one of them would be adopted. We have a biological daughter who is almost 2 years old. We became pregnant with our second child and at the 20 week routine ultrasound, we discovered that our baby boy had severe skeletal dysplasia and that he would be guaranteed to die very shortly after birth. All of his long bones were extremely short and his lungs would not have room to breathe. We were assured that our baby would not live more than a few hours.
We were stunned and so, so very sad. We read all we could about his condition and we knew that we did not want our baby to suffer, so we decided to terminate the pregnancy. During the termination, my uterus was perforated, I lost more than 2 liters of blood and had to have an emergency hysterectomy.
We had already decided that we wanted another child, we just had to figure out how to do this. We started talking about adoption almost right away. We also looked into surrogacy, but it is extremely expensive. So, we started reading about adoption, both domestic and international. We read many blogs and informational sites. A friend of a friend referred us to a local agency. We set up a meeting with the local agency and we found out that the countries we qualify for are India, Russia and Ethiopia. The agent told us that an Indian baby would be between 2 and 3 years old and have special needs. We decided that we wanted a healthy baby, so that now narrowed our options to Ethiopia, Russia or domestic. A Russian adoption is significantly more expensive than an Ethiopian adoption. With a domestic adoption, we would be waiting for a birth parent to choose us out of a book and that process could take years. We were not interested in the heartbreak of foster care. So, all roads led us to Ethiopia.
So, we applied to both the local and international agency. We were accepted into the Ethiopian program and we are starting our home study now!