Approved!

Today I had a great lunch break walking a 2.2 mile track with my mom on the campus where I work and then eating a picnic lunch in the shade.  As we were packing up, my phone rang.  It was our social worker from our placement agency!  She welcomed hubs and I to the program and said that she notified the agency that works in Haiti that they can activate our file!

This is such a nice feeling.  The pure joy of adoption.  This feeling will come and go during the process as things get hard, as waiting becomes unbearable, and as we reach new milestones and rejoice over taking steps closer, as we see Haiti and her people, as we meet our child and then have to leave our child while the waiting continues, and so on.  It’s certainly a roller-coaster ride.  So let me just take a moment and enjoy this.  Right here.  The feeling of hope.  The feeling of excitement.  The deep-seeded feeling that we are doing exactly what we need to be doing.  It’s worthy of taking a moment to acknowledge this feeling.  So note to future self…see this?  How you feel?  Get back in touch with that somehow.  That you, self, are doing the right thing.  This is going to bring you to your son.  It will happen.  He will be home one day.  Take a deep breath and carry on.

Okay now that I have given my future self a pep talk, I will attempt to give an overview of what is next and what this journey might look like (in very simple terms right now).

We now start our local home study.  We are using the same home study agency and social worker from our last adoption…so a good bit of the information will be the same and some of the documents and training will be acceptable with this adoption.  But we’ll still have meetings with our social worker, forms to complete and run all over town for various signatures, and lots of waiting to do while she puts tons of our personal information into a roughly 10 page document.  A summary of us basically.

We also begin working on our dossier…another packet of documents signed by various authorities…that describes our intent to adopt, who we are, why we are doing this, and why we are good enough people to be doing this.

Then all of that information is sent to Haiti…to the agency that operates the creches that we will be adopting from.  They look at it and pick a child that they feel best fits us and our parameters.  Oh, well, that is important to share too!  We want a boy (a SON!!!) who is younger than Orange by at least a year.  So, we could be matched with an infant, a 1 yr old, a 2 yr old, or a newly turned 3 yr old.  We are open to those ages.  We will consider various special needs that hubs and I have discussed in private.

Once we have been matched with a child (accepted a referral, whatever you want to call it), then our paperwork and the child’s paperwork get combined and sent to lawyers, social workers, government consultants, the civil courts, higher courts, Haitian gov’t officials, and the US Embassy.  I may have missed some people in there.  But, just know that it has a lot of places to go and a lot of people to see.  And this takes a loooooooong time.  A long time.   Haiti’s government is very different from ours (and we know that even ours can be slow sometimes).

Before the earthquake, it took about 2 years to get through all those people after you are matched with a child.  So, now we all assume that it will take longer…but we have to wait and see.  I am guessing that if we are super lucky (low percentage) then it will be about 2 years after being matched before we have him home.  If we are neither lucky nor unlucky (high percentage) then it will be about 3 years.  If we are unlucky or super unlucky (low percentage, but dang…this stuff happens) then it will be 4 or 5 years.  No-one told me that, so I have no-one to quote or reference, so take that for what it’s worth.  I am just creating my own make-believe lucky to unlucky scale for my own sake…to get us ready for settling in and waiting.  And of course I use lucky/unlucky lightly. (So please don’t take offense to that.  I really mean it in a joking manner.  And if this is not a joking topic b/c of where you are right now, then I apologize.  Certain things can hit us in the gut depending on where we are in life.  I want your gut to be unharmed.  Sending you love.)

So what do we do while we wait all that time?  We go visit him! We update forms!  We blog…cry…drink wine…hang out with blogamigas…consider the ways in which we torture ourselves with things like this in life…and we’ll give thanks for being privileged enough to be waiting in the first place.  All of that and more wrapped up in an adoption process that is both beautiful and heart-wrenching (depending on whose side you are considering).

We will probably go and see him about twice a year.  We want to take the girls on at least one of the trips to meet their brother.  After we have gotten a feel for things.

We have a feeling that he will be between 3 and 6 yrs old when he comes home.  So, we have plenty of time to set up some playdates and babysitters.  Feel free to pull out your calendars now and pencil us in.  *wink*

We are thankful today.  To be in a place in our lives where this is an option for us.  And we begin now to prayerfully consider our future son’s past and the sacrifices and tragedy that is happening in Haiti, not so far away from our very own home that is our safe-haven.  This process will once again, and in a different way, open our eyes to the struggles and beauty of others who are very different from us but who are also just like us.  Connecting us.

Advertisement