New Blog!!

I've started a new blog!  I will be discontinuing this blog, so please check for updates here:

http://therosefam.blogspot.com/

Knowing God's Will

Some of you may have heard by now that the last few weeks have been difficult ones for us.  We heard that our adoption house in Colombia, Los Pisingos, has been shut down.  At this time, we don't know if this is a temporary or permanent shut down.  All we really know is that the government stepped in and took all approved applications from Los Pisingos.  Our application is now in the government system, ICBF, and will stay there unless we direct them to do something else with it.  It is possible to adopt from Colombia directly through ICBF, but the wait times are significantly longer than through a private adoption house.  If we leave our application with ICBF we are looking at a 3-4 year wait.  If we do not want to stay with ICBF, we can either request to have our application transferred to a different adoption house (although all adoption houses are currently full and not accepting new applications) or request to have our application transferred back to Los Pisingos if and when it re-opens.

So, that leads us to the title of the post - knowing God's will.  We have had other bumps in the road but this was the first time that the news affected us so deeply.  It really made us think about the decisions that we have made.  Are we following God's will?  A very wise woman (you know who you are) told us that when a door is closed, we will be smart enough to know that we should think about whether or not we are following God's will.  The closure of Los Pisingos seems like a pretty big door closing.  We are still hopeful that this is only a temporary closure but our choice to adopt from Colombia has become even more of a matter for prayer in the last few weeks.  We met with our caseworker this afternoon and our conversation reminded us why we chose international adoption originally and reaffirmed the decision in our hearts, at least for the time being.

We have not received much in the way of updates from our adoption agency yet, but as soon as we know more we will post an update.

On a lighter note, several weeks ago I picked out fabric for our crib bedding.  We have really been trying to be deliberate about not buying things for the baby until we have more certainty, but one of Rich's aunts, Aunt Lois, is going to be sewing our crib bedding for us.  She was in town this past weekend so we gave it all to her.  Now we just have to wait and see how it all looks when it's put together!  Here is a picture of some of the fabric.  Ignore the black and white at the top and bottom of the picture - this is just the bedding from our guest room in the background. :) We're using bright oranges, greens, teals, and gray for our nursery colors.

Application Accepted!!

We found out yesterday that our application has been officially approved by Los Pisingos!  That means we are now officially on the waiting list. :) You wouldn't think that we would be so excited to be on a waiting list, but the application approval was the last thing that we were waiting for before we could be put on the waiting list. 

So, what's next?  We just wait (patiently) for the phone call with our referral!  We did ask for an updated estimate of wait time for a referral, and we were told 1-2 years.  We are hopeful that the wait will not be this long, but we are prepared to have a long wait ahead of us.

We have seen providence at work in our lives over the last few weeks.  I had been considering what to do for employment post-baby.  The life of public accounting had become more stressful and demanding than I thought I might be able to handle with a baby at home.  A few weeks ago, I was approached with a job opportunity that would still allow me to do meaningful work, and would also allow me to have what I would consider a better work-life fit. Although the opportunity sounded wonderful, I struggled with what that would mean for us.  Could we afford it?  Would I be able to take a sufficient leave when the referral comes in? What would my work schedule be like post-baby?  If the referral was going to be coming soon, did it really make sense to change jobs right now?  Just as we were trying to analyze these issues, we heard from Bethany that all of the adoption houses in Colombia needed to be re-accredited.  The houses go through accreditations routinely, but this time all of the houses had to become re-accredited at the same time which meant this would be much more intense than a routine accreditation.  We really thought this meant that it would be a long time before our application was even reviewed, let alone the wait for a referral after that.  The answer became very clear, and I accepted the job opportunity.  Just a few short weeks later, we now know that our application has been approved.  If this news had come earlier, we would have faced a much more difficult decision.  We will have different challenges now, but we believe that we were led to make the right decision, and we were given the information we needed when we needed it in order to do that.  It is amazing how things work out.

We are going to try to be patient as we continue to wait.  In the meantime we are keeping ourselves busy with lots of other things.  We are trying to consciously enjoy the things that we take for granted now  but will seem like luxuries when we have a little one to take care of.  If you have any suggestions of things we should do between now and when the baby comes, please feel free to share. :)

We will keep you posted as we receive information!

No news is not always good news

We hadn't heard anything recently from Bethany about the status of our application in Colombia so I sent them an email to see if they had any updates to share.  Unfortunately, they did not.  In fact, we heard last week that all adoptions at Los Pisingos are on hold again.  Due to the increased government scrutiny of adoptions in Colombia, Los Pisingos is going through the process of getting re-accredited.  That means that all adoptions are on hold until that process is complete.  We do not know how long the re-accreditation will take, but it definitely means a longer wait.  We will keep you posted as we hear more.  Since we were hoping that we would have some good news to share soon, we just wanted to let everyone know that it will actually be more of a delay than we were originally expecting.

Brief Update

It's been quite a while since we've created a post, so I wanted to give you a brief update.  Our application has been submitted to the adoption house in Colombia, and we were expecting it to be reviewed and approved within a couple of weeks.  However, we have been waiting since late April and still have not received approval of our application.

Within the past few months, the government in Colombia has been taking a closer look at adoption policies.  This has resulted in delays at the adoption houses in all stages of the adoption process as they comply with the government's requests.  From what we know, this is the reason that our application has been delayed.  We really don't know how much longer our application will be delayed, but we will make sure to post an update when we hear more!

In the meantime, we have been keeping ourselves busy with as many summer activities that we can fit in.  We know this may be the last summer with just the two of us, so we are trying to fit in lots of biking, kayaking, and camping while it is still easy to pack up quickly and run out of the house!  We also rented a cabin in the Smoky Mountains for our 10th anniversary and spent a week there.
Since I don't have a lot of exciting news to share in this post, I thought I would share some of the details of the process.  Adoption is something we always knew we wanted to do, but how do you get from thinking about adoption to waiting for your application to be approved in an adoption house in Colombia? I can assure you that there are a lot of steps along the way. :)  Here is a brief summary of what we have done so far.  I will also try to give you an idea of what is still ahead of us.

1. Domestic adoption informational meeting: Summer 2010 - We attended our first informational meeting at Bethany Christian Services.  We hadn't yet shared with anyone how serious we were about starting down the path to adoption.  We still had so many questions and uncertainties about the process, the financing, and the realities of adoptive families.  At this point, we hadn't even considered an international adoption because we really didn't know much about adopting internationally!  We first attended an informational meeting about domestic adoptions but realized that we wanted to look into international adoptions before we made any decisions.

2. International adoption informational meeting: Fall 2010 - We attended our second informational meeting at Bethany and learned about adopting internationally.  We were provided with a packet of information that outlined the countries that Bethany works with and the differences between the countries (cost, average wait times, ages of children, age requirements for parents, medical issues, etc.).  It was overwhelming to think that all of these things needed to be considered!  This was when we started to realize how little we knew about adopting and how much help we were going to need from our friends, family, Bethany, and other adoptive families.  We had preliminarily made a decision to adopt from Colombia, but we need to gather a lot more information!  We met one on one with Bethany to talk about the Colombia program, and we also got a lot of information from other adoptive families who shared their experience.

3. Preliminary application: Fall 2010 - We submitted our initial application to Bethany.

4. Sharing our news!! Fall 2010 - Once we knew we were ready to go down the path to adoption, we of course wanted to share our news!  We were excited to let everyone know that we were ready to move ahead with this!

5. Formal application:  April, 2011 - We waited a few months to submit our formal application because we knew that once this was approved, the next step would be the home study.  As a tax accountant, I am very busy early in the year, and we wanted to make sure we had time available to coordinate our home study meetings.  We thought that it would take a long time for our application to be approved, but within a week we heard that it was approved!

6. Home study begins: June, 2011 - Our first 'home study' meeting was actually at the Bethany office.  We met our caseworker, Kim, and she just asked us some general questions about how we met and how we became interested in adoption.  She gave us LOTS of homework!!  We had to fill out a questionnaire that asked about how we were raised and the relationships we have with our parents, siblings, and friends.  That was the easy part - it was at least mostly multiple choice.  The hard part was the family information guide that we each needed to complete (think essay exam....LONG essay exam).  We had to answer questions about what it was like growing up in our families, what activities we did as a family growing up, what strengths/weaknesses we think our parents had, how we decided to pursue adoption, our jobs, how we met, our own strengths/weaknesses as a spouse, our spouse's strengths/weaknesses as a spouse, what we consider the most important aspects of parenting, and much more.  Needless to say, this was a very deep thinking exercise.  It wasn't always easy to think of an answer for some of these questions, but it was a good opportunity to analyze our relationships and our expectations of being a parent.  The remainder of our home study visits were at our house.  The most memorable question that we were asked was about how we planned to discipline our children.  Of course we have some ideas of how we plan to discipline, but we really are going to have to just figure this out as we go!

7. Online training: Summer 2011 - In order to be approved to adopt from a 'Hague' certified country (which Colombia is), we needed to complete 10 hours of online training.

8. Home study completed: November 2011- Our life has been condensed to 13 pages!  We can now move forward with our paperwork for Colombia.

9. Psychological report: October, 2011 - I was expecting our psychological evaluation to be much more uncomfortable than it actually was.  We met with our psychologist and he asked us a few questions, but really we just had a conversation with him.  He is also an adoptive parent, so he was also able to share his experience with us.  We had to take a very long multiple choice test too.  It was like the standardized tests we took in elementary school (make sure to use a #2 pencil and stay within the bubble), but much more interesting.  Some of the questions asked about what you would be interested in doing for a living (park ranger, florist, etc.) and others asked about moods.  I really am not sure if there were 'right' answers for any of the questions, but we passed!

10. Dossier compilation: November, 2011 - March, 2012 - Who knew there could be so much paperwork required?  We had a long list of things that we needed to compile and of course nothing is as easy as it seems.  We had to obtain copies of our birth certificates/marriage certificate, FBI clearance, medical clearance, immigration approval, pictures of us and our home, and other various documents.  Not only did we have to obtain all of this information, we also had to have it all certified!  Some of it needed to be notarized, and some needed to be apostilled which is an additional certification that is done at the secretary of state.

11. Dossier sent to Colombia: March, 2012 - We handed over the paperwork that we worked so hard to put together!  Bethany added a few documents and then it was sent to Colombia.  The documents would needed to be translated to Spanish before they could be submitted to the adoption house.

12. Application is submitted to Los Pisingos - April, 2012 - Our dossier has been translated and is in the process of being reviewed at the adoption house.

I am going to have to post what is still ahead of us later as I am out of time!!  I hope this has given you a little insight as to what the process involves.  Feel free to ask questions - we are happy to share our experience!

I am very excited to say that we have an update to post already!!  We just heard from Bethany that our dossier has been translated to Spanish and was delivered to Los Pisingos today!  Los Pisingos will now review the dossier.  We are waiting for the official word that the we are registered with Los Pisingos.  This will hopefully only take a couple of weeks.  At that point, we will be put on the waiting list.  I will send you another update as soon as I have one!

Thanks to everyone who has shared their kind thoughts since our original posting.  We really appreciate your thoughts and prayers!

The beginning of our journey

Where to begin?  This journey has been such a huge part of our lives for several months so it is hard to sit down and put it into words.  We still have a long way to go, but we wanted to share our experience thus far as well as give you an idea of what still lies ahead of us.

The decision to adopt is one that we made several years ago.  Little did we know that there would be so many decisions to make!  After carefully considering the differences between adopting domestically and internationally, we decided to pursue adopting from Colombia.  We were fortunate enough to meet a great group of families who have also adopted from Colombia.  I don’t know how we would have made it this far without their help and support (special thanks to Glenn and Becky!!).

We submitted our initial application to Bethany Christian Services in April of 2011.  Once the application was approved, the next step in the process was the dreaded home study!  I asked early on about what kinds of things people would ‘fail’ their home studies for.  The answer was things like a criminal background – phew, I don’t think we have to worry about that!!  It sounds ridiculous now that I’m writing it, but I was seriously concerned that since we have two dogs they might think we have too much dog hair in our house!  Our home study was actually pretty painless.  There are of course a million questions to answer, but we were very comfortable with our case worker which helped with the process.

It took several months for our home study to be finalized, but by Thanksgiving we were ready to start compiling our dossier.  This is the massive packet of documentation that gets sent to Colombia for review and approval.  For those of you that know me, you will not have a hard time believing that I created a spreadsheet to track all of our paperwork. J Between requesting documents from various agencies, making sure that we were timing everything right so that nothing expired before we could submit it, and getting everything notarized and apostilled, I never would have made it through without my spreadsheet!!  I can tell you that if you can be cleared to adopt internationally, you can probably be cleared for almost anything.  We’ve been cleared through Homeland Security, the FBI, and our local police.  Our doctor has signed off on our health, and we’ve had our employment and finances verified.  I’m glad that these processes are in place because I’m sure they do more good than harm, but it can definitely be overwhelming at times!

So, where are we now?  All of our paperwork in the U.S. is completed – at least everything that needs to be done at this point.  Our paperwork went down to Colombia on March 22.  It will need to be translated to Spanish, and then it will be sent to Los Pisingos, which is the adoption house in Bogota.  They will review our application and once it is approved, we will be put on the waiting list.  We really don’t know how long the waiting list is, but we were told that we would have a better idea once we are actually on the list.  We’re hoping that we’ll have our referral yet in 2012, but we really don’t know.  Once we get our referral, there will be another round of paperwork that needs to be done, but hopefully at that point it will only take six weeks or so before we can go down to Colombia.  We’ll be in Colombia for six to nine weeks but at the end of our stay there we should be able to bring our child home!  Some countries require you to make multiple trips before you can bring your child back to the U.S.  We really like the fact that the Colombia program only requires one trip – even though it’s a long one!

We’ll be updating our blog as we have updates, but they might be few and far between for a few months.  We’re so excited to continue on this journey, and we’re glad you’re sharing it with us!! J