Happy New Year!

We hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! We'll be back next week with more updates, but wanted to share a quick glimpse into our New Years weekend project. 

Wishing everyone a blessed 2013!

Shèngdàn jié kuàilè!

I hope that means Merry Christmas in Chinese, if it doesn't you can blame google!

We're going to take a short break from blogging to enjoy the holidays, hopefully our last holiday season without our little one!

Thank you for your support and taking the time to read about our journey.

Can't wait to keep you updated on what 2013 has in store for us!

Success!

Just a quick not to say that home study visit #1 complete! It took about 2 hours and was relatively easy, lots of questions that we have already had to think and talk about during this process. The anxiety (and cleaning obsession) was much worse than the actual visit.
The dogs did pretty well. She's not really a dog person so she mostly ignored them and eventually they got the message and they ignored her. She said good things about them for the pet portion of her paperwork, so we're glad they pulled it together enough to impress her.
The house tour went well and she didn't even pull out white gloves to check our baseboards! (Kim was disappointed). She also loved the baby room progress (you all will have to be kept in suspense, pictures to come later!)
We also found out yesterday that the agency that processes our fingerprints and background checks is backed up 14 weeks! 14 weeks!!!! Good thing we got ours done early!

She will be coming back to our house in a few weeks for one more visit where she will meet with each of us individually. However for right now there's a lot of relief and a lot of this going on in our house for one more step done!

Home study visit #1

Our first home study visit is this week! I believe there are 4 visits total, the next 2 will be one on one with our home study lady and only 1 needs to be in our home.The home study is a HUGE part of the steps that need to be completed before we can send our paperwork to China.
I think this is the part that makes Brian and I the most nervous as we don’t usually have strangers in our home judging every tiny detail (or at least if do, they are polite enough to do it behind our backs).
We also have 2 large dogs that LOVE people.
However, during the home study we need them to act a little less like this

And a little more like this  

To their credit, after the first minute with new people, they relax and are very much like the second picture, but that first minute they sometimes act like they have never seen a person before. And that the visitor may be wearing clothes made out of bacon.

So…if you have any dog training tips feel free to send them our way.
We’ll just be here scrubbing every inch of our house (folks, check your baseboards. In 3 years at this house we haven't cleaned them and they are GROSS! Thanks to my mom for pointing that out and making them my obsession this week) and praying it goes well!

One more ridiculous task done!

We received our birth certificates back this week from the Secretary of State, the 2nd of 3 steps in our birth certificates' journeys towards China.
Not sure if you can read the writing, but essentially it says the Secretary of State certifies that the person certifying our birth certificates is a real person and is qualified to certify them.....Yup. We paid $25 for those crazy paragraphs!

 At least this process give us something to laugh at! And thankfully the ND and KS offices are pretty quick, we have heard that this step sometimes takes people a while.
On to the next item on the list, our first home study visit!

Adoption paperwork or How we must kill a forest to adopt a baby

And the paperwork begins...

As we started this process we knew there would be a lot of paperwork. I think we thought everyone was being dramatic, I mean we have bought two houses and sold one, we know about paperwork, right? Nope.

Adoption paperwork is a whole different beast. For example, we will need to get fingerprinted at least twice if not three times…..because everyone knows your fingerprints change?? We also have to have background checks done by 4-5 different government organizations and have our birth certificates "certified" three different ways. Good thing other than a few speeding tickets (mostly Kim) we have led pretty boring lives.
 We should have had an idea when we turned in our initial application and in turn got a 10 page questionnaire and 3 pages worth of questions about our childhood, careers, marriage and thoughts on parenting (of which we had very few). 

Then we were told we had to schedule "document training". A whole meeting just to talk about documents? This won't take very long.....When stumbled out of Starbucks two and a half hours later everything was very foggy. Luckily for Brian, I thrive on checklists and getting to check items off as done! Brian also humored me and we bought an adoption binder (isn't it pretty?!) to keep the mountains of paperwork together.

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So for the next few months, my joy will come from making little check marks on the above piece of paper and watching our binder grow with stuff we are done with! :)

First steps

Deciding to adopt was actually a pretty easy decision for us (strangely enough it took us longer to decide on the name of this blog). Then we looked at each other and said, now what? It was a bit overwhelming at first to even figure out where to start!

The first thing we were able to do was to complete one of our three required eight hour classes. Brian even restrained himself from complaining about missing a day of college football and a CSU football game that we had tickets too. I knew he was a keeper! The class was very interesting and talked about everything from what to expect during the adoption process to what to expect day one when you get your child to how to talk to your child about adoption. It really helps that the ladies that run the class have both adopted internationally so they could give great insight. Brian and I left with our heads spinning and lots to talk about, but we are excited for the next two classes to see what else we can learn. As first time parents we have no idea what to expect, so we will take all the help we can get!

The week of Thanksgiving we took advantage of an afternoon off work to go to the police station to get fingerprinted. I don’t think I have ever said the words “See you at the police station!” to Brian and let’s hope it’s the last time! The process was easy and we learned that I have sweaty fingers (I don't care who you are, it's not normal to be in a police station getting your fingerprints done and not be nervous!) and Brian’s got great prints. Let’s just hope the state of Colorado deems them good enough so we don’t have to do that again!

 

So far so good, it's nice to get a few things checked off the list! Speaking of that list, I'll fill you in next post as to what the wonderful world of adoption paperwork is like! Here's a hint, after getting all the background checks and Homeland security clearances, Brian may actually qualify for a job with the FBI. I'm sure they need graphic designers, right?

You're doing what?! China?!

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We know that our decision to adopt from China came out of left field for a lot of people.
Let’s start from the beginning and fill you in.   

Brian and I started talking about kids before we got married and decided that we wanted to wait for a few years and enjoy married life. These first 5 years of marriage have been amazing and have allowed us to really solidify our relationship. We will always be grateful that we gave ourselves time to “be selfish” and enjoy our marriage before having children.

When Brian and I started looking into adoption, we noticed the process is very feelings driven. It's sort of like finding your future spouse, you just know when it feels right. We were able to rule out domestic adoption pretty early in the process as it just didn’t “feel right” to us. International adoption has always intrigued us and we decided to start researching countries. This is another place that we had to go with what felt right. Many countries have strict requirements regarding travel, the age of the children you can adopt, etc and the more we researched, the more China stood out as the best match for us. We began to be able to picture ourselves traveling to China to meet our son or daughter.

We started interviewing agencies in October and decided on one local to us. It was nice to know that we could stop by and talk to our coordinator face to face if we had questions.We have been lucky enough to do several of our meetings at Starbucks. Long to do lists always go over better with a caramel macchiato!

And that brings us to today! We are jumping in with both feet into this process and can't wait to see what the future will bring.