Not so well timed trip to Minnesota

Last week Brian needed to spend the week in Minneapolis for work. This was planned several months ago and we decided that I would fly out there mid week to meet him for a mini vacation. As it turns out that was one of the coldest weeks Minneapolis has had all winter and poor Brian got to experience -30 degree windchill for the first time.

Luckily our extent of being outside was walking to and from the car and one very cold and windy photo op that Brian humored me on (must get our picture taken by the cherry every time!)

We had a great time visiting friends and seeing the (indoor) sights of Minneapolis. It's always nice to get away for a few days!

This week is going to be a busy and productive one. Brian's birthday is this week (I think I'm more excited than he is), so we are going out to dinner and going to the CSU basketball game. Then we have our last (!!) homestudy visit and our last (!!!) all day adoption class! 

Have a great week everyone! 

Love without boundaries blog series

We wanted to share a blog series that our agency told us about.
Love without borders is a non-profit agency who helps provide care to the orphans in China. They provide everything from special bottles for kids with cleft palate or lip to funds for life saving surgeries.

They wrote a blog series on the changes over the last 10 years in international adoptions from China. In case you are interested in following along, here's the link:

Love Without Boundaries blog

On the home front, we finished home study visit #3 yesterday! Woo hoo! One more home study and one more class and we will be mostly done! While this is great news, our social worker did warn us that it can get frustrating after this point because it will be mostly out of our hands. We won't have any more boxes to check off, we will be waiting for our paperwork to be processed and translated, waiting for China to receive our paperwork and waiting to be matched. Hopefully our wait time will be 2-3 months, but we just don't know. We do look forward to using that time to get some house projects done and enjoy our free time while we still have it. And working on our patience!

Pink or Blue

Most people assume when you adopt from China that you are going to bring home a baby girl due to China's one child policy and the tradition that the sons take care of the parents as they get older.
When we first started researching adoption, we discovered that there are two ways to adopt from China.
First is the healthy child list and this list is made up of mostly girls. We thought that this would be the list we would want to be on, everyone wants a healthy baby right? Well the wait time on this list is currently 5-6 years.....Yup, years.
So that was out.
Then we heard about the special focus list. In China, any abnormality or deformity on a child causes them to not be "healthy" and puts them on the special focus list. These conditions can greatly vary from something as simple as a birth mark or eczema to cleft lip or club foot or more severe conditions like Spina Bifida. This list often has both boys and girls of all ages.
Brian and I spent a lot of time thinking and praying about this decision. To be quite honest, we never thought we would adopt a "special needs" child. However the more we thought and prayed over it, the more God started showing us what "special needs" really means.
We saw this video at one of our adoption training classes and I'm not ashamed to say that I had to hold back tears. Go ahead and watch it, we'll wait....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rztYMMhMT2Y

There were many things that stood out in this video (besides the cameo of a few pitties :)).
First, these parents admit they didn't know everything about their chidrens' needs, but they did know how to love and through unconditional love these children blossomed. This is really no different than having biological children. You never know what cards you are going to be dealt or what your child will be like, but the one thing you can do is love them no matter what.
Another thing I loved from the video was the quote "When you are adopted, your parents looked out at the whole world and chose you". What an awesome way to explain adoption to our child. Our goal for our child is to not feel abandoned or orphaned, but chosen. Chosen by God to be our child, even though he or she was born a world away from us.
I could go on and on about that video, but this post is wordy already. In short, it confirmed Brian and I's desire to adopt a "special needs" child in a way that I never expected.

Part of the adoption paperwork includes a "type of child" form where Brian and I need to specify what needs we think we would be well equipped to handle. We found it very difficult to fill out this form and because of this we are choosing not to share our decisions. We will say however that we did not take this decision lightly and took into account what we thought we could emotionally, physically and financially handle. We want to be open to finding our child as quickly as possible, but we need to be honest about our capabilities as first time parents and as working parents.

We're a little over half way through the adoption process, we have 1 more class, 2 more homestudy visits, physical exams and a few more (ok lots more) pieces of paper. We are hoping to have our application sent to China by the end of March and after that it is just a matter of time until we are matched.
We can't wait for the day that we can post the picture of our son or daughter on this blog!
Until then we'll just be here waiting......

Home study visit #2

Homestudy visit #2 is done and was really pretty painless. We had individual interviews with our social worker and then talked together about some ways to make sure we take time for ourselves once we become parents. It was a good reminder that we need to take care of our mental health in order to take good care of our child. We have 2 more home study visits this month and then we will be done!

And we checked off 4 (!!!) items on our checklist tonight! We only have 10 items left on our list, some as easy as taking pictures of our house or finishing our 2012 taxes and as difficult as our I-800, which is a big document that is one of the last documents we need to submit to the USCIS before sending everything to China.

Very exciting to see things moving along!

Busy week!

Just a quick update to say this week is a busy and hopefully very productive one! We got our passport pictures taken (China needs 5 of each of us, not sure why they need TEN awkward passport pictures in addition to the 20 other pictures we have to provide to them, but whatever!), are completing some of our financial paperwork, have homestudy visit #2 tomorrow and our 2nd (out of 3) all day adoption class on Saturday. Very excited to be moving forward again and making very real steps towards finishing our paperwork (not to mention I get to make more check marks on the list, which makes me oh so happy!).


P.S. Yes our class is this Saturday as in the day everyone else in Colorado will be watching the Broncos beat the Ravens. We plan on recording the game and vegging out the rest of the night watching that and the CSU basketball game. I'm thinking we're going to have to avoid our phones completely until after we've watched the game!

Tell me more...

One of the things that surprised us when we started the adoption process is that we both needed to get a psychiatric evaluation and a personality test done. Neither of us have ever seen a psychologist (and if we had we probably wouldn't talk about it here. I mean we trust you, but who knows who else is reading this!) so we had no idea what to expect, except that it had the potential to be very expensive. Our coordinator quoted us anywhere from $750-$1500. ouch. By some strange miracle, I got a tip to look into the mental health portion of our health insurance and lo and behold these visits might be covered! We haven't gotten a bill yet, but for right now we are holding onto hope that we dodged that expensive bullet.

So the week of Thanksgiving (black Friday to be exact, nothing like having your first psych consult after a day of fighting crazy crowds of people!) we had our first appointment. It was....interesting. Our psychologist was very nice and tried to make us feel comfortable, but I think his favorite phrase is "What else?" and several times we truly ran out of stuff to talk about! At one point Brian and I looked at each other and Brian said "well we like to go to CSU football and basketball games....". I almost busted out laughing because it is so true, we are pretty normal average people with a happy marriage and very little drama in our lives (which we are VERY thankful for, knock on wood!).
Then he handed us our personality test to take. 600 some questions ranging from "do you like to read mechanics magazines" to "do you hear voices". I think we were both cross eyed by the end of it.

*Side note, we had to complete the test on a scantron form. Anyone remember these? I can't believe they are still around! Mr. Scantron must be making a killing on these things!

Anyone else just tempted to fill in all B's and see what happens? A personality test is probably a bad place to try something like that out though.......

Anywho, first psych consult, check! Personality test, check! Individual consults, check and check!
We're just waiting on our psychiatrist to write up his evaluation and send it to our agency (yes I am tempted to call him twice a day every day until he gets it done, no I haven't actually done that. yet.).
We're very excited to be at about the halfway point of all these check marks!