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!

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!

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?