Changing our homestudy

It seems like forever ago that we started on our adoption paperwork. Ah, how young and naive we were. We thought we knew what kind of child we wanted, and we thought that the only other factors we had to consider were wait times and choosing a good agency. How wrong we were!

 

Luckily, there are many experienced adoptive parents and adult adoptees out there who tirelessly educate and argue with and encourage us new PAP on the various online forums (like this one and this one and this one). And we started to see that it's not just about what we think we want. It's also about what other adoptive parents want. And about what birth families need. And about what the @%#&!s, who would make money off a child, want. Most importantly, about what the kids need.

After much time and reading and talking, we began to realize that what we thought we wanted maybe wasn't exactly what we wanted. Maybe we could want something a little different, maybe a little less of what the other adoptive parents and the @%#&!s wanted and a little more of what the birth families and the kids needed. To be clear, it's still about what we want. We're not going to adopt a child that we feel incapable of parenting. We’re just slightly redefining what we want.

There are two lists in the adoptive world: the waiting parents list and the waiting child list. The waiting parents list is very long, and most people are waiting for a healthy baby. The waiting child list is for children who don't have anyone to adopt them. These children are there because they are older, or have medical issues, or both. For the last few months, we've been thinking about how we can move farther from the waiting parent list and closer to the waiting child list. We've been talking to many other adoptive parents and some health professionals. 

We know that there are wonderful people out there who have adopted seven or ten special needs children. That's not us. But a slightly older child, we decided we want that. And we found a special need that we feel comfortable with. 

We have decided to ask for one or two children, up to five years old, and Hepatitis B positive.

Yesterday we began the process of changing our homestudy. It’s going to be pretty simple and hopefully will not take too long. We took a long time to make this decision, and we’re pretty excited about it, and confident it was the right one for us.

paperwork update

This month finds us wrapping up our dossier paperwork. We received our approval from USCIS on February 3. The time from mailing the I600A application to approval was 9 weeks. Also at the start of February we requested that our agency send us some paperwork needed for our dossier, and those papers arrived February 17. While we were waiting for the papers, we redid a few things that weren't notarized quite right. Then when the last papers arrived, we compiled the dossier and sent in a copy to our agency for a final check. We got the go-ahead on February 23, and today we went to Fed-Ex, made three copies of everything, and sent all our original paperwork to Washington DC to be authenticated. We're using an expediter, so we should get the authentications from both the Department of State and the Ethiopian Embassy within 3 business days of receipt.
We have been in this process for about seven months now, but we're almost done! It's taken us a long time to get here, mostly because I didn't understand when we started that we could be working on several things simultaneously. Our homestudy agency always referred to finishing the homestudy and then "handing us off" to the next agency to do our dossier, so I didn't realize I could have started on the dossier while the homestudy was still being written. The dossier instructions had sequential steps, so I didn't think to work on several parts at once. So to anyone out there who is just starting out: if you are in a rush, know that you can multi-task.
But really the delays have been a blessing in disguise (note: this is the first and only time I will use the word "blessing" on my blog). These extra months have allowed us to gain from the wisdom of parents who have been there. Especially in December and January there were some amazing conversations about ethics on the online forums. I think if we'd gotten everything sent off and then started learning about these ethical issues, we might have felt really disappointed. Instead we are already prepared for the fact that submitting our dossier will likely not be the last paperwork we do. Nothing's been decided yet, but we are thinking seriously about making some changes.
If all goes well, my next post should be about our authenticated dossier being accepted by our agency.

Almost done with dossier

So we're sitting around, and we both get this quietness, which I'm learning means that we're both thinking about the adoption paperwork. Tabb asks, is there anything we can be doing right now for the dossier? I know, I say, let's run through the checklist for the 17th time.
- Power of Attorney document on its way to be certified (should receive by end of next week)
- Employment letters done
- Health forms done
- Birth certificates and marriage certificate done
- My new passport received and copied
- Letters of reference on their way (but I am secretly stalking you, Jamie and Amanda)
- Phone interview with our case worker done 
- USCIS approval on its way in ????? weeks
There must be something we could be doing right now. What if I scour the USCIS website one more time for clues to wait times? That could be productive.

USCIS

Another snow day today, so we went down to the USCIS office to see if they would let us do our fingerprints early. They did! Everyone there was very nice, and we only had to wait about 20 minutes before they called us in.
Then we went to the credit union and got a bunch of our documents notarized.
The dossier paperwork seems to be going faster than the homestudy paperwork.

Dossier

Snow day today, so a good day to work on getting dossier paperwork organized. This is the checklist required for the dossier. Once everything is collected and notarized, it goes to the State Department and then to the Ethiopian Embassy.

1. Power of Attorney letter - must also be certified by the state department. Luckily that's in Raleigh, and they have a same-day service if you go there in person.
2. Statement of Reason for Adopting an Ethiopian Child - done. Mostly I included what I had written here, but in more formal language.
3. Photos of us and the house - done. Lots of cleaning involved, just in case an Ethiopian official is on the lookout for dog hair under the couch.
4. Original copy of home study - done.
5. Employment letters for each of us - requested and should be arriving soon.
6. Financial statement - done.
7. Birth certificates - Tabb's is ordered and on its way. I was born outside of the U.S. but luckily I do not have to order a new certificate. I can just get a notarized copy of the original.
8. Copies of passports - mine expires in August, so I've sent it in for renewal. Should come in a couple of weeks.
10. Marriage certificate - picked one up yesterday after work.
11. New health form from our physicians - I have an appt on January 20. The traveling notary will meet me at the doctor's office once again. Tabb works next door to the hospital, so he can pop over to the doctor any time.
12. Police clearance. We have our FBI clearance, which will be enough, unless we don't have our dossier completed by February 16. On that day we go past the allowable 3-month age on documents, so then we'd have to get a local clearance instead.
13. Two letters of reference - with a few changes, we can use two of our original reference letters from our home study.
14. USCIS approval - we have our fingerprinting appointment on January 20. I don't know how long after the appointment we get the clearance. The timing of the USCIS approval will probably determine whether we can get everything processed by the State Department and Ethiopian Embassy before February 16.

And then, once all that is finished, we are officially on the waiting list. At this point it sounds like the wait for a referral will be well over a year. Then there will be an additional wait, which also seems to be getting longer, to get a court date in Ethiopia. So I'm guessing it will be at least summer of 2012 or later before we travel to Ethiopia. And of course, anything could happen between now and then.

not really thinking

I'm working on our "Statement of Reason for Adopting an Ethiopian Child," which will go in our dossier to the Ethiopian government. It's funny how many blogs I've seen where the parents' reason was, "God told us our child was in Ethiopia," and that's been a completely acceptable statement. Yay, religion! No need for thought or self-reflection!

update

I forgot to post that our homestudy was finally officially accepted by Wide Horizons a few days ago. There had been some missing paperwork that the homestudy agency hadn't told us about. I think the two agencies have only partnered recently, so they seem to still be ironing out the communication kinks. Not a big deal, since we still have Mount Dossier looming in front of us. Dang, those instructions are long!

We also got a USCIS fingerprinting appointment for January 20. Tabb reminded me NOT to do any weeding, because last time my fingerprinting had to be delayed due to a giant blister.

Anyway, the dossier instructions were printing out as I wrote this. I'm about to get a beer and start reading them.

Homestudy ✓ Next up: USCIS

How exciting - we are officially past the first step in the adoption process! We received the finalized homestudy today. We went to the post office to pick it up, put one of the notarized copies in the envelope to USCIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services) and got right back in line to mail off the I600A (application for advance processing of orphan petition). It will be received in Texas by 3PM on Monday. The government website says processing takes 2.5 months, but I've heard it can be faster.

Our homestudy was delayed a few extra days because we found out that Wide Horizons has a rule that requests for siblings must cover a 4-year range. We had originally put 12-36 months on our application, and we had to change it to 0-48 months. When our homestudy agency told us (it seemed to be news to them, too), Tabb agreed pretty quickly, but I took a couple of extra days just to sleep on it and make sure I was OK with it. Then on Tuesday I realized (on a beautiful walk home from work) that my uncertainty about changing the numbers on our homestudy had nothing to do with the ages of the children we want or feel able to parent, and everything to do with wanting to feel like I can control something in this process. Which is silly, because if there's one thing I know about international adoption it's that I can't control anything. And this realization was a very nice feeling, because I really love those rare moments when I feel that things are completely out of my control. It's so freeing.

Our final homestudy says one child 12-36 months or siblings 0-48 months.

Paperwork

Last week we were officially accepted by Carolina Adoption Services and got our first packet of paperwork. My first reaction when I looked at it was to leave the house. So I did. I came back to it later and started filling it out, then I left it again. The next day Tabb and I worked on it together, and now it is feeling less overwhelming. The key thing is to do it one step at a time.
Here’s what’s included in the first round of paperwork:

• Basic family information
• Education and work history
• Discuss your values and beliefs
• Organizations to which you belong
• Activities you enjoy separately
• Activities you enjoy together
• Childcare plans
• Plans for preserving your child’s cultural heritage
• Preparations for international adoption
• Information on our parents and siblings
• References
• Our autobiographies
• Various legal documents to sign
• Financial and tax statements
• Birth certificates, marriage certificate
• Photos of us and our house
• Proof of life insurance (we need to get some)
• Proof of health insurance
• Guardianship letter (who would care for our child if something happened to us)

Right now we are working on our autobiographies.