What’s that? News? Oh never mind.

Just got off the phone with our agency rep.

Bottom line #1: It will take another month to resolve some paperwork issues for the kids that are currently in process.

Bottom line #2: We still don’t know if these children will be our “referral” or if the paperwork issue will be unresolvable.

Bottom line #3: We are definitely not traveling to Colombia to meet our kids this year.

For other adoptive families…You have to stay on top of your agency and they need to stay on top of their in-country liaisons.

We’ve learned that the ICBF staff aren’t necessarily calling the agency contacts with updates or news such as problems like this that come up. We would still be waiting for a referral–thinking it was coming in early November– if we hadn’t called. The reality is you have to be your own advocate. So, now we have to move forward with the third round of medical and fingerprint updates because they expire every six months and ours expire in December.

Our Stats

When we started the paperwork process in early 2007, the wait for a sibling group of older kids (over 4 years) was only four-six months. Then, the wait time was extended to six-nine months, then 12 months, then 18 months.

12.07–Dossier Submitted for sibling group of two children ages 0-6

04.08–Dossier Approved (no follow-up questions or changes required!)

04.09–Regional Assignment!

09.09–Where in the world are our kids?

Bad news and good news

So we spoke with our agency rep after her return from Colombia.  We learned that the sibling groups that were “in process” turned out to either not be adoptable–meaning some family members requested guardianship–or they were actually a sib group of three instead of two.

While we were approved for three, we’re still requesting just two siblings right now, so our file remains in the region we were assigned and hopefully we’ll  be next in line when the next group comes up in the system.

Some good news is that we’ve recently made connections with local contacts in the city where we’ll meet and bond with our kids.  So, we’ll have people to hang out with and friendly help in addition to the agency staff and interpretor.

Update: There’s No Update

I think that pretty much says it all.   Surprisingly, the referral we thought was coming, hasn’t. No idea why.  Our agency hasn’t been able to give us a status or provide any specific details for us either about when we could expect it.  The program director is actually in Colombia through this week though, and we’ll be following up with her for the status when we can reach her.  We’re very curious about recent referrals that have happened quickly and we wonder if some prospective adoptive parents are able to adopt outside of the government agency’s timeline and process by going directly through private orphanages.  We’ll let you know what we learn.

Window Boxes!

This is just a break from adoption stuff to show you how great our window boxes look

Approved But No Time For Pleasantries

I have to say I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the FBI and The Department of Homeland Security U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices.  

Both offices are accessible by email and are very prompt about answering questions about our application.  BUT, THEY HAVE NO TIME FOR PLEASANTRIES as this reply message from them today shows:

“A reply to this message, including “thank you” or other such notification, is discouraged due to volume of messages received.

Your application for renewal was approved and an approval Notice (Form I-171H), indicating an extension until 11/13/2010 has gone out in today’s regular mail.”   Love it.

For the visually-oriented.

Okay, early feedback from my family is that this is kind of boring without pictures.  Well, without having the goofy grins and silly expressions of actual kids, these will have to do:  (click on the pictures to get a better look)

Resting on my cat is a great little phrase book written specifically for adoptive parents.

Not sure yet if these are age-appropriate, but I love that they’re bilingual.

 These Usborne workbooks for kids, and the phrase book above are our main study guides.  We’re also going to a Spanish Conversation class once a week.    When we’re in Colombia, we’ll have a bi-lingual guide helping us get around and understand what’s going on when we’re at court.

 

                                                                                        

 

 I bet you’ve been wondering, “Where does Mary work?”   I’m at United Way of Forsyth County working downtown in a circa 1960s high-rise next to the RJR Tobacco company. I’m on the 17th floor.

The “while you’re waiting” reading list

 We’ve read or should read some of these.  There is much to learn about attachment and re-parenting–a lot of it is technical, but there’s also some practical tips and strategies.  We still need plenty of advice and encouragement from friends and family though…

What do you do when you can’t do anything?

While we’re waiting to hear about our kids, we’ve been doing as much as we can to prepare our home.  The irony is that we had planned to move before our adoption was finalized.  In fact, we were preparing our home to put it on the market just a few weeks ago, so we don’t have the kids’ room/s painted or furnished. 

But since we don’t know how old the kids will be or their gender, we’re feeling a little bit paralyzed.  If the kids are close in age and the same gender, we’ll put them in the same room, and right now we’re leaning towards putting them in the smaller room thinking that cozier is better. 

We are starting from absolute scratch with this–other than a few bilingual children’s books, we have no toys, no clothes, no kid-sized cups and chairs–we don’t even have so much as a baby aspirin in the house.  We have so much to do, but don’t know what yet.  We’re going to be scrambling like mad at the last minute.  Any advice is welcome!

Fingerprints

This  past week we went to our local sherrif’s office to re-do our fingerprint cards which we then sent to the FBI in WV for processing our background checks.  Just one element of the original dossier paperwork was proof of a clean criminal record, and naturally that has an expiration date, so we need to prove we’re still law-abiding citizens. 

Today we drove to the INS office in Charlotte where we filed the  original application to file the international orphan adoption application.  We had to appear in person again to get  another set of fingerprints that will also be sent to the same FBI office in WV for processing. 

I still haven’t figured out why we’re doing the fingerprinting twice.   BTW, Did you know your fingerprints wear out?  The scanner had trouble reading prints on both of us.  Now we wait ten days to find out if we “passed”…