More on Visa

I called to double check this morning, and J's visa was officially issued as of today.

Now just waiting on the travel call. That may or may not happen sometime during the rest of this week. I'm scoping out plane ticket prices though. Did you know that some (most? all?) airlines charge you a fee to have a baby on your lap during an international flight? Yet, domestic flights don't charge you for that same privilege. Just my opinion of course, but I think that is ridiculous. My baby might weigh 20 pounds, won't be taking up a seat and then you charge me $200 to allow him to fly across the ocean. Just leaves me flabbergasted.

Nothing Yet

I was able to distract myself with a Girlfriends' Lunch Out, retail therapy and chocolate yesterday.
Called again today though and still no visa interview.
I'm thinking he does not yet have Emigration Permission.
Also- note to self and to other families calling- the office is closed on Wednesdays around lunch time.
Will distract myself some more tomorrow and then call back again on Friday.

Vacation Continued

C and I had fun during our few days in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. We did quite a bit of wine tasting at vineyards all over, saw a geyser, some Redwoods and drove along the coast.Now we are off to San Diego to attend the wedding of a friend.

In Adoption news- still nothing new. I called the Dept. of State this morning to check again, and unfortunately the Packet 3 is still not returned, so there is no Visa Interview scheduled for J yet.

Hurray for T (see a few posts below) though- her daughter jumped a bunch of steps and had her Visa Interview!

Vacation- Check... Visa- Still Waiting

As of this morning, though that would be after the completion of business on Tuesday in Korea, Baby J's Packet 3 has still not been returned to the Embassy by our Korean agency, so no Visa Interview yet.

C and I are off to a much needed R & R vacation to both northern and southern California. We plan to spend a few days in Napa and/or Sonoma and then head down to San Diego for the weekend. It should be a good time to get our last "husband and wife only" bonding experiences in.
As I was packing my carry-on last night, I was so excited to not have to pack study materials for a flight! But I also realized that this is the last time it will be this easy to pack for a long while! Oh, to have the joys of hauling baby equipment and supplies around. We will be there soon.

No visa interviews all around

First- my heart is just aching for my friends K & C whose daughter's homecoming is now delayed by possibly a few months due to government workers dropping the ball on some paperwork. This is the family that has been about a month ahead of us in this whole red tape process. They were told almost a month ago to expect to be able to travel in two weeks. Didn't happen, so our local agency finally called the Korean agency to track down what happened. The news was not good. They are still waiting for that all elusive Visa Interview and will need to continue to wait until their daughter's Emigration Permission and passport come through from the Korean government. My C's thought was that whoever was responsible for messing up the paperwork should be publicly humiliated and fired (well, in not so nice of terms as that)!

Also, T, an online blogger friend, has been waiting about the same length of time to hear about her daughter's Emigration Permission being granted so that they can move on to the Visa Interview. (Their local agency lets them know when it happens, whereas ours does not.) T is slowly going crazy and my heart aches for her as well. She just hasn't heard anything at all, so hopefully her daughter's paper work will materialize soon. May those precious baby girls be united with their wait-crazed mamas soon!

As for us, we are also still waiting to hear about J's Visa Interview. From what I have seen of other families' posted time-lines, it typically takes 6-12 days for the Visa Interview to be scheduled after the Packet 3 is sent out. That is assuming all the other steps have already been completed. (See K & C's and T's plight above). Baby J's Packet 3 was sent out from the Embassy to our Korean agency a week ago, so we are still within the the average window to get to that next step. I called this morning to check, and the Visa Interview was not scheduled as of yet. Friday is a Korean holiday, and then it is the weekend, so the next time I call to inquire on the status will probably be Tuesday, right before we leave on our vacation to California. Waiting until then to call again will allow two more business days to be completed where hopefully something will happen. We shall see.

I'm also waiting to see if I passed my last test for grad school, which I took yesterday. I am allowed one re-take, in the event I didn't pass. I wasn't so confident after I finished, but then again I never am. C and my mom have been reminding me about how much test anxiety I have had in the past for major tests, thinking I failed every one so far, when really I have passed every one so far. This time felt different though- I was just very overwhelmed by the amount of material. I actually cried right when I started taking the thing, which I think was an emotional response to how keyed up I was. Oh, well. Again, just have to wait and see.

To distract myself from the two waits, I'm heading up to my old hometown today to go to lunch and go shopping with my mom. We are going to look for small, Colorado-themed gifts to bring to Korea with us for the foster moms, socials workers and directors of the Korean agency. Also, this weekend, I plan to work more on the landscaping of our back yard, and I am going to make my first quilt ever. Well, at least the top. I bought a baby quilt kit to make for J that included most of the supplies. I still have to do the cutting, piecing and sewing though. Once I get that part done, my mom, who quilts a lot, will do the actual quilting to put the top, batting and back together. Hopefully, it turns out great. :)

I will post more when we have more news. In the mean time, Happy October! (Can you believe it?!?)

Packet 3 Out and Emotional Lability

The paperwork advanced another step today. :)
Yesterday afternoon, I called the Department of State, Consular affairs, in Washington, D.C. to see where things stood. I didn't post about it yesterday because nothing had happened yet. In fact, the Visa Specialist Officer said that the case had not even been opened in Seoul yet, only forwarded there. So, given that news, I was going to wait to call again until the end of the week.
Yeah, right. Didn't happen.

I called again just now after being inspired by the good news of a scheduled Visa Interview for the daughter of one of our waiting friends.
Got good news of our own that the Packet 3 (basically the paper work required to set up the visa interview) was forwarded to the Korean agency. :)

The Korean agency completes that paperwork, returns it to the US Embassy in Seoul and then our baby's visa interview can be scheduled.

There are also two other parts to the equation that we do not get to find out when they happen, but they are completed at some point in Korea. This is the Emigration Permission by the Korean government for our son, and obtaining his Korean passport. They may have both already happened, but we don't know for sure as unfortunately, our US agency does not find out when these occur. We do know that once the Visa Interview is scheduled, those two things have occurred, as that is the last step before we get the travel call.

On a side note, as I have been reading back through my blog posts, I have noticed a trend that I mostly post only when a step in the process occurs, or when I am hopeful that a step will occur soon. I tend not to post on my "Down" Mommy days, when I feel as though we will never get to the end. I also haven't posted any of my very vivid and very strange dreams about the process. (I've had about 4 of those- well 4 that I recorded in my personal journal as they left me very disturbed upon waking up.)

So given that, I just want to state here and now, for the record, that this journey has been very emotional- both the ups and downs. It has not been all happy bunnies and pretty roses. Just ask my hubby or my mom about my occasional hysterics! Luckily for all you blog readers, I have avoided broadcasting those days to the world. :)

There is a somewhat tongue in cheek saying that the adoption journey is a paper pregnancy. In terms of the emotions and preparation involved, I would have to say that is true. The only thing I don't have to worry about, is the discomforts of a growing belly and other physical changes of pregnancy. I actually do mourn the fact that I am missing that aspect of growing our family though. (If you know me IRL, and know what I do/ did for a living, and what my graduate degree is concentrated in, you will understand why I might be mourning a bit more than usual and might be a bit slower to accept the loss of never experiencing a pregnancy.) I'm slowly getting past it and dealing with the aftermath of infertility in my own mind step by step. All I can say is that it is definitely a healing process.

Milestones

Today is a happy day!
Last week we got a small, but positive update on how J is doing now at 7 months. It's rare to get any kind of update, so I'm thankful for that, but also a little sad as we only received information on two specific things. We still have no idea how much he currently weighs, how tall he is now, or if he has reached any of the other milestones 7 month old babies typically reach- like sitting up, crawling, etc. We may be receiving new photos though soon, so that will be fabulous.

As far as the paperwork/ redtape process of bringing him home goes, we are still waiting for our I600 approval. It has only been slightly over a week since we went in to get fingerprinted though, so today or tomorrow would be the earliest we would hear anything anyway and we most likely will not get our packet in the mail even then.

The two families who are our friends and fellow waiting parents both got one step closer to their girls yesterday though. One may even be home in about two weeks! How exciting! I can't wait until all three are home (and settled in) and we get together for a picture. :)

a month...

Today has been four weeks since we first saw Mr. J's picture. When looking forward to what to expect for each piece of the clearance to bring him home, the time has seemed to drag on and on. However, looking back in retrospect it has flown by. It helps that I am keeping busy and am spacing out big events on my schedule to to help diffuse some of my anticipation.

ASAP... Sit and Wait

Today we drove up to Berthoud for the required Pre-Arrival meeting at our adoption agency. It was a long and rainy drive, as the weather here has not been beautiful for the past few days, but we made it. When we walked in the door, we were pleasantly surprised to be handed the Legal Paperwork for J! Totally worth the drive! The letter requesting state approval was sent off in today's mail as well, so that should be back in a week to 10 days.

The meeting itself was a discussion of what is happening paperwork wise on both the US side and the Korea side in preparation for each baby to receive travel clearance. The timelines I posted here in an earlier post remain the same, although sometimes the Legals take even longer- up to three months. (Three weeks looks good now in retrospect!) In the world of international adoption, the paperwork process is dependent on many different agencies. Each step has to be done ASAP as you get to it, but then you sit and wait around for the next step. So that is the new mantra: ASAP... Sit and Wait.

During the meeting, we also reviewed what to expect when your baby gets home. We originally discussed the topic during our Core Training, but it was good to hear a refresher. Finally, we had a visit by a family whose son just came home 5 weeks ago. After the meeting, C and I went to a local coffee shop with C & K, and S & L, the same two couples we shared a lunch table with at the picnic. It was good to get to know everyone a bit more and take a nice break.

We're hoping for a quick turn around time on the State letter and then to receive the invitation to be fingerprinted before September 5, as C will be gone on business for two weeks straight after that. Back to the Sit and Wait part!

Waiting Parents at a Picnic

What do you get when three couples, who have all been matched with a baby born in Korea, but who are all still waiting for paper work to process to bring that baby home, share a lunch table at our adoption agency's annual picnic?

Lots of ooohing and aaahing over pictures of each of our babies, comparisons of what step in the clearance process we are all at, discussions of what baby gear everyone already has or still needs, the best places to get said baby gear, lots of ooohing and aaahing over the babies who have recently come home, laughter at the antics of the older children, and a discussion about the finer points of pestering wasps by freezing them to sedate them, then tying dental floss around the bodies and letting them unfreeze on leashes.

Guess which part the daddies were discussing?

Actually, the wasp thing was a minor part of the conversation, brought up by my mom and the men took off with it for a bit. The rest of the time we were all having a great discussion about our babies coming home.

Yesterday was such a nice day for a picnic and the BBQ was great. It was good to be surrounded by other families with small children who had been born in Korea or China. A great day overall.

Next week we will again drive the two hours up to the agency to attend a Pre-Arrival meeting for the various families who are waiting for their children. We chose to go so soon after our referral, despite not having any of the clearance steps completed because the next Pre-Arrival meeting is not scheduled until mid-October. So even though J will most likely not be able to come home until after that, I didn't want to leave that meeting until the very end of this waiting process.

I was disappointed in the mail all last week, but hopefully, J's Legals will arrive this week and we can move on to the State clearance letter. I can't believe it has only been two weeks since we were matched with our baby. Even though he is not home yet, it seems as if he has been a part of our family forever. We have loved (the concept of) a baby since the start of our adoption journey, now we at least have someone, and a picture of the little man, to direct that love to. In a few more months, we will have a real live squirming baby in our arms who will be the recipient of all the love we have been storing up.

Blank Canvas

Our basement finish has officially been completed, which means we got to move all of the office furniture and equipment out of the temporary office upstairs and into its permanent home downstairs. That leaves us one completely empty room upstairs, which will become our baby boy's nursery. Behold the blank canvas!I'm so excited to start decorating! The theme for the room will be sports and most everything will be primary colors. We do have a lot of the stuff already from gifts and other resources. I was garage sale/ Craig's list queen for a few weeks and found a rocker/glider and a changing table, both in great shape. The plan is to paint the changing table, but the rocker was fine, even though it won't match the wood of the crib and dresser we plan to get. I also have a multi-sports wall paper border which I will put up at chair-rail height and then will paint the walls a dark blue beneath it. I'll post more pictures once the transformation is complete.

Unfortunately, that is the extent of our adoption news right now. We are still (somewhat) patiently waiting for our referral.

Showered With Love

Even though we have not received a referral yet, and thus don't know exactly who our son is, in the last few weeks I have been blessed with two beautiful baby showers thrown by wonderful friends and family.

In late June, my town's sorority alumnae association held a Scrapbook-Shower-Party as one of our scheduled events. What made this shower even more special, is that our alumnae association is a newly organized group and despite not knowing me all that well, my sisters stepped right up to help welcome our future son to our family. (I love how the bonds of our sorority instantly connect supposed strangers, transcending geography and generations.) During the event, we were given a Scrapbook 101 lesson and made an awesome 6 x 6 personalized ABC poem scrapbook that I only have to add pictures to later.

This past weekend, my sister-in-law, J, and my best friend from high school, B, conspired together to throw me a fabulous shower held at my mom's house. Many, many of my friends live all over the U.S. and Germany, so J sent everyone onesies ahead of time to decorate and send back, thus being able to "participate" in the shower. For those who physically attended, we ate yummy cake, played a few games and decorated our own onesies there. Our son will definitely be well clothed with unique onesies! It was good to hear from and/or see old friends and it was fun to be the expectant mommy. :) I really had a great time and I can't tell you how much I love J and B for putting it all together. Thank you girls!

Here are a few pictures from the shower on Sunday:

B directing Korean word Balderdash

Guests making onesies

My mom decorating her onesie

Me with onesie I stenciled

Pretty handmade rag quilt, made by S (on left)

J and me with her diaper cake

Opening the high chair

Most, (but not all), of the onesies

Other recent news:
Sometimes the world of adoption requires tough decisions. Last week, we were given the opportunity to consider if we wanted to further review the medical records of a baby boy available for adoption from our Korean agency. Without going into too much detail about the circumstances, we were presented with some initial minimal information about the little boy, and we were also not the first family to hear the information provided about him. After an afternoon of research, family discussion, and prayer, C and I decided that we do not have the resources to parent that particular little boy, so like the families before us, we declined to pursue further information about him. It was a heart wrenching decision, but I can only hope that by us declining, it opened up the opportunity for the Forever Family that God intends for him, to find him.

To end this post on a positive note, this afternoon I contacted our local agency in the hopes of connecting with a fellow prospective adoptive family who blog and who actually live relatively close to us. I knew I wouldn't be provided with their phone number, considering all I had to go on were their first names, the town they live in and the fact that they are waiting for a Korean baby girl with AAC. Our contact at the agency assured us she would call them with our name and phone number to get us in touch though. K & C are at the very top of the waiting list for girls (not counting families on hold), and since we are now #2 for a boy (again, not counting families on hold) our babies should be very close in age! Hopefully, they will call us and we can all get together!

Fortune Cookies

As we wait for our referral, life (of course) goes on. Part of my life being normal right now is working on finishing up my graduate degree before our son arrives. Yesterday I finished my last gigantic paper! So gigantic, that everyone at school half jokes that it is our thesis, though this is a practical-based and not a theoretical-based graduate program. Now the only thing I have left to do to finish school, is to study for, and take, the Comprehensive exam.

Anyway, to celebrate, I treated myself to lunch at PeiWei, (Mmmmmmm!) and at the end of every Chinese meal, there are of course, Fortune Cookies. I have this superstition where you have to eat the whole cookie before you can read the fortune, or it won't come true. I don't always remember to do that, but one of the last times I did, the fortune I received was something about finding a good home or going home to a new place within the year. (This was last August.) Lo and behold, we found an awesome house and have settled in, and it didn't even take a year. :)

So yesterday, after I finished my lo-mein, I dutifully ate my entire cookie before reading the fortune. Here is what it said:
"You will soon be called upon to celebrate some good news."
You can interpret that how you want, but personally I am taking it literally. I will be called soon with good news, as in our referral call is coming soon. :) I suppose "soon" is relative, but the fortune was the icing on the cake for a fabulous day. Now hopefully it comes true!

Wait prolonged slightly

There have still not been any baby boy referrals through our agency recently. Also, we are back to being effectively #3 on the wait list as one of the families ahead of us who was on hold, has come off, so they are now the first family in line. So, as it stands currently, we are #5 with two on hold ahead of us. One of those two families is on hold until 2009, but the other may come off at any time as well. So, again, we are looking at probably at least July before receiving our referral and information/ pictures about our future son. Possibly even August now.
As my friend M e-mailed me recently.... Everything happens in God's time, and I need to let it do so!

Names

Friends and family keep asking me if we already have a name for our child picked out. The answer is "yes", but a convoluted yes. Shortly after we were first married, C and I had a big baby name discussion, even though at the time, we were not anywhere close to being ready to start our family. We picked out a boy name and a girl name and actually kept the two of them the same for about 3 years. We even announced them to our families. Then however, I started tweaking the girl name a bit by playing with middle names. Also C decided he didn't like the boy first name we had originally picked as it was too trendy, though we definitely wanted to keep the boy's middle name.

So, when we started actually trying to conceive, we began to explore other boy names. We decided on a different name that we both liked and we kept it for another 2 years, again announcing it to our families. Fast forward through dealing with infertility and making the decision to adopt now (rather than later). Now that we knew we were for sure going to have a boy, by virtue of being on the boy waiting list, we started discussing names again. Turns out the new boy name we had decided on was the #3 most popular name in the country. Not cool in my book as I have a fairly unique name which I like very much and never had to deal with two "H" kids in my classes. Although C's name is fairly common, he said it wasn't a big deal to him growing up to have 1 or 2 other Cs in his classes. However, I wanted to avoid the top ten names if at all possible.

One night after our application was submitted and sometime in the middle of our home study visits, we sat down with our family tree and started going through boy names of our ancestors. After some elimination, we narrowed it to 4 that we liked. I lived with each name for a week or so each, imagining calling our son that when I was speaking to him and from there decided on the one we like the best.

So yes, we have a name picked out. Since we have been fickle before though, we are not announcing it yet, reserving judgment until we see the first picture of our son that will hopefully come with our referral. That way if I decide he doesn't look like a "______" we can change our minds yet again, and no one will know!

Since we are adopting from Korea, there is another aspect to this name thing as well. Our son will have a given Korean name and many adoptive families choose to keep all or part of their child's Korean name after adoption. However, many families don't. I don't have a strong opinion either way, though I am leaning to changing his whole name. If we do decide to keep part of his Korean name, it will be as a second middle name because the middle name we have chosen already is important to our family. I guess it depends on what his given Korean name is and what it means. As always, we will just have to wait and see.

Hopefully soon.....

Waiting in June

No new baby boy referrals since the first part of May, so we are still at the #2 spot on the waiting list. There were quite a few baby girls matched in the past month though, which is great for those families. Just sad for us.
Perhaps we will get the call soon now though.
We shall see....

Moving on up...

I found out today that within the last 2 weeks there have been two families who received their referrals for baby boys from Korea.... which means we have moved up! We are effectively #2 on the waiting list. Perhaps we will even become parents by the end of the month! Of course, we won't actually get to bring him home for at least another two months after that, but hey, we'll know who our son is!

I'm starting to go stir-crazy though- at least when it comes to adoption stuff. There is absolutely nothing I can do for the adoption right now and it's driving me nuts! I've even already picked out the nursery theme and registered. I'm hoping that continuing on with life as "normal" and trying to ignore adoption stuff to an extent will help the time go faster.

Since I would like to be doing something- anything- that is adoption related, I guess I can work on this blog. I've been reading other blogs of waiting and adoptive families, especially those from Korea to pass some time when I'm not doing "normal life" stuff. I decided to add a list of those I read or of anyone who finds me and wants to be added. If you would like to be linked from here, just leave a comment with the url of your blog. I'd appreciate a return link as well!

Waiting for news of exactly which little baby boy, dreaming of a Forever Family over there in Korea, will become our son.

Officially Waiting

In April, we completed 24 hours of training that is required by the State of Colorado to become adoptive parents. Our last class finished last night. Now we feel slightly more prepared, but of course no one can tell you how YOUR child will be, and even practiced parents are often surprised by their second or third children.

Now we wait for our referral.

With everything submitted to our adoption agency, the home study done, all classes completed, the only thing we CAN do is to wait. I could start interviewing Pediatricians, but I think I'll hold off on that for a bit longer.

Back when we first started this process in January, I was originally thinking the referral would happen in the July-ish time frame due to where we were on the waiting list initially. On average, our agency gets 2 boy and 2 girl referrals each month from Korea. Of course in January, they got 7 boys, but that is atypical.

However, (drum roll please.....) I just called and we are effectively #4 on the list! We are really #7, but three families are still on hold. That means if Eastern Social Welfare sends our local agency 4 boys in a very short time frame, we could be matched with our son soon! Or it could still be in July. You just never know.

So, yeah! May God grant me patience as we continue to wait. :)