does this make me a bad mom?

Bishop's dream came true yesterday when I accidentally spilled a whole jar of catnip on the floor. I think it was the best day of his life. I did eventually sweep it up, but I had to let him roll around in it and eat as much as possible because he was so happy. And high.
Also, I was laughing way too hard to pick him up.

It's such a perfect day...

finally! (the post i promised :-)

I got a little side tracked this week. Worked 6 days in a row and it kinda turned me into a zombie. Not the brain-eating kind. Just the don't-know-which-way-is-up-can't-work-up-the-energy-to-blog kind. But I'm better now.

So, yes, it finally happened! I had been somewhat impatiently waiting for about a week to hear word that we had been placed on the waitlist. Kate had sent our final documents (the budget worksheet and the CIS approval letter) off to be authenticated and it seemed like they were taking forever to get back to her. Our agency, Gladney, will place you on their waitlist once your entire dossier has been authenticated on the state level and then sent off to DC for final authentication. Every day I would check my email and phone messages, hoping to hear something. And then on Wednesday, I was at work, between massages, and checked my email (thank god for iPhones.) And there they were, two beautiful emails from Kate and Jessica. I was so excited I did a jig. Luckily I was in my massage room where no one can see me. Of course, then I did another jig in the office in front of about 3 people when I told Kirsten the news. I then texted Matt with a message that said "dude, we're on the waitlist!" He texted me back with, "sweet, dude!" I know, we're so eloquent.

So what does this mean? How Long? What do we do now? Well, quite frankly, we go about our business. Because nothing is going to happen for a while. Gladney is saying right now that the average wait for a referral is 6.5 months. But there a few families who have been waiting for 8 months. And by the time we get to the 6 or 8 month mark, who knows how long the waiting times will have increased to. And remember, folks, this is just for the referral. Add another 4-6 months (or more) on top of that to pass court and be allotted travel dates.

So what the heck do we talk about now? Well, we can talk about how our cat, Bishop has been diagnosed with asthma and now has to be given steroids to help breath right and not sound like he has a smoker's cough. Or we can talk about how Matt bought Shamwows. Apparently they won't make you say "Wow" every time. We can also talk about Ethiopia. It's a fascinating country with a rich culture and history and we want our child to know as much as possible about where he/she came from.

So, as you can see, my blogs might be a bit random now. It's so weird, after all this time always feeling like we needed to be doing something, to not have anything to to do but wait. But that's all we can do! So cheers to the wait and hears hoping its as short as possible.

finally!

I will write more about this tomorrow, but I just wanted everybody to know that we have officially been placed on the waitlist!!!!!!! Yay!!!!!!!!

I-171H

I seriously thought this would take months to come, but today we received our letter of approval from Immigration! I am so freaking excited! Now all we have to do is get notarizations for that and our budget worksheet and we are done with all of our paperwork! Then, as soon as Kate gets everything authenticated for us, we can be placed on the wait list. Oh happy day!

my practice baby is born!

I am so excited to announce that our very good friends, John and Janet, have had a beautiful baby boy named Cole Bradley! Cole was born at 4:30 AM on Feb. 20, 6lb 9oz at Northwestern Hospital. We went to see him yesterday and he is so beautiful! Poor Cole has to spend 7 days in the NICU because they say he has an infection. It's really just an elevated white blood cell count, he seems totally fine. I got to hold him for a little bit, but I don't think it went very well. I was nervous because he is attached to monitors and an IV and I was so worried I was going to detach him! And he is so tiny! I think he was thinking, man this lady is not doing this right. Anyway, we are so excited for John and Janet and we are totally going to be practicing on little Cole. We clearly need all the practice we can get :-) And we can't wait for Baby McBride and Cole to be playmates!
Here are a couple of pics:

Look at this little face!

BTW, nothing has happened on the adoption front. Still just waiting for our CIS approval letter. Waiting and waiting and waiting.........

waiting to wait

By my count, there are only two remaining pieces of our dossier to be handed in. One is our budget worksheet which has to be notarized, and the other is our I-171H from CIS. The first one will come quickly. We just have to get the form from KBS Dossiers in the mail, notarize, and send back. The other, well who knows when that is going to happen. Our homestudy has been sent to Immigration. But I just checked their website, and it seems that the Chicago field office is pretty far behind on processing these forms. I will try to keep an optimistic outlook, and hopefully we will receive it within the next two months (please oh please!)

So, as you can tell by reading so far, our homstudy is finally complete! It was a bit of a trial to make that happen. In order to understand why it took a while, let me explain a little bit about notarization as it pertains to international adoption. The personal notary stamp of the individual who is notarizing your document must not expire for at least a year and a half (and that is pushing it.) The reason for this, as explained to me best by my friend Catherine (who had it explained to her by our dossier service when she was getting a reference letter notarized for us) is that foreign governments view this expiration date as an expiration date for the document itself. So, if a document is notarized by someone who's stamp expires on say, 12/19/09, and our case has not passed court in Ethiopia at this point, that document will have expired. Such was the case of our homestudy. FRC sent out copies of our homestudy to us, Gladney and CIS, all notarized by an employee of FRC, whose notary stamp expires on said date. This was a wee bit upsetting because I just felt like, shouldn't you know this? You do homestudies for international adoptions, right? You have done this before, right? Anyway, to their credit, they were very quick in re-doing everything once I made them aware of the situation.

Another milestone we passed was finally getting approved to adopt by Gladney! (I sometimes secretly can't hardly believe that two agencies have approved us to adopt a baby. Really, us? I don't know, that seems so grown-up :-) With this approval, we have transitioned from our assistant case worker, Susanne, to our actual case-worker, Jessica. We had a conference call with Jessica last week. She is so nice and helpful (as everyone at Gladney has been, seriously, if you just stumbled upon this blog and are considering international adoption, these people are awesome and soooooo nice.) Jessica will be with us the rest of the way through this adoption process. She will be the one to call us with our referral and she will be the one to let us know if we have passed court. She gave us a rundown of the process from here on out. It seems that the average wait time for a referral right now is about 6.5 months. Once you have accepted your referral, its another 1 to 3 months just to get issued a court date, and another 10 weeks or so to have your first court date. She also made sure we understand that there are many different factors that go into passing court, and that it is a very challenging process that Gladney is not really in control of.

I can hardly believe we have already been on this adoption journey for about 6 months now. Looking back, I do wish that we had done some this differently. I wish that we had initiated the homestudy sooner, like right at the very beginning. And I wish we had been more vigilant about getting all of our documents and paperwork completed as fast as possible. But honestly, we had no idea what we were doing. And at least we will know better for the next time!

still here, still movin along

Man, we are so close now. So close to being done with the paperchase I can taste it! Well, I hope we're close. I do panic when I read other adoptive family's blogs (yes I am a blog stalker, haven't quite worked up the nerve to "introduce" myself yet) and I see how they had to redo this document or that or many documents, for various different reasons. It's just not simple. None of this is simple. I find myself cursing that fact from time to time. But then I give myself a pep talk (yes, I actually do that) and I try to get over it. Eyes on the prize, as my very wise sister said.

So we have taken the remainder of our adoption classes that are required by our homestudy agency, FRC. Our favorite, by far, was a class called Race and Adoption. There was a panel of adoptive parents and adult adoptees and there was just so much perspective and so many things to learn and consider. We talked about so many different things that I couldn't possibly cover it all here, but let me tell you one of the most important things to consider if you are a white parent adopting a black child. I'm going to speak to the white folk reading this blog now. People, we do not know about the hair! And it's not trivial, it is in no way unimportant! Hair, especially for black women, is a source of pride and identity. And it cannot be cared for the way that white people care for their hair. So if I don't want to look like a neglectful momma, I better learn about the hair!
Anyway, we took two more classes after that, one of which was an on-line class about medical issues in international adoption (important because there can be so many unknowns when you are adopting from another country) and another class at FRC called Viewing Adoption from a Family Systems Perspective. It's a fancy, social worker-y name for a class that actually was pretty interesting. The idea is that the adopted child's birth family actually becomes a part of your extended family network, which I really liked. We have no idea if we will actually meet any of the birth family, but if we do, we are very interested in trying to keep contact with them, as much as possible.

Sooooo, the classes are done, what else is there? Well, our homestudy has been finalized and printed up. Very many things can hopefully move forward now. Our main agency, Gladney was waiting for copies of our criminal clearances obtained by FRC. They needed them for our application with them to be complete so they can approve us for adoption. But FRC didn't want to send the copies until our homestudy was complete. The homestudy couldn't be complete until we finished our classes. We couldn't finish our classes until FRC actually offered the classes we needed. (Do you see how this is a vicious cycle of waiting for things that are completely beyond your control?) We also are waiting on a couple of things that will complete our dossier. We just received our FBI clearances by FedEx (those dudes at the Bureau are quick! only took them 2 weeks!) so we have to get them notarized. We have to get our budget worksheet notarized, but our dossier service hasn't sent it to us yet because she needs to see the homestudy first (of course) and we have a couple more reference letters to come in. We also now have to wait for our I-171H which is our approval from CIS (immigration). This was also completely dependent on the homestudy. Is your head spinning? Are you even still reading this? If you are, kudos.

Sometimes I wish I could just live like this guy: