The Zen of Adoption

Check out this beautiful song by Kellie Coffey that really captures many of my experiences over the past few years - the joys of motherhood, our longing for another child, infertility, and our journey to adopt our daughter…..

Click Image to play!

The summer is upon us here in Florida and I can’t believe how quickly time flies! We received notification that our I600A application was received at the Department of Homeland Security with a mildly alarming estimate that it would take us about a year to get our biometrics (fingerprinting) appointment, and that if we haven’t heard from them by June 2008, we should call.  I’ve been reassured that we should be contacted relatively quickly and our appointment should be scheduled in the next few weeks… talk about CYA… I mean, come on, a YEAR?

From what I understand it is all electronic now and it takes minutes… I’m not sure we even meet with an officer to answer questions, or fill out additional forms or anything like that. Are there really that many people who need to be fingerprinted by the US Government on a daily basis? Maybe there are… I have no idea. I just hope we can get this taken care of relatively quickly!

Thankfully, at this point, all that is left is the big stuff: our Homestudy, our Medical Evaluation, our local Police Clearances, and our I171-H which will allow us to bring our newly adopted child into the country.  Pam, our dossier compiler has been hard at work getting our documents properly signed sealed and delivered! We still have some outstanding items that our Social worker wants us to pull together for her. Oh, and we need to have some photos taken that are representative of our family and lives to send to China with our Dossier.

Our biggest issue has been finding a Dr. to go to for our medical evaluations - it is very difficult to get appointments (unless we want to wait until September, which we don’t!) Beyond that we just need to coordinate our busy summer schedules to find a time to have our Social Worker do the home visit portion of our homestudy.

So much to do, and the news about wait times isn’t encouraging. The predictions have reached the three year mark (some predicting it will go higher,) but like everything else, there is no telling if wait times will continue to rise, or if they will abruptly fall.  We are just trying to get to the point where we’re actually in the queue and can start our wait… Then it will be out of our hands.

We managed to get the show on the road! It has been an interesting week. We’ve been in contact with our social worker who requested her own autobiographical document, seperate from the two 10 page documents we slaved over and submitted to our agency (destined for our Social Worker, we thought…) She also requested three more personal references, this on top of the three we already had to impose upon our friends for (I know they were happy to help us, but I still found it such an uncomfortable request to make.)

We also completed our Financial Statement, our Adoption Petition, our I600a document for US immigration, and our floor plan. We still need a local police background check, medical exams, an entire portfolio of photographs of our family and lifestyle… the list goes on.

Hopefully we can get our homestudy done this month or early next month and Pam our dossier preparer has been busily getting our various documents certified, authenticted and sealed.  She has been wonderful!

We still have a lot to do, but hopefully we’ll keep pace and continue to make steady progress!

Putumayo can always be trusted to compile the most unique, engaging collections of music from around the world, regardless of the theme, and they’ve done it again with the enchanting Asian Dreamland.  We’ve been playing this non-stop in the car. Our favorite track: 4. Cradle Song by Zulya, which Alex affectionately refers to as “Ellie Bellie” (which means something in khazik, but is just funny to Alex.) To hear a bit of this catchy tune click here.

I find the selection a little heavily weighted to songs originating in Japan, but each one is beautiful and I love that they include an idea of what the songs are about.

One surprise was track 2. Dokokade Yoruga Naita by Emme, it features Japanese lyrics set to a traditional celtic tune - I recognized it in the first 15 seconds, what a cool cultural-fusion!

If you want to sing along with Alex to “Ellie Bellie” too? you can find Asian Dreamland here!