The Finished Products!

Here are the finished products of the two pieces we did for Madison's room. We painted them white, added new knobs to the dresser and I made a cushion for the toy box/bench seat to match the rest of the room.

A Delay In Our Adoption Process

We were notified by our adoption agency on Tuesday that there has been a new procedure/policy put into effect that will probably delay our adoption process. The I- 600 form, which is the Petition to Classify an Orphan as an Immediate Relative, is normally filed in country (Vietnam) once we are there. The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) now says that beginning 10/29 we have to file it here (in the US) and wait for approval before we can travel (which can take some time). So once we receive our referral we will have to file the I-600 with all of our baby's documents and once we receive approval, our agency can start to work on travel arrangements. This doesn’t seem like it will delay us getting our referral, but it will delay the time between when we get our referral and when we travel. They are saying that now it could take up to 4 months to travel after we receive our referral.

We were hoping for more referrals this month from our agency (including ours) but it seems to have been a slow month. Some families that received referrals in late August and mid September just received their travel plans and this new policy will not affect them since they already had imminent travel plans. We were hoping if we got our referral this month that we would be one of the last groups to travel before Christmas and be home by Christmas, but now it is looking like we will probably travel sometime after the New Year. The latest they are letting people travel is the first week in December. This brings on more delays though with the New Year in January followed by Tet the Vietnamese New Year in the beginning of February.

We have learned throughout this whole process that all we can do is wait and pray. Once we have done our part, it is totally out of our hands and into the hands of God, our agency, the orphanages and the Vietnamese Embassy. New policies will always be coming into effect and changes will continue to be made that may or may not affect people’s adoption processes for the good and the bad.

What we do know is that at the end of this journey, some day in the near future, we will finally have our little girl and bring her home and that is the most important part!

Another Quote

"There is no telling how many miles you will have to run

while chasing a dream."
~Author Unknown~

For The Nursery

This is a piece we are in the process of painting for the nursery, it is an old dresser we are re-painting white.

For The Nursery

This one is my garage sale bargain. I got this toy box/bench for $2.00 at a garage sale because the hinge was broken. It was brown, but with a fresh coat of white paint and a new hinge it will be just like new!

A Nice Quote About Adoption

Not flesh of my flesh nor bone of my bone,

But still miraculously my own.

Never forget for a single minute,

you didn't grow under my heart,

but in it.

~ Fleur Conkling Heyliger ~

I bought this necklace for myself.

It comes from the quote above. It was handmade.

Operation Baby Lift

To the left you will see a video clip entitled "Operation Baby Lift". This is a new documentary that is going to come out in 2008 about Vietnamese orphans that were brought to America at the end of the Vietnam War. The reason it is interesting to us is that there is a woman who works with our adoption agency that will be helping us when we go to Vietnam that actually took part in Operation Baby Lift. Her name is Cherie Clark and she is interviewed in the film and has also written a book about the events called "After Sorrow Comes Joy". I haven't read the book yet but it is definitely on my "to do" list before we go.

We're DTV!

What does DTV mean? It stands for dossier to Vietnam, it means that everything has been completed and our dossier is in Vietnam awaiting a referral, yeah! We are considered DTV as of July 17. On our agencies blog group database we are currently one of 52 families waiting for a referral. Where are we amongst the 52? Probably right around the middle of the group (according to date), but they really can't go by order of DTV date because some families request boys, others girls, others either or, and many different ages of babies are requested so it's really hard to tell in what order they issue the referrals. In the past couple of months they have issued 12 referrals the first week in July and another 10 or 12 the first week in August, and there is word that more are on the way so referrals are definitely coming pretty fast. We still think ours could come sometime in October or November.

And The Wait Begins.............

It's hard to believe that it has been almost 2 months since our last post. We got all of our dossier completed and everything mailed out on June 27 (see picture left). Half of our dossier went to the Vietnam Consulate in San Francisco to be authenticated and the other half to our adoption agency in Oregon. Once both halves come together the entire dossier will be sent to Vietnam where it will be translated. Once that is done all we have to do is wait for our referral. They are still saying a 2 to 4 month wait for referrals. If they are correct we can expect a referral anytime between September and November. A group of 10 people from our agency just received their referrals on July 2 and they were told that they would be traveling by the end of July/beginning of August. Once our dossier gets logged in in Vietnam we will have a better idea of how many other people are ahead of us waiting.

Meanwhile, we finally found a crib thanks to Dad and Donna and their extremely generous neighbor! Not only did she give us a beautiful white crib, but she also gave us 3 large bags of VERY nice clothes (Kathleen and I will have to fight over them!). I also received my crib bumper and skirt I was having made, it's so beautiful! (See crib picture left) . We also found a little toy chest/seat and a dresser that we are going to paint white to match the crib. So our nursery is slowly coming together.

That's all for now, we will continue to keep you updated as new things happen!

We Have Our I-171H!

On Saturday we finally received our I-171H in the mail. This is the "biggie" that basically says we have been approved and can officially adopt and orphan, YEAH! Once we send it out for certification and authentication, which only takes a couple of days, we can submit our dossier to our agency, but..............before we do that we need to wait for Kathleen. She is a few weeks behind us because she had a small delay with her homestudy, but we think all is resolved now and we hope it won't take her too long to receive her I-171H.

We have also learned since our last post that things aren't moving as quick as we had thought with our agency and Vietnam. They are now saying it will take 2-4 months for a referral after our dossier is submitted and another 2-4 months to travel after receiving our referral, so that puts us sometime between September and December again.

In the meantime it gives us more time to prepare. We still have a nursery to put together. So far we have chosen a theme (see picture left), found a crib and a couple of pictures for the walls, and obtained lots of girl clothes from many different sources. Andy and the boys bought me a sewing machine for Mother's Day so I have been having fun making all kinds of "little things".

I have also posted 3 pictures along with this post. One is a picture of some babies in one of the orphanages that our agency deals with over in Vietnam. It is really sad to see how they just line them up on the floor. They don't have cribs in a lot of the orphanages over there like they do in other countries. The other picture is the theme for Maddie's nursery, it is called fashion frogs. The third picture is our "ultrasound" I actually got it off of another family's blog. I have also added another website under favorite links called pictures of Vietnam. It is a website that has hundreds of pictures of Vietnam for anyone interested in seeing more of the country.

We will post again once we reach another major turning point in our process (hopefully soon!)

Happy Easter!

Just a quick update on our current progress. Our homestudy is officially complete. We received our final copies from Teresa this past week. We also finished collecting all of our documents for our dossier and on Friday we sent them up to Columbia to have them certified at the state level. Once we receive them back we are just waiting on one more form, our I171H which may take about another month to receive.

Things are moving pretty quick between our agency and Vietnam. A co-worker of Kathleen's is also adopting through the same agency and received her referral this past week........only 2 weeks after submitting her paperwork! They told her she can expect to travel anytime in the next 3 to 8 weeks. We were shocked when we heard this, a bit quicker than we had planned. We were planning on traveling sometime between October and December, but if all keeps going smoothly, we may be traveling sometime this summer.

Homestudies and Fingerprints and Paperchases....Oh My!

It has been a busy couple of weeks since we last posted, but a lot has been accomplished in those couple of weeks. This past Thursday we had our homestudy with our social worker Teresa and it went very well. She talked with the boys for a little bit about being big brothers and having a little sister and they did really well. When asked, Brendan forgot what country his baby sister would be coming from and then when we reminded him that it was Vietnam he said "oh yeah, it's near China and England." He was a just a little bit off in his geography with England. But overall the homestudy went well and this weekend we received our rough draft copy from Teresa to review and make any necessary changes and once we send it back she will send us the final copy for our approval.

We also got notice that our I-600A was approved and we went to get fingerprinted on Friday. That was an interesting experience. They don't do it the old fashioned way anymore by rubbing your fingers in black ink. They have gone high tech buy using what looks like a copy machine that scans your fingers and the prints appear on a computer screen. While I was having mine done I could hear Andy asking the lady doing his prints a tone of questions about how the whole computer process worked and what all of the numbers meant (engineers!).

Now on to the paperchase. After reading this paragraph you will know why they call this part of the adoption the paperchase. All along we have been collecting, filling out and making copies of required forms that we need for the adoption. Today we dropped off about a dozen of those forms to have notarized. Most of them are required for our dossier. All of this papers travel to many different places. Once they are all notarized, some of them have to go on to be certified at the state level, then they need to be authenticated by the Embassy or Consulate of Vietnam. Once the papers are all authenticated, they are sent to Hanoi where they are translated. This part apparently takes a couple weeks, but once it is complete we will be ready for our referral!(that means a child is chosen for us).

I also received my passport in the mail this week and Andy doesn't have to have his renewed until next year, so we're ready to travel!

The main things left for us to do is keep up with all of our paperwork for the dossier. There will be a constant stream of papers coming in that will have to go through the above process. Our goal is to have our entire dossier completed and submitted by sometime next month. Kathleen seems to be at about the same place in her process as well so it's still looking good for us to go over together.

I have added a website under favorite links called World Fact Book - Vietnam. It has a lot of good information about the country for anyone who is interested.

We'll post again soon!

Moving Right Along.....

In the past couple of weeks Andy and I have both had our physicals from our doctors that we need for both our homestudy and our adoption agency. Today I mailed out the remainder of our paperwork to our social worker for our homestudy. The next step will be our social worker coming to our home for our homestudy visit. About a week and a half ago we also mailed out our I-600A form to begin processing. After we get that processed we will need to go downtown to be fingerprinted.

Where is Vietnam?

Vietnam is in South-eastern Asia, bordering the Gulf of Thailand, Gulf of Tonkin, and South China Sea, alongside China, Laos, and Cambodia. We will be traveling to Hanoi (in north Vietnam) for the adoption. Andy has actually traveled not too far from Vietnam to Thailand twice now, so the 27+ hour trip will be a piece of cake for him (ha-ha). I will try to find a good website on Vietnam and post it under links for those of you who are interested in more information on the area.

What have we done so far?

We have chosen an adoption agency called PLAN Loving Adoptions out of Oregon, they came highly recommended and we have been very happy with them so far. We sent in our initial application to the adoption agency which was accepted. We then chose an agency locally to do our home study which is the next major step in the adoption process. We were very lucky to find a lady here in Charleston who has been doing home studies for over 20 years and has adopted 2 children herself. We are currently in the process of gathering all of our information for the home study. We are working on our autobiographies, financial statements, health reports and personal references and have sent away for our Department of Social Service, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and Sexual Offender Clearances (yes, they check it all!). Once those are all completed we will have our first home visit with our social worker.
In the meantime, we are getting our I-600A form ready to mail out. This is the biggy! It is the key document to becoming officially "qualified to adopt" in the eyes of the U.S. government. Along with the form we will have to submit several documents as well as be fingerprinted. This form can take up to 90 days to process, so this is often a common culprit of delaying and adoption process. All of this is part of the paper chase to get our dossier ready to go over to Vietnam. Once they receive our dossier they can choose a child for us.

Room For One More

Welcome to our blog!

As many of you may already know, we are in the process of adoption a little girl from Vietnam. We are very excited to be adding a new addition to our family and we would like to share the journey to our daughter with you.

We are also very excited because our daughter will not be the only new addition to our family. My sister Kathleen will also be sharing in this wonderful journey as she adopts her own little girl from Vietnam. We are going through the same agency, and we hope to stay on the same schedule so we can all go over together.

Many things have been happening since we have started our adoption process so we have a bit of catching up to do. From now on we will try to keep a more up to date time line of events that will eventually lead to our trip to Vietnam.