Where we stand today

A few of you have been asking for updates in these final days of this crazy adoption journey of ours. Well, unfortunately, nothing much has changed. Time has allowed be more to aware of and come face to face with our feelings, I guess. Instead of the numbing fear in which I (we) had been experiencing the past few months, our emotional roller coaster has now leveled off.

On a high note, we seem to have wrapped our heads around an older adoption and feel pretty okay with it. Officially, we are now on the wait list for a girl, ages 2-5. Fear had gripped us with bringing an older child into our home; all we could link "older" to was scary words such as RAD (reactive attachment disorder). But truthfully, we eventually just got honest with our feelings in that we have simply aged our of "baby". It just does not feel right for our stages in life anymore and we had to make the choice that if wanted to move forward with adoption, it was going to be older or nothing.

The more we investigated older adoptions by reading, taking classes, and talking to families, the more we realized it is mostly about the child's inherent disposition and resiliency more than anything. Adoption is trauma and loss to these youngsters - to babies and toddlers. I have now heard almost equal stories of 6 month babies not transitioning well and 6 year old blending in perfectly with an adoptive family. We are fully aware that adoption always holds more risks and older can be more challenging at first, but more than ever, we have accepted that things will be the way they will be. Life. There are just no guarantees.

The low note is the reality that things are still not looking good for ET adoptions. In fact, they are looking worse. Let me explain what is going on over there the best way that I understand.

A + B + C

A: A child becomes "referral ready" at an affiliated orphanage. With the restructuring of adoptions via ET government this last year, "referral ready" means a rather stringent process (including an investigation) to ensure that the child is a true orphan. The ET government is scrambling to process this threefold paperwork process now with limited staff and budget; hence the delays. In the end, a much coveted MOWA letter is issues stating that the orphaned child is legitimate. Where I am still a bit hazy is where in this process the child is matched with a family. It would be the most logical to assume that the child would be matched after the sign, sealed, and delivered MOWA letter, but I am hearing too many families getting matched and flying to ET for their court date without the letter being issued. ??? Anyhow, now to.....

B: The family flies out, spends time with the child, starts the bonding and loving, then goes to court and adopts the child. Let me repeat, ADOPTS THE CHILD. The family then leaves back to the states leaving the child there while .....

C: The US Embassy gets their paperwork in order. Again, for reasons I am not entirely clear, there has been some changes with how the Embassy is processing these children's paperwork (visa, passports, etc). Apparently, the US government is skeptical of the ET government process of orphan investigation (?), so they are conducting their own paper chase. The US government is scrambling to process this threefold paperwork process now with limited staff and budget; hence the delays (hmmm... sound familiar?). IF... WHEN... the child passes the second round of investigations, then the family can fly back to ET to pick up their child(ren) to bring them home.

I am all about making double sure that a child is legitimately an orphan, but last week our adoption agency sent our a dreadful email to our waiting families and we are all shaken to the core. There were a handful of babies referred out last June (the last wave of referrals). Somewhere between B and C, these children we relocated to a new facility that was acting as an interim between the recently closed down orphanage. Details have been limited and are still leaking out, but I believe that these children were already adopted by their families and their was a hold-up in the US Embassy process. I have heard rumors that these families were searching for their children's status and locations. Apparently, wherever they were, they were languishing and WACAP got word that 3 of the referred babies have died.

My heart has been breaking for those dear babies and loving families. I have been mourning the potential loss of the "idea" of our daughter, so I can't imagine what these families are going through that have already started to attached (and adopted!) to a specific child.

WACAP sounded outraged in their email stating that the US and ET government is failing these children by their delays and uncoordinated restructuring, but there are so many looming questions. I am fighting every inch of my being not to let these doubtful questions creep into my mind, but I can't help but wonder if enough was done on WACAP's behalf to provide a safe haven for these children. Even more so, I question what the HELL we are getting ourselves into.

But despite all of this, we do march on. No doubt many of you reading this may think we must be on the brink of insanity to continue (and we sort of are), but unless you have walked in our shoes, words really can't express why and how we continue on - possibly past our "December 31st" deadline. Honestly, we can't even really figure out that tug anymore. I can verbalize a few feelings to express where we are at today, however.

There are 118 waiting families with WACAP. By changing our referral request, we are now in the #2 spot for age 2-4 referral and #1 for age 5. That is awfully close to feel that our hearts can peacefully go on with the "what-ifs" if we were to bail out now.

Husband and I have come to terms with stopping. As each day passes, we just sort of accept that we will most likely walk forward in life as our family of three. Even though we have always envisioned our family being larger and a little piece of our hearts will always feel that emptiness, we can find contentment with how things are. It would be rough at first to stop, but we know it would get easier. The Kid will be okay, too. We think.

We try our to shield him from the drama. We keep is simple, stick to the facts if we need to, but we can go through weeks without even breathing a word of the adoption within his earshot. Lately, however, we have been watching and listening to his cues and know that he is grieving this potential loss, too. More than grieving - his verbalization of grief is practically palatable and gut wrenching. He confessed how he still longed for her and begged us to tell the agency to still call us of they "find our sister" after we stop. He gets sad after we are around families with siblings. He has taken a newly adopted boy from China (in his extended day program) under his wing. He has a Baby Alive on his Christmas list so he can "have something to take care of if we don't get baby sister" (Santa might be swapping out for a guinea pig instead). Finally, just yesterday, he just about jumped out of his pants when I sat down on a seat near him. Apparently, he has an imaginary "sister friend" that he plays with. Her name is something like "Alhea" or "Mireah" and I squished her when I sat on her.

Again, I know that the kid WILL be okay if Sister never comes to us because he is happy and has a great life but add these confessions to the mix, and the signs are too big to stop just yet.

Hopefully, my next post will be of some cheerful pictures of the holidays (Grammy is coming for a visit!), and maybe even some good news in general for a change!

October fun!

What does one do to get one's mind off of the doom-and-gloom of a crappy adoption (all referrals from ET have come to a screeching halt and there is no end in sight....it is not looking good for us, folks....not at all)? We get out and have some fun!

We started by getting out to enjoy these beautiful mountains just minutes from our doorstep.
A few weeks later, we had our first big snow storm, so of course my boys had to be the first up the canyon to go sledding and to scout out the ski slopes. Notice my son trying to force a smile. He was still in shock after his nightmare trip to Cookie Cutters. "We just asked for A TRIM!" My boy was so shocked at the stylist's misunderstanding of a trim.... which does not mean hacking two inches off... that he cried huge crocodile tears. In turn, the stylist cried, too. The drama! I still think he is a super cute little stinker, though.

Up, Up, and away!
And finally, a really big mind consuming activity was throwing our annual Halloween party. It was a total hit this year and the first party in our new home. We had over 40 people attend and kids were crying when they had to leave. I call that success. :) Got to hand it to our lovely house - it really is built for parties! As always, I forget to take many pictures, so the coolest parts of the party were not captured. The kitchen was filled with a variety of "spooktacular" food consisting of bone bread sticks in a bloody sauce, witch hat cookies, monster munch, and spiderweb dip. Here's a few highlights, though!

The kids started by snuggling in the garage to watch a frightful Scooby.
Next we roasted some weenies and marshmallows.
I whipped up some of my lizard tail, frog eye, snake guts brew. (Shhhh... don't tell, but that pirate was really Husband incognito. Nobody even guessed)
Last but not least, we surprised everyone with our disco room! They must have danced their little hearts out for 2 hours!

My cute little monster, Frankenstein. The girl behind him is his "future wife". He has been convinced that she is "the one" for two years now. Luckily, we like the parents so they have our nod of approval... when they are 30.
Can't help but show off my gorgeous little niece.
Fun times! It made throwing that massive shindig all worth it to see those smiling children (and smiling adult children, as well!).

I'll just take it as a sign.

Husband and I sent an email of our final decision to change our age request to 1-4 late last Monday night - meaning that WACAP would get it Tuesday morning and it would go into effect immediately. All day Tuesday at work, I had these wonderful visions of now walking off the airplane with a little girl holding my hand and no longer carrying an infant. It felt so good and so right. That VERY day I came home from work to find a package waiting on our front step from my sweet and thoughtful friend, Beth (she had no prior knowledge of us thinking about adopting an older child). There was an enclosed card saying she saw this lovely batik at an arts festival, thought of us, and knew she had to buy it. The inscription on the print says,

"Waiting on the porch for mama."

A few changes...

Here they are....

1) After hours, days, weeks, months of thinking and researching - soul searching and lamenting over where we were and where we are now .... we have decided to officially make some changes with our agency. No longer are we on the "infant" request. We are now open to adopt a toddler/child age 1-4.

2) We have had to make an official ending date to the madness. A date that has to be put out there to establish a mutual ground so that the potential blame and/or guilt is never felt toward the one that might have said "I'm done". Come December 31st, together we are pulling the plug.

I am at peace with this. Scared silly on many levels, but at peace.

Miss "M" update

(This is what we get to view off our back porch this time of year. Last week we poured the cement for the hot tub foundation. It is placed with optimal viewing capacity. Oh yeah!)

Thought of a good metaphor to describe our life these days. Take a walk to your window and set your gaze upon one of those newly fallen golden leaves. Watch the breeze pick it up and gracefully glide it through the air, and then watch it take a nose dive, smash to the ground and tumble a bit until the next breeze picks it up again.

This explains the emotions of where we are at with this crazy adoption. A few hours ago we were soaring, and this hour we are getting tossed around (by our thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams). More to come on this another day....

Today this post is about Miss M. With the exception of the 3 people that have followed my blog, I'll give you a quick re-cap. Miss M was adopted from Ethiopia when she was 15. She entered the History class I was co-teaching the week that she came to the states - and the week we submitted our application for Ethiopia. I know... CRAZY!

Fast forward two years and she is a senior and celebrating her 18th birthday tomorrow. She is no longer in my classes, but we have maintained a friendship. Even though she pops her head in to say "Hi" in between classes, I have to do teachery stuff and she has to do socially stuff, so I've had to set a boundary of opening my door after school about 1x/wk for a "chat time". It is usually on Fridays and it's a great way to wrap up my week!

This last week was a not-so-unusual difficult one with a defiant student of mine. This student is easily driving me to burn-out at 100 mph. Our school psychiatrist stopped by to "train me" (aka - train me how to not get myself punched) when he goes, "Well, Mrs. P, the situation we have here with this student is a very tricky one. He has R.A.D, you see, which means Reactive Attachment Disorder. He developed this as a direct result of being adopted at age three..."

Enough said.

My physical and emotional reaction was the immediate drop of my head on to my stack of ungraded papers and to have my fists start pounding my desk. "Nooooo!" I shrieked, "Not that! We are insane! What are we thinking? We could not take that on!" The psychiatrist slowly got up and tip-toed out the door mumbling something along the lines of trying to have a nice weekend. Clearly I am now crazy beyond the realm of a shrink.

A few seconds after he exited, in walked Miss M.

(Attention future/current adopters, just take a moment to ponder this. You are talking scary RAD stuff and then in walks the most amazing ET adopted woman? Please, mind of mine, just help me make sense of it all. I am not really religious ((of the conventional type)), but if someone up there is trying to send me messages, why must they be so mixed?)

Miss M had saved up a lot of exciting things to share. The school counseling department is starting to set her up with financial and scholarship opportunities for university, she talked of her aspirations of getting her nursing degree so she can go and open up "safe houses" for kids in Addis Ababa (yes... she is really THAT amazing), and about the friends she is making in the Ethiopian community that she has now discovered in our own city. She shared music from her favorite African band, talked about a holiday Ethiopia is celebrating this week called Meskel (I think?), and taught me a few new words in Amharic.

She also told me that next year, when she is going to college, she wants me to know that she will be available to call when/if we have troubles with the transition of our child. She can teach me the language, customs, diet, and in general, just ways to assist the bridge our child might face from being there to being here.

Priceless, I know.

My role as a teacher has been interesting. Because I don't really feel it is my place to give her advise on her personal life (re: adoption issues, etc), I have taken on the role of just being an active listener. Honestly, there can be 30 minutes that go by that I don't open my mouth. It has worked out well, though. I just suck in her ET stories like they were more valuable than oxygen. She has taught me to love that country and the plight of the orphan.

Obviously this her-talk/me-listen relationship has served her well, too. Today she told me "Thank you".

"Mrs. P, thank you so much for being a friend to me the last two years. Before I started meeting my ET friends here, I have felt like you have been the only one that I could feel comfortable talking with. You have helped me with things, including helping me realize how important it is to appreciate my opportunities and to be serious with my education"

It took about everything in me to not scramble across the desk to give her a big hug. She is just super cool. So cool, in fact, that she helps me keep this Ethiopian dream alive - and that leaf to keep soaring just a little longer.

Not going to lie...

It's been a tough month. Tough, tough, tough. Like the yuckiest kind of tough. Adoption. It is not for the weak of heart, and my heart is struggling. I am surprised that I have been able to keep it bottled in the way I have; the stress and anxiety that comes with five years of emotional highs and lows, the uncertainty, the elation, and the fears. I have to give myself a big fist bump for keeping my sanity thus far, because now that the floodgates have been opened and I am allowing myself to really think, regroup, and simply FEEL (lending to many shout-outs of "Why the F#@K has this happened to us!?"), I am not sure how I did it. My mental state has pretty much sucked the life out of my family and then spat them back out almost as battered as I feel. Thank God for Scooby Do (the best babysitter cable can buy!) so husband and I can go into the other room to have some of the toughest and most heart wrenching talks that I hope we never have to have again.

Why is NOW the time to freak out? Because of many reasons. Of course, there is the same old news coming around...

changes in ET government, more expected delays, dropping an orphanage, longer wait times between referral and embassy (the process used to be about 3 months between the referral call and bringing your child home, and now it seems to be about 6-10 months), because this time last year the expected wait times for referral were 6-12 months and now it is 18-24 (with the asterisk that "wait times for infant girls may be even longer") and we are only in month 15

...all the things that bury our hopes of bringing our daughter home even deeper - but this is also getting stirred up now because I (we) feel us shifting as a family. Those shifting reasons I will keep to ourselves for the time being, but I will say that it is time to take a hard look at things.

This should be a very interesting few months ahead of us, indeed.

A WACAP friend of mine, Zoe, has a great blog and summed up a lot of how it feels on her post "22". Check it out if you get the chance! http://slowmama.com/

HOWEVER there is a ray of sunshine in these stormy days. The Kid started Kindergarten this week! He is such a big, smart, funny, witty, loving boy. And what did his mom let him do to celebrate his first week in Kinder? She let him watch the big boy Harry Potter movie tonight. And now where is my big boy as I type this? He is sound asleep next to me with about every inch of his skin velcroed to my side with his fist in a death grip on my shirt. He fell asleep whimpering that his minuscule scab on his cheek was burning so does that mean that the bad wizard man is near? Oh, so sorry my little bug. Your Mommy lives and learns. I'll make it up to him tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's some cheers to a happy 13 years of school ahead! :)

Husband

I have dedicated my other blogs to everything including the kitchen sink (literally), so I think it is time that I dedicate a blog entirely to my husband.

Today is his 39 birthday. A wee puppy, he is.

See that picture? Yes, I know. He is a handsome little stud muffin. Hold back, ladies. Control yourselves. He's taken.

We have sort of a funny little love story. Back in 1998, Husband took a hiatus from his SC tennis job to work at a ski resort in Utah. I happened to be taking temporary teaching job in Utah - a brief time nestled between Peace Corps and moving back to Oregon for graduate school. We were set up by his ex girlfriend that he was living with at the time (I'm going to be cruel and just leave you hanging with that one!) and we had a brief 2 month romance. The ski season ended and he flew back to SC and I to OR. Much to his dismay, I felt that it was not the right time in our lives to keep a long distance, so I broke it off. He has finally forgiven me for that. In my defense, we had great fun for that two months, but he made me cry twice. Once was over publicly pointing out a gray hair of mine and the other was for publicly picking on me over my woman's liberation poster. He is not a jerk - rather smoothness was (is) not his strong point. That's okay. I've decided it would be too exhausting if he were perfect, so I have finally forgiven him for that.

Fast forward 2 years and I was cleaning out an old email box when I found his email address. We had not spoken that entire time. I thought, "What the hell? He might want to know I landed in Corvallis and am doing well.", so I sent off a little note. Three months later, he flew out for an amazing weekend. It hit me that after all the toads I had kissed, I was finally with someone that made me feel comfortable just being me, so the following summer I flew to Charleston to spend time with him, and then the year that followed, we flew back and forth while he finished his graduate program. Finally in 2002, he moved to Portland for me. Two years after that, we got hitched and have now made full circle back to Utah. We celebrated our 7 year anniversary last week and it just keeps getting better each year.

Even though we are opposites (ex. He's a sports fanatic and about died the other day when I asked how many goals they had made in a basketball game), we have really meshed into one odd sort of unit.

For all of that, here is this.

These are the reasons why I love my husband very much:

* We can talk about everything and anything, and we accept each other completely - faults and all.

* He is a 'What you see is what you get' kind of guy. There are no games, just all honesty. I trust him completely.

* He is a wonderful father. Really - better than I could have imagined one to be.

* He is really, really good at his job teaching kids. I admire him and he makes me proud to see him in action.

*He lets me sleep in on the weekends.

* We have problems, as I don't believe any marriage is without, but I am SO thankful they are the problems that they are - mostly just around routine and chore stuff that goes hand-in-hand with being a dual working family.

* When we have a problem, we both work really hard at fixing it.

* Our relationship has always strengthened during the hard times in our lives... and we have had our fair share.

* We have the summers off together, and as I know many couples that would strangle each other after that much time together, we thrive. At the end of the summer, I love him more than ever. I just really, really like hanging out with him.

* He has this amazing way of sorting out my thoughts when I can't. He can have this amazing clarity and after I can ramble on and on, he will paraphrase what I said, and then I go, "Ohhh... so that is where I was going with that?"

* He tries hard to make me happy.

* We respect each others feelings. I crumble inside if I know I have said something that hurt him. This is good for me - I like that he keeps me good.

* For what he lacks in the back rub dept, he makes up for with the foot rub.

* Yes, about all he really knows how to do in the kitchen is make a Garden Burger - but damn if it is not a good one!

* We respect each others individuality and make sure to give each other freedom, but at the end of the day, we're happy to come back together.

* I could go on and on with the mushy list, but for sake of time in getting this out on his birthday, I will end on this note. I may not be certain of much, but I know that we will be stuck with... I mean married to...each other forever.

I love you, Babe! Happy birthday!