Waiting

Today marks  2 months since our dossier was shipped to Honduras.  Perhaps a strange place to start blogging, so let me start at the beginning.

Johnny and I have thought about adoption for a long time.  We have two biological children, a boy and a girl, and they are the best part of our lives.   We are a happy family with a lot of love to give.  And we want a third child.  We agonized over this decision for a long time.  Have another ourselves?  Adopt?  Leave this issue alone?  For many reasons, some selfish and some not, we decided to find our toddler son in Honduras.

The initial decision brought us so much peace and confidence in our decision.  We cried, we laughed, we gazed fondly at our children and thought of the joy one more would bring.  We were entering this process with open eyes, had read every book on attachment issues and sensory disorders, but still thought , “it will all be OK if we can just bring him home”.   Now there are days when we think, “will we ever bring him home”?

 I will not lie, the last eight months have had a lot of trying moments.  The paperwork was a mountain, but we were organized, fast, and very optimistic.  We found other families on-line who had taken anywhere from 3 months to a year to get it all together.  “Of course we can get it done quickly if we are determined”, I thought.  We hired notaries on Craigslist to come to doctors’ offices where there were none.  We moved meetings and vacations to get the earliest appointments possible.  But then we found out how much is out of our control.  For example, happening to be the family  whose I-600A sits on a Central Immigration Services Agent’s desk for a lengthy summer vacation (it took 78 days to approve) while others got theirs back in 35 days.  Or having to revise our psychological evaluation three times so far because the template changed again and again.  And the financial strain.  International adoption is expensive.

But still we hold so much hope for our future and the future of our kids!  And during the wait, we have met so many awesome families who share our every emotion in this process.  They, along with the reassurances of family and friends, have been a lifeline.

The real wait (the wait for our referral) is just beginning….