Ready

The books are lined up on the shelves, the bed is made, the shades and rug were carefully selected.  There has been an empty room in our house for almost 2 1/2 years that has evolved and flowed and has held different dreams, but now it is finally ready for a specific little girl who will be our daughter.

We skyped last week!  It was surreal to interact with her, to have her call us ma ma and ba ba (mommy and daddy) for the first time.   It was so hard to wave goodbye at the end of the call.

Are we ready?  Yes.  Our plans for summer are all tentative as we wait for the call saying the judge has made his or her final decision and we can book our flight to Taiwan.  We wait, and our daughter waits in a foster family.  We are both trying to make the best of the waiting.  She is learning English and practicing her letters and looking at our pictures.  We are practicing mandarin phrases, sending her packages, and looking up places to stay.  But we are all anxious to be together.

Packages and Paperwork

Our adoption agency sent us all of the paperwork to prepare for our in-country stay and appointment with AIT (The American Institute in Taiwan).  I am telling myself this means we are getting close!

In the meantime, our daughter is getting acquainted with us through pictures, our voices, and presents we send in care packages.  It is a challenge to send the 'right' stuff, when it is being viewed by not only the social workers but YT's birth father and perhaps court representatives.  I have tried to forget all of that and focus on the relationship these things are building between ourselves and our little girl, in place of actual contact.

I have not met the social workers at New Hope, but already I am impressed by them.  They are so thoughtful when sending us updates.  When we get an email each month linking to new pictures and videos in our dropbox account, it is like Christmas!  We watch the videos over and over, seeing her reaction to each item we have sent, seeing her giggle and run and hug stuffed animals.  And sometimes she seems sad.  Already, we have seen it all... but from so far away.  We are still hoping to travel in June- we make very tentative plans for anything during the summer at this point, as we are on hold.  Please send us your prayers and good vibes that the court process is going well and we can bring her home soon.

Care Package #1: a book we recorded, photos with labels in chinese, 1 outfit and a special snoopy that she loved

Care Package #2 A lot more clothes, some sensory toys, and songs in English that the social workers requested

The cutest TEVAs ever.  They sent us an outline of her foot on a piece of paper, and guess what?  They fit!

Court Date

YT looking at pictures of us with her social worker in January

Just a quick update to let everyone know our first court date was today, February 22nd.  It actually occurred while we were asleep last night, so of course she was the last thing I thought of before I went to bed and the first thing I thought of when I woke up.  

We will not hear anything today unless there was paperwork missing... sort of "no news is good news".  We were represented by our Power of Attorney, and YT and her birth father were probably present.  I thought of her birth father so many times yesterday, trying to send him strength and peace in his decision.  

The next big step will happen in two to three months, when we get the verdict from the judge, which is called the "first decree" or "civil ruling".  From there, it is just 4-6 weeks until the final ruling, when she is legally our daughter and we can travel.  Thanks again for all of your support, inquiries, notes, smiles and hugs- our friends and family have been incredible during this process!

A New Kind of Waiting

I bought her an outfit, size 4.  It is pink and frilly and has a matching headband for her very short hair.  It is louder than my typical style.  But from her pictures I can tell she will love it... something new and girly, but with leggings so she can still ride her tricycle fast like we saw her do in a recent video. She was flying!

I also searched for a nursery rhyme book in Chinese with English translations and beautiful pictures.  I can envision the social worker sharing it with her since he says she does not know any songs or rhymes.  I do not have a nice voice, but I sang every day to my children when they were toddlers.  And I would repeat the songs as many times as they wanted, over and over again.

We are allowed to send her a care package after the first court date, and eventually we will get to skype with her.  We are still waiting for court dates and a revised I-600A (our petition to the U.S. Central Immigration Service to bring an orphan into the U.S.), but we have something useful to do as we wait.  We get to prepare her room and work on our language skills, find play therapists and read about her culture.  We are finally preparing for not just "a child" but our daughter, specifically.  It is joyful and scary at the same time, because we are so attached and hopeful, and yet worried about the court process going smoothly.  As your gift to us this holiday, I ask again for your good prayers, meditations and intentions.  Thank you, friends and family!

We have a daughter in Taiwan

She is four-years old and we will call her Y.T. here until we can tell you her real name.  And show you real pictures.  We have seen videos of her laughing and dancing and hopping like a bunny, and you will have to trust me when I say she is adorable.

We were standing on a beach in Tobago when we got the call from our caseworker that the birth father has chosen US to be her parents.   My ugly cry followed… Johnny and I hugged and could not let go.  I expected to feel like I did when I found out I was pregnant with our first two, but this was more raw and emotional.  It felt more like when they were actually born.

For those of you saying, “back up, back up, I thought you were waiting for a toddler in Latin America for the last 2 years!”, I will start at the moment we saw Y.T.s picture in our adoption agency’s September blog post, listed as a “waiting child”.  We knew we wanted to be considered as soon as we saw her information.

What is next?  The court process in Taiwan will take 6-8 months (details on the timeline for anyone interested), so we will probably travel in May or June to bring her home.  I will be hoping she can celebrate her 5^th Birthday with us in May… we have missed so much of her life it is hard to tolerate the loss of another birthday.  In the meantime, we are studying Mandarin, doing paperwork, and painting the spare bedroom!  Our oldest daughter has definitive ideas about the decorating process based on what she remembers liking when she was 5.  Both of the kids are ecstatic to finally know their sister’s name and see her face.  They have been amazingly patient with all of the twists and turns of the adoption process.

Thank you all for your love and support!  This waiting period has been really hard on our family and we could not have made it without you.  We are now focusing all of our energy on preparing for Y.T. and the tough transition ahead.  We know nothing about “hard” compared to her challenges, but we cannot wait to love and take care of her. 

More to come!

The End of the Adoption Tax Credit?

The end of September was important to many of us who are prospective adoptive families, meaning we are in the middle of the adoption process but have not received a referral of a child.  That is because for anyone who is still waiting, seeing October 1st come means the last glimmer of hope passes that your family's adoption will be finalized in 2012.  That is painful on many levels, but to add 'insult to injury' so to speak, it may cost families like ours a lot of money.  We entered this process almost two years ago thinking it would be possible to finalize our adoption in 2011... 2012 was a given.  But as 2012 comes to a close, so does the adoption tax credit.

FAQs about the Adoption Tax Credit

A couple of weeks ago I wrote my congressman about HR 4373, asking him to support it.  Now that congress is out of session it is unclear what is going to happen, but I picked up this regarding what may happen: "We think that the chances of passing legislation that extends the adoption tax credit for some number of years or making it permanent are good because adoption and the adoption tax credit are popular on both sides of the aisle in Congress. It is most likely to happen as part of the passage of some form of the extension for the Bush era tax cuts or other major fiscal/debt/tax reform packages. It is highly unlikely that there will ever be a separate vote on the adoption tax credit, which is part of the reason why we have to try to build the co-sponsorship list now for bills like H.R. 4373 and S. 3616—so the support can be seen and pointed to when the future tax discussions take place.  And, while the chances of extending the Bush era tax cuts in some form are reasonably good, it will be affected by how the Congress decides to deal with the federal deficit and the debt crisis. Some want to extend all the Bush era tax cuts for everyone, some want to extend most of them, but only for families making less than $250,000 a year, some want to reform the tax code, with or without the Bush era tax cuts, and nearly everyone agrees that tax cuts or tax reform cannot be allowed to increase the national debt any further. The adoption tax credit is part of that big mix and, as of now, appears to be in good shape under most options." (From adoptiontaxcredit.org)

For adoptive families wanting to follow the progress of this legislation, join "Save the Adoption Tax Credit" on Facebook for updates.

Approved

Today we received our approval letter from the oldest private orphanage in Colombia, Casa de la Madre y el Nino.

The approval letter means that they have reviewed all of the information about our family (our pictures, our home study, our FBI fingerprints, our medicals, our psychological evaluations, etc) and they have agreed, "YES... we will refer a child to this family".

The orphanage director has assured our adoption agency that when they agree to work with a family they will refer a child to them within 12 months, so for the first time we feel we can officially share the news that a third child will be joining our family.  Although our US Central Immigration Approval was for a child 0-59 months, the casa's committee approved us for a 3 to 5 year-old child based on our stated preference for a toddler, and probably taking into consideration the ages of the two children already in our home.  When we receive the referral we will have approximately 60 days notice that we will be traveling to Colombia to live for 6-8 weeks in Bogota before we can bring our child home.

Wow.  I am overwhelmed that we know the city where our child resides.  I am overwhelmed that I have already missed so much of his life.  I am grieving for the losses he has already endured and will continue to endure when he leaves behind the country, people, smells and foods he is used to. We are so ready to love him.  Please, whether you say prayers or meditations or call on karma... we could use your thoughts and positive energy!  Thanks to our family and friends who have given support over the last eighteen months.  Hopefully in the next year we will finally bring our third child home.