A Small Glimmer of Hope

We got our medicals completed on Tuesday.  We all ended up having to actually go in to see our doctor, because on the form it asked for the date of the last exam.  Our doctor would have been fine just filling it out and putting a current date on it, but he couldn’t change the date of the exam unless we actually all came in for an exam.  We weren’t sure how they were going to bill for it and what we would end up paying.  We just left it up to the lord and trusted that it would all work out.  We got there and the receptionists were very confused, so they ended up signing us all in and making us pay our co-pay for each of us.  Then our doctor came out and made them refund all of that money back to us.  He said that because of the circumstance he would do it all free of charge.  Plus he had no idea how to bill for it and didn’t want to mess with it.  We are so thankful for his generosity and consideration.  He really is the best doctor ever.  It is kind of an interesting story on how he became our doctor.  It all has to do with our decision to have no more biological children.  He was the one we were referred to for Jason’s vasectomy.  We liked him so much that we decided to switch over to him as our family doctor.  He was just so nice and funny and personable.  He is really good with kids as well.  Also, when we decided to adopt we were told that we would need to find a doctor who has done adoptions before, because we would need him to know how to fill out all the paperwork and also be aware of all the tests and exams that need to be done on children coming from foreign countries.  It turned out that our doctor has done adoptions before, so we were able to stay with him.  Funny how things work out, and he has just been great through this whole process.  This has been one of the only things that has actually gone smoothly throughout our whole adoption journey so far.  It is things like this that remind us that the lord really is on our side and is helping us along this journey.  It gives me hope to be reminded of this and helps me remember that we really will get through this despite how long it may take to get there.  

Our social worker emailed us yesterday to let us know that as of last week none of the new Hague home studies have been accepted by the USCIS.  She said that she was actually given some real guidelines that will help her know if there is anything our home study is lacking before we turn ours in with our I-800a.  That way there is a greater chance that ours may be accepted.  Why they are just coming out with guidelines for this 4 months after the new policies were put into effect is beyond my comprehension.  I know they are trying to protect the children of the world, but they sure are making it tough for any of these children to get adopted.  We just mailed in all the rest of the things we needed to update for our home study to our social worker today.  I guess our next step, once our home study is actually, finally finished(which it should be now), is to mail everything on to the USCIS and hope it gets approved.  We will definitely be needing a lot of prayers for that one.  I feel like we are so close to the end I can almost touch it, but something always happens and we just can’t ever seem to make it to the end.  This is why I chose the picture of the lighthouse for this post.  I feel like we are on a boat trying to get to shore.  We can see the light from the lighthouse which gives us hope and something to hold on to, but we just never seem to be able to make it to shore.  I am just thankful for the light and that is what is keeping us going.  We know we are on the right path and we will make it, but it is just hard to tell how far away we actually are.

Ups and Downs

Today has been quite the ride, full of all sorts of ups and downs and twists and turns, and it’s only 2pm.  Let me start off by saying what a great day we had yesterday.  We got to Vancouver just in time to have lunch, so we parked a block away from the Embassy which happened to be right next to an A&W.  We had lunch and then went to the Embassy, which was a very small office (one room with no chairs and just one lady helping people).  She gave us the form we needed with an instruction sheet.  She didn’t even ask us where we were from.  They don’t do the fingerprints at that office and she told us we didn’t need to get it notarized or authenticated or any of that.  I guess they do things different in Canada.  We found the International Fingerprinting office, which was just a block away, and got the fingerprints done.  The instruction sheet said to get a certified check from the Royal Bank of Canada, because Manila has had problems with other banks which would cause our application to be delayed, so of course we went in search of the RBC.  We were able to find one just a couple of blocks away.  We ended up having to pay them $15 for a $4 check, but oh well, I think it will be worth it.  Since we had everything done we decided to try to find a post office to get it mailed off and have everything finished.  We found one just across from the Embassy.  We were able to get everything taken care of all within a 2 block radius and all within 2 hours.  The Lord was definitely on our side today.  Now we just have to wait to get it back in 3-4 weeks.  It felt so good to know we had everything done, finally.  I felt so happy and relived for the first time in months.  We had a great time in Canada while we were there.  I will write more about that on our other blog and include some pictures.

Well, that was yesterday.  Today is a whole different story.  I decided to email our social worker to find out the status of our home study, since it has been a couple of weeks since we submitted it.  I also emailed Wide Horizons to find out if the USCIS was still requiring the NBI or not, so I would know if we should submit our home study and I800a now or wait until we got our NBI clearance back.

I got an email back from Wide Horizons saying that the USCIS is still requiring additional information from 100% of all applications received.  Crazy!  They still haven’t come out with clear guidelines of what they want from the home study, but should be coming out with something soon to make the process go more smoothly.  Now that’s the government for you.  Way to implement a brand new program without having it all figured out first.  Anyway, she said that we should go ahead and submit our home study because they are still arranging appointments to get fingerprinted and by the time we get that done they should know better what we need.  It still seems pretty confusing to me, but I was happy that we could move on with the process while they continue to not know what the heck is going on.  

Then I got an email back from our social worker and all of my hopes and happiness from the previous email was dashed to pieces.  She was waiting for our home study to be approved by the agency’s main office and just found out today that we need to have our medicals redone because they are over 6 months old.  I don’t know why she didn’t think of this before, but like I mentioned before, I don’t think she has ever had a home study take this long and just didn’t think about it.  I just wanted to cry when I read that.  In order for us to have those done we needed to schedule physicals for each of us.  Me, Jason, and both girls.

I called Jason to let him know, I figured I might as well ruin his day too and we could be miserable together.  He told me he would call the doctor and figure out what we should do.  He then called me back to let me know that he found out that our insurance only covers 1 physical a year for each of us and if we had to have another one done it would be $200 out of our own pockets(and we were worried about having to pay all the co-pays again).  That would be $800 for all of us.  Not gonna happen.  He said he was waiting for our doctor to call him back so he could find out if we could just bring him the forms, without making an appointment, and have him just fill out the forms again exactly the same but with the current date.  I was so depressed at this point and praying for a miracle.

Jason called me back after talking with our doctor and said that he was willing to do it without an appointment.  “Thank You God!” is all I can say.  I feel so blessed and so relieved for this.  In the end, I always know the Lord is on our side, because everything always works out.  It is just not always fun getting to that point.  I just keep wondering what is coming next.  There is always something.  I feel like I am on a never-ending roller coaster and I just want to get off but I can’t.  Especially after that dream I had.  I know I can’t give up.  Maybe that is why the Lord blessed me with such an incredible dream, so on days like today, when I am at the end of my rope, I can look back and remember the peace and love that I felt and know that it is all going to be worth it in the end.  Our children must be pretty special to have all the powers of hell working against us in bringing them home.  Lucky for us we also have all the powers of heaven with us and they are mightier, so I know they will make it home.  It will just be quite a long and crazy journey getting to that point.

Purple Blossoms and Babies

I wasn’t sure at first if I should share this on here or not, but it is an important part of our journey so I  decided that I would share it.  I am going to try to recall as much detail as I can so I do not forget anything(this may be long).  Thursday night I had a dream, but it was not an ordinary dream.  It was the most beautiful, vivid dream I have ever had.  In this dream I was in a dark room.  It was just me and Jason alone in the room. I had just had a baby, but I do not recall ever seeing myself actually physically having the baby.  I knew it was a baby girl and I remember looking at the clock to see what time it was.  I watched the clock turn 7:15am and I remarked to Jason, with much excitement, that it was the exact day and time that Eva was born(Eva was actually born around 2am).  For some reason, in the dream, those two things, the exact time and Eva’s birthday, were very significant.  After looking at the time, I went to turn a light on so I could see the baby, but I knew it would be too bright for the baby.  Instead I turned on the hall light and then went over to the bed where she was sitting.  I saw her big, beautiful eyes staring at me and a slight smile come upon her lips as she looked at me.  I ran my fingers through her hair and down her cheek.  I felt so happy and peaceful and was amazed at what a calm, beautiful baby she was.  I felt so much love for her in that instant and felt an incredible bond.  I knew she was a very special baby and felt so happy that she was ours.  I then looked at Jason, who was laying on the bed with us, and then I looked out the window behind him.  The sun was just rising and peaking through the window.  I looked out and I saw the most beautiful tree I have ever seen.  It had some leaves that were dark green and others that were light green and then beautiful purple blossoms showing through between the leaves.  I have never in my life seen purple blossoms on a tree, so it was very new to me and I remarked to Jason how beautiful it was.  I then asked him if we should tell anyone that we had our baby, but he said that it wasn’t time yet and that we should wait.  Then I woke up.  It was around 5:30am.

I decided to wake Jason up and tell him about my dream and I couldn’t get back to sleep after that because I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  I knew it was significant and I knew that it had to do with our adoption but I am still unsure of what it all means.  I am almost certain it means that we are going to be adding another daughter to our family and that she is a very special spirit.  It would be a miracle if we got a girl, since almost everyone adopting wants a girl and we already have 2 girls.  It is strange because as of April the Philippines no longer allows families to request either gender.  If we could have made a request it probably would have been for a boy.  I still feel that we might be getting a girl and a boy as a sibling pair, especially after what my mom told me when I talked with her today.  I called to tell her about my dream, because I knew, out of anyone else I could share it with, that she would understand.  I was very surprised to find out that she also had a very similar dream just a couple nights before I had mine.  Hers was also so vivid that she knew she needed to write it all down so she wouldn’t forget any of the details.  She told me she has never had a dream like this before and knew there was something very significant about it.  I asked her to send me a copy of what she wrote, but for this blog I will just write down a few of the main details I can remember.

In her dream she was also in a very dark room and she was having a baby.  Nobody knew she was having it and nobody else was in the room except for my dad.  She just had a couple of contractions with little to no pain and than one push and the baby was out.  The baby was wrapped in a very soft blanket.  She knew it was supposed to be a girl but when she pulled the blanket back, it was a boy.  She kept thinking it was such a small baby and asked how much it weighed.  It was 7lbs 1oz and for some reason my mom knew that was a significant number.  She knew that the baby was much smaller than that.  She asked my dad what his name should be, but he said that they had no names picked out.  She then said that because he was such a special baby that his name should be Gabriel, like the angel, because he was an angel, and they would call him Gabe for short.  

I got the chills when my mom told me her dream.  It was just way too similar to my own.  I am almost certain that it too relates to our adoption.  I guess only time will tell.  I have thought of lots of different ways to interpret these dreams, but the one thing I know for sure is that these two kids are very special and I feel very blessed that they may be a part of our family.  I also feel very blessed that the lord would give me the gift of these dreams so I can begin to feel connected to my children.  Adoption is so much harder than pregnancy, because when you have a baby growing inside of you it is so much easier to feel a bond and a connection beginning to grow and continue to grow every day.  With adoption, all you have is paperwork and waiting, and it is really easy to forget the reason you are doing all of it.  Now I know we have a daughter and maybe a son as well, and they now actually feel tangible to me.  I feel a connection I never thought I could feel for someone who I have never even seen.  It will be very interesting to see how everything turns out in the end.  I just really felt that I needed to write all of this down so I could look back and remember the great love the lord has for me in blessing me with such a wonderful gift.

Canada Here We Come

Even though our social worker told us to go ahead and get the NBI clearance done, I emailed our agency this week to find out if there was any possible reason that we really needed to, because I was so not looking forward to doing it.  I was really hoping Wide Horizons would email back that we absolutely do not need it, because that is what they told us to begin with.  Well, they said to go ahead and “try” to get it done, because as of right now the USCIS is not accepting applications that just have a letter from ICAB attached stating that the Philippines does not have a child abuse registry.  They are saying it is not good enough and that they want the NBI clearance done.  Our agency is hoping they will relent on that eventually, but who knows when that will be, so they are still telling people not to get it done.  I think they told me to go ahead and do it, first just to see if it can be done (they seem to think that it can only be done in person in the Philippines) and second because they realize (as I made sure to point out in my email to them) how extremely unhappy I would be if it turned out that we did need it and didn’t have it when we could have been spending the last couple of months working on getting it done.  

I have done a lot of research on the internet on how exactly to go about getting this done.  They sure don’t make it easy to find the information.  What I found out is that if you live close to a Philippine Consulate than it is pretty easy to do, but if you don’t then you are basically screwed.  If you live close to one than all you need to do is bring in a passport size photo of yourself and a check for $25.  They have you fill out the application and then fingerprint you and sign and stamp your application.  You then mail it to the NBI in Manila with a certified check for $4.  That’s it-pretty easy I would say.  Now if you are unfortunate and don’t live close to a consulate than you have to mail in a request for the application and fingerprint form(certified mail $10) and wait around to receive it.  Then you take that to the police department to get your fingerprints done($15).  Next you have to take it to get notarized, but that is not good enough, you also have to then mail it(certified mail $10) to your secretary of state to get the notary certified($15).  Then you have to mail(certified mail $10) everything back to the consulate to get authenticated($25) and then they mail it back to you with their stamp of approval.  You then mail everything to the NBI in Manila($4 plus whatever certified shipping is).  I don’t have a clue how long all of this would take to get done and I don’t really want to find out.

Unfortunately for us, we do not live close to a consulate.  The closest one is in Vancouver, Canada which is 2 hours away, but we don’t know if we can get it done there because we are not officially under their jurisdiction.  We are under the jurisdiction of the consulate in San Francisco which is 16+ hours away.  My brother just happens to be on a business trip in San Francisco this week, so I had him pick up the application and fingerprint form for us.  That will at least take care of the first step.  We decided yesterday that we are going to go to Canada on Monday to see if there is any way they will let us complete it there.  That would save us so much time, work, and money.  I don’t know how important this jurisdiction thing is, but I am praying that it doesn’t matter for the NBI clearance.  

If the Canada plan doesn’t work out then we may just try getting the application filled out and fingerprints done and then mailing it to the NBI in Manila.  On their website it never said anything about all the other steps, I found that out on the consulate websites.  Then if that doesn’t work we will have to go back and complete all the steps.  I guess we will have time to work on all the other steps while we are waiting for our response to come back from Manila.  Anyway, that is our plan for now.  I guess we will just see how things go.  Nothing has been easy with this adoption, so I am not expecting this to go smoothly either.  If the Vancouver Consulate turns us down at least it won’t be a wasted trip.  We are planning some fun things to do while we are there.  We might even stay the night and spend a couple of days there.  It has been a few years since we have been there, so it is about time we go again anyway.   

Nine Months

9 months - The amount of time it takes to have a baby and also the amount of time it has taken us so far to complete our home study.  I was hoping this post was going to be one of excitement and joy at being able to share the news that it is finally complete.  This is not the case, however.  We had to meet with our social worker one more time on Monday because of the new Hague rules.  It wouldn’t have been too bad if her office wasn’t an hour+ away and if we could have found someone to watch the kids.  Luckily for us the meeting didn’t last too long and the kids behaved pretty well.  Our social worker told us that in her 20 years of doing adoptions ours has been her most difficult.  She said that our agency was still working on getting a letter from the Philippines for the child abuse clearance portion for the USCIS, but that they are unsure if the USCIS will accept it because some other agencies are telling their clients to get the NBI clearance done.  I had a feeling it was going to turn out this way and should have just gone with my gut instinct to begin with and worked on getting the NBI despite what our agency told us.  Our social worker told us to go ahead and just try to get it done just in case, after they get this mess sorted out, that we end up needing it after all.  I hate feeling like everything is out of our hands, so at least now it can feel like we are doing something other than waiting around for our agency, ICAB, and USCIS to make some decisions.  Jason is also going to attach to the USCIS form the letter he received from his mission president when he was released which states that he served an honorable mission while in the Philippines.  We are hoping that, along with our attempts to get the NBI clearance, it will be enough to get our I-800 form approved with the USCIS and get scheduled for fingerprinting.  

Another bit of frustrating news from our social worker was that, because our home study has taken so long to complete, we have to redo a lot of things that have expired.  At the time our home study is submitted, our state criminal and child abuse checks can be no longer than 3 months old and the FBI check can be no longer than 6 months old.  Most people finish their home study within 1-2 months, so I don’t think our social worker even thought about these things.  It has been well over those time frames and this is the first we have heard about it.  The Washington checks are pretty easy and come back within just a couple days, so we have those finished already.  For the FBI check we had to go and get fingerprinted again at the police station and then get a certified check to mail off with our request.  That could take a couple weeks or more to get back.  We had a pretty stressful day yesterday trying to get everything done.  Jason has been working tons of overtime, so this was the last weekend we had available for probably the rest of the summer.  To make things more stressful, we also decided we needed to get the girls a bunk bed after Eva slept so much better, during our trip last week, on a bigger bed.  Somehow we managed to get everything done, even with me forgetting my license at home and not realizing it until we got to the Everett Police Department 2 hours before they closed, and then having to drive all the way back to Lake Stevens, during the worst traffic time of day, to get it and then all the way back to Everett again.  We ended up getting two sets of fingerprints done for each of us, because we also learned from our social worker that our home study has to be updated every year since we are adopting from the Philippines.  We could have gotten a couple more sets, but in a couple years it might be nice to do it again to help us feel like we are doing something other than just waiting.

The other big thing we did this weekend was to get our Dossier finished and mailed off to our agency.  Most people submit this after their home study is finished, but we figured since it was done we might as well send it off and find out if we are missing anything.  I guess they will just have to hold on to it until our home study is finished, whenever that will be.  I am kind of getting use to all of the setbacks now, so nothing really surprises me anymore.  I’m sure there will be something else, but at least we know we are in good hands and the Lord knows what He is doing.  I know one day I will look back on everything He has put us through and finally understand the reasons.  I think if we had known how hard this was going to be from the beginning that we would not have done it. That is probably why we were into this too deep to get out of by the time we found out that all the odds were against us.

Before I end this post I just want to add one more thing to end on a positive note.  The family who is adopting the sibling group that we were first interested in showed up on the Yahoo adoption group I am part of.  They are getting ready to pick them up in August or September.  We have been emailing back and forth and they sent me some photos and videos of the kids.  This is a great blessing to me to know they are going to such a wonderful family and to be able to have them share their excitement and experience with me.  It makes me very excited for the day we get our referral and then to meet our child for the first time.  It seems like forever to wait, but I know the time will fly by and everything will work out beautifully.