Health Status

Hi,

I have had a few people ask about the health status of our future child. A legitimate question considering the horrible AIDS epidemic going on in Africa right now. We are able to tell our adoption agency what kind of health problems or developmental problems we are willing to take on. We are willing to take a child with minor correctable health or developmental problems. All of the children are tested for HIV and Hepatitis before they are referred to a family. We won't take a child who is positive for either, so our agency won't refer a child to us with either of those conditions. Most of the children will suffer some problems from malnutrition. Most of those problems can be overcome with time. Some of the children may not grow as tall as they were meant to, or may be anemic. There is a chance of institutional delays and some cultural delays. For instance, in some cultures kids don't walk as early as American children because they "wear" their babies a lot of the time in slings, so the kids aren't on the floor as often to develop that skill. We are sure that God will give us the child that is suppose to be with us and we will be able to handle whatever that entails. Have a good day!!!

There is no me without you

Hello again,

Duane flew to Tulsa for work yesterday. He had plenty of time to catch up on his required adoption reading. I am reading a book called, "There is no me without you," It isn't required reading, but it is really good. I am only about half way through the book, but it is really interesting. It has some history and how there came to be some many orphans in Africa. It follows one women's story of helping orphans. If anyone is interested in reading about this subject, this is the book that I would recommend.

I got an email from our social worker yesterday. The program director in overseas resigned. Luckily they had someone else to take over for him right away. Unfortunately that means that we have to redo some of our paperwork because it has the old directors name on it. It won't be too big of deal. Every time we have to change something in our dossier that will go to Africa we have to have it notarized, then send it to the secretary of state to get the "Great State Seal," so that they know the person who notarized it is actually a notary in the state.

Hello All,

Last week, on Thursday we all went to public health for another round of shots. I got 3, Ty got 3, Ali got 2 and Duane got 5. Yikes!!! If anyone plans on traveling to Africa, be prepared to get a lot of shots. We wanted to make sure that we got everything required and recommended. We didn't have to get Yellow Fever vaccinations to go to Ethiopia, but we have heard of people not being allowed back into the US if we went to a country that had Yellow Fever. I'm sure that whenever we get back to the US we won't want to be stuck in quarantine. We also don't have to take medicine for Malaria while we are there because the capital city's elevation if too high for there to be Malaria in the mosquitoes there. There isn't a vaccination for Malaria. The way to prevent it is to take antibiotics while we are in Ethiopia. I think we will all take the antibiotics to prevent Malaria just in case. Sometimes adoptive families get to leave the city to meet their new child's birth family, so better to be safe than sorry:0) We have an appointment next Thursday for our next round of shots.

Another big thing we have been working on is getting our house ready for another kiddo. We finished (almost) the room in the basement that we have been using for storage for the last 10 years. Wow, we accumulated a lot of stuff in that amount of time. We got the room done about 2 weeks ago, with the exception of the closet organizer and Ty moved in. He seems to like it. It is bigger than the bedroom he had upstairs, and it is farther away from Mom and Dad which is always a good thing when you are 17. It kind of turned into a whole house bedroom makeover. We repainted Ali's room yellow and purple. She got new mirrored closet doors and new carpet in her room. The room that will be for our adopted child got new carpet and new paint. While Ty was in that room, it was red, white and blue. We decided to paint 2 walls white and the other 2 kind of a medium blue. I am not a fan of blue at all, but it is suppose to be the most relaxing color. I'm sure that when we bring our new child home they will be scared and won't understand what we are saying to them, so if the color blue might make them feel better, I guess I can deal with it :o)

Our Ethiopian Adoption

Well, some of you may know, and some of you may not know that Duane and I are in the process of adopting from Africa. This is how we got to where we are now. Duane and I have always talked about adopting, or doing foster care "someday." Several days after the earthquake in Haiti Duane and I were driving back to Gillette from Moorcroft when the news came on the radio. They were talking about all of the children who had lost their families in Haiti. I said, "we should adopt a child that really needs a home." Duane said, "yes we should." That was January 19, 2010 and that is the day our journey began. We discussed adoption several times over the next few days. We decided to use Bethany Christian Services as our adoption agency.

January 25, 2010 we filled out our preliminary and wait then waited to here back if we would be eligible to adopt. Waiting seems to be something that you do a lot of when you decided to adopt.

January 28, 2010 we received an email from Bethany Christian Services letting us know which countries we were eligible to adopt from. We found out that some countries have very strict rules about who can adopt their children. One of the countries we were eligible to adopt from was Ethiopia. I had already been having dreams about a little African American toddler, so that seemed like the choice we should make. I was in Washington and Oregon at this time. I was in Oregon for 5 days trying to keep my then 20 month old niece, Kathryn occupied while my brother and his wife were busy taking care of their new baby that had decided to come into the world about 8 weeks early. I spent 4 days in Washington with Duane's sisters family and their 8 year old daughter Kerrigan. I decided that if I could keep up with my nieces, I should be able to keep up with a new child of our own. I think I did ok :o)

In February we spent a lot of time talking about adoption and how it would impact our family. We talked a lot about bring a child of another race into our family and how it would affect members of our extended families and friends. We talked to people who had adopted children and adults who had been adopted as children. We spent a lot of time talking to our own children. We also had to consider how this would affect us financially. Adoption is very expensive!!

We had an incredible amount of paperwork to fill out. An incredible amount. We had to have it all filled out before we could submit our formal application. We had to ask several members of our families and friends to fill out letters of reference for us. Everyone we asked to write letter was so helpful and supporting. We had to fill out papers about our childhood, how we were raised, our relationships with our siblings, the kind of house we have, our employment histories, how much money we make, who will raise the child if Duane and I should have an untimely death, doctors statements and fingerprinting among other things.

March 3, 2010 We submitted our formal application. This is when it started to get serious. We had to send money with our application.

March 18, 2010 Duane and I had our first meeting with the social workers for our home study. It was our joint interview. I guess we did ok.

March 26, 2010 Our formal application was approved by the Country Program Director.

April 19, 2010 We completed our individual interview for the home study. I went first at the Bethany office and then Duane had his interview. Our social workers then came over to the house for our home visit. It just so happened that it was our annual neighborhood clean up day, so everyone had all of their garbage piled in the street waiting for city pick up. The social workers didn't seem to mind, but seriously what are the odds of neighbor cleanup being the same day as the home visit. Ty and Ali both got out of school early to have their individual interviews here at the house. They were pretty happy about that.

May 1, 2010 We received our official, approved home study in the mail.

May 3, 2010 I sent our I600A application to the USCIS. This application is for the immigration of a child into our country. I also mailed off a copy of the home study to America's Christian Credit Union. They needed to home study before they would fund our adoption loan.

May 10, 2010 I sent all of our notarized paperwork to the Secretary of State to get the Great Seal of Wyoming. We have to have that paper attached to every notarized document to prove that the person who notarized our signatures is actually a notary in the state of Wyoming. I think that there we 35 documents.

May 12, 2010 We got all of the paperwork back from the Secretary of State.

May 13, 2010 We received a notice of action from the USCIS that they had received our I600A application and were processing it.

May 19, 2010 We have to get our biometric fingerprints at a field office for the Department of Homeland Security in order to complete the I600A. The notice of receipt we received from the USCIS They said that I could check the status of my case online, but I was never able to. I called the National Benefits Center phone number listed on the form. I told them that I was unable to check the status of my case online . The lady I was talking to said that was because for some reason you couldn't check the status of that form on line, but they didn't know why. I asked her to check to see if we had our fingerprinting scheduled yet. The closest field office is 2 hours away in Casper, WY. Here is what she told me, "the appointments are all full, so you are on a waiting list to get an appointment scheduled." WHAT, a waiting list to schedule an appointment? I asked her if I could call the field office, but was told that they didn't have a phone number. She gave me an email address to the field office which didn't work. I asked her if there was another field office we could go to. She said that I would have to go to the USCIS website and see if there was another office that we could make it to, then call her back. I did that and there is a field office in Rapid City, SD 2 hour and 15 minutes from us. I called her back, she had to talk to her manager to do a manual appointment location change and then they had to book appointments at least 2 week out so that they could get stuff to us in the mail. She said she would check on all of that and get back to me. She called me back about an hour later. We have our appointment two weeks from today at 8:00 in the morning. It seems like that was a fairly simple solution, but it sure took a lot of work to get there. Thanks for letting me vent. If I hadn't been a little pushy, who knows how long it would have taken for us to get moved off the waiting list to schedule an appointment. Crazy.