As I was driving Auden to daycare one morning this week, I heard an advertisement on the radio for the Adoption Expo at the Grand Hyatt that we went to exactly one year ago on Saturday which started us off on this crazy journey. In some ways, it feels like we have come so far in one year- chose an agency, got through the “paper chase,” completed our home study, and we have been on the Korean program’s waitlist since July. But due to the unpredictable nature of adoption, in many ways I feel like we have barely taken any steps closer to finding our daughter.
This brings me to an update on some decisions we’ve made recently in light of the increased wait times for the Korean Program. By the way, since I last wrote the estimated wait times have increased again (sigh). The first decision we made is that we definitely want to wait for a girl. It saddens me that there are so many more boys available for adoption (internationally and domestically) because I think boys are the absolute best (of course I’m biased, ha) but we feel in our hearts that a little girl is right for our family at this time. So, then the question is, do we stay in the Korea program even though we probably won’t be able to go get our daughter until 2014? Cody went to an informational meeting at our agency last week to discuss the future of the Korea program since things have been slowing down significantly lately. The consensus is that things aren’t going to get better, if anything, they will just get worse (no surprise there). So it seems pretty unnerving at this point to put “all our eggs” in this basket. We also decided against moving to domestic adoption. We’ve invested so much time and money with this agency already; I really don’t think I can handle starting all over again with a domestic agency. However, if we were starting the process right now, knowing about the severe slow downs that occurred in many international programs this year, we probably would have went the domestic route. But international is where our heart is now.
The past month has been a whirlwind of learning as much as I can about the China Waiting Child (special needs) program, and then relaying that information to Cody, ha. We had the opportunity to meet with a family that has adopted two boys from China who had cleft lip/palate who were gracious enough to have us to their home. We also had an appointment with Auden’s cardiologist which gave us the opportunity to ask him about various congenital heart defects (CHDs) that are typically seen in the special needs program. These two issues are typically the most minor/correctable in the special needs program which is why I focused on them. Cleft lip/cleft palate is minor in the fact that you are just dealing with oral and cosmetic surgery (nothing life-threatening or serious), however, there are typically many surgeries involved throughout childhood and speech therapy is typically necessary on a weekly basis into grade school. While, CHDs on the other hand can be more serious in that you are talking about the heart. However, Auden’s cardiologist reassured us that many of the CHDs (or at least the ones we would be open to- ASD, VSD, PDA, PFO and maybe TOF) are generally no big deal, some requiring no surgery, some requiring just one surgery. It was wonderful to hear that he actually has experience in looking at adoption files from China and he would be happy to review our potential daughter’s file when we get matched. He is an extremely well respected doctor affiliated with Georgetown University and we trust his opinion.
So with all this information we have decided to pursue the China WC program. Cody has decided he wishes to pursue CHDs only at this time. I am still open to cleft, but will of course respect Cody’s decision. Because young girls with correctable CHDs are typically the most desired by potential parents, we will have to wait longer for this type of match. Especially because the China WC program, just like the Korea program, is composed of 75% boys. Still, our agency has promised us that the longest it has ever taken for them to find this type of girl match for a family has been 8 months, so that would still put us in the 2013 time frame that we have been hoping for. We are actually going to stay on the Korea wait list for now, and do what is called “dual listing” (which I found out I could do since my last update). Our agency will let us be on two waitlists at the same time but as soon as we accept a match, we have to get off the other waitlist. We figure, no sense in getting off the Korea waitlist now since we already paid for the Korean homestudy. Now we can get started on China right away.
So, what’s next? More and more paperwork. Korea was the easiest program to apply for because they didn’t belong to an international treaty called the Hague Convention that most countries belong to. So we got away with doing less paperwork. Unfortunately, for China we have to now do that additional paperwork. First, we had to do two more background checks of two states we didn’t need for Korea. We submitted them last week and New York will likely take 6-8 weeks to come back. In the meantime, we needed to complete a couple more hours of education requirements (webinars) and we had to bug some more of our close friends and Auden’s daycare provider to write a recommendation letter for us for China’s specific requirements. As soon as our background checks come in, our social worker is then able to write a homestudy report specific to China. After she writes our homestudy report, we can then start to compile what is known as a “dossier” which is the additional paperwork that Hague Convention countries require. I will discuss this more in detail when the time comes. They can’t start looking for a referral (or match) for us until our dossier is sent to China. I’m hoping we can get our dossier sent to China by April, but we will see.
It’s hard not to all of a sudden feel “behind the game” with China since I feel like we are starting over in many respects. But I have to keep reminding myself that we couldn’t have started earlier anyway because of Auden’s age. Since they match children in the China WC program when they are typically over 12 months old, our agency wants Auden to be 2 years old when they start looking for a match so there is a least a year age difference between the children (which makes sense to us too). Also, China requires parents to be at least 30 years old, which Cody just turned in May, ha. Although the paperwork is obnoxious and getting on another country’s waiting list means considerably more expenses, it feels good that we are going to have options. I like the idea of doing all that we can, then having God lead us to the path that is right for us. A big thanks to our friends and family who have been so supportive the past month as we worked through our next steps.
