Paperwork, Paperwork, and more Paperwork!

It has only been two weeks since we received pre-approval for Annabelle, and we have already accomplished so much.  Because we have been through all of this before, we already knew what things we were going to need to get done.  We are working with two agencies - one in our state to do our home study and one that is out of state that works specifically with the Philippines and will be our placement agency.  We contacted both and were able to talk them into sending us all the paperwork at once and ahead of time, so we could get as much accomplished as we could while Jason was on vacation.  They usually have an order that they send it all in so you don't get too overwhelmed.  Plus, they usually like to have money first before they will send anything.  Luckily our agencies were very understanding and accommodating.  We already knew which things would take the longest, so we got started on those right away.  We have definitely felt the Lord's hands in this process helping to move things along at a much faster rate then we would have been able to do alone.  It just reaffirms to us that we are doing the right thing and have made the right choice in adopting Annabelle.  After just two weeks we pretty much have everything done to complete both sets of documents that we need for our home study and our dossier (the set of documents that our placing agency will send to the Philippines for us).  The only things we have left now are all outside our control, and we will just have to sit and wait for those things to start coming in.  For those who are curious as to what is involved with an international adoption, here is a list of the things we have done or are getting done:

-criminal and child abuse checks from every state and country we have lived in since we were 18
-an FBI background check which we needed a set of fingerprints to accomplish
-had to order certified copies of birth and marriage certificates
-every member of our household had to have a physical/medical report done
-the couple adopting has to have a psychological evaluation done which includes two specific tests.  The first test was 567 questions and the second was 172 questions and took about 3 hours total, including a third test our psychologist added.  We were also interviewed separately for 2 hours each.
-we had to complete a 10 page questionnaire for our home study
-have a home visit from our social worker that lasts a minimum of 4 hours, where she interviews each family member separately and checks out our home (we are having this done on wed.)
-find 3 people to write letters of recommendation for our dossier and 4 people to be references for our home study

That's all the big stuff.  There are a bunch of other papers we had to fill out and/or sign, but those were all pretty easy compared to the things I mentioned above.  Because we have been able to get so much done the last couple weeks, it looks like we might be able to have our home study done by the middle of January and maybe even everything we need to have our dossier sent to the Philippines.  I'm not sure how quickly the Philippines is processing dossiers right now, but they are typically approved around 1-2 months.  Once we are approved we will receive our official match with Annabelle.  After we send them our match acceptance we start all the immigration paperwork.  Depending on how quickly all of that paperwork goes through, it will be between 3-6 months before we can travel to go pick Annabelle up.  If everything continues to go smoothly, then it looks like it will be early summer that we will be able to get her.  That still seems so far away, but I know that the time will go by very quickly and she will be here with us before we know it.

Meet Annabelle

We aren't allowed to post any pictures on the internet of her until we have gone to the Philippines to pick her up, so here is a drawing that Breanna did of her:

Her name will be Annabelle and she just turned one in September.  She goes by a different name in the orphanage, but Annabelle is her second given name and is what we have chosen to name her.  She is beautiful and perfect in every way except for one thing - she has no limbs.  She was born this way.  It is a very rare condition.  It will be a huge obstacle in her life and will also be quite a challenge for us, but we believe that she will grow up to do amazing things in her life despite this challenge, and we are so excited to get to be part of that.  We don't feel like we are a family that is qualified enough to care for a child with so many challenges, but we know we can love her.  We know, because we already love her, even though we have never met her.  We can love her unconditionally and give her a home where she will always know that she is loved by us and also by God.  We will do whatever we can to help her reach her full potential and to be happy.

When we first found her on the waiting child list my first thoughts were about what potential she would be capable of achieving being born with this disability.  I did some research on the internet to find others born this way.  The first one I came across was Nick Vujicic.  He was born in Australia with no arms or legs and is now a Christian motivational speaker.  I cried when I watched this video of him.  He is so inspirational:

After watching this and also hearing inspirational stories of others with similar conditions, I realized that Annabelle would be capable of so much more then I would ever have thought possible.  This is when our family seriously began to consider adopting her.  Joshua and Eva never needed any convincing.  They wanted her from the first time they saw her picture.  I remember having a talk with Joshua about her and telling him that she wouldn't be able to do a lot of the same things as him.  I asked if he still wanted her for a sister and he said "her have eyes, and her have ears - her can hear, and her have brains".  He was only thinking about what she would be capable of.  I wish we could all think that way.  Because Breanna is much older, she had some reservations about it, but after giving it a lot of thought she also wanted this little girl to be a part of our family.  Jason and I had some reservations in the beginning also, but we feel so strongly that she is our little girl that nothing else really matters.  I have no doubt that she is going to bring so much joy to our family as well as to so many others.  The name "Annabelle" actually means "joy" which is why I decided to title this blog "Our Path to Joy".  We are so excited that our journey to bringing her home has officially begun and can't wait for that day to get here!

Finally!!!

I guess I should have waited a few more days to write my last post because "soon" came much sooner then I was expecting.  We just received an email this morning informing us that the Board has chosen us to adopt the little girl we requested.  This is not an official match yet, but they are putting her on hold for us in order to complete and submit all the paperwork required.  At this point, it is unlikely that they will not match us with her after everything is submitted.  We are beyond excited about this!  I was really sick last night and had a horrible night, so I was a little late in checking my email this morning.  Luckily the girls hadn't left for school yet, so I was able to share the exciting news with them and then we all called Jason together.  He told me to send him the email, because I don't think he believed me.  He's not always the most optimistic person, so I think he was expecting this not to work out for us.  I think he is very happy though.  I know the kids are.  I heard them talking on the way out the door saying that this was the happiest day of their lives.  They are so excited to share the news with all their friends.  What an amazing Christmas present we have received today!  I got tears in my eyes when I read the news.  God is so good and I am so thankful for this precious blessing He is giving us and trusting us with.  I feel honored that we were chosen to be her family and I can't wait to meet her and hug her and kiss her all over!

Now we have a couple months worth of paperwork to do and then more waiting.  If everything goes well, then we should be matched with her by March and then travel sometime during the summer to pick her up.  This is going to be a very busy next couple of months, but it will be so worth it!  

Still Waiting

Well the couple weeks more we were told we would have to wait has now turned into a month and we still have no answer.  I finally emailed our agency director to see if she could find something out for us.  Just sitting around waiting was driving me crazy, and I was beginning to feel like we had been forgotten.  I just got a response today that she was able to talk to one of the social workers in the Philippines and was told that they will be reviewing our case before the Board soon.  I have no idea what their idea of "soon" means, so I still have no clue as to how much longer we will have to wait.  This is so frustrating!  We could have had all our paperwork and home study done in the time it has taken so far just to receive an answer.  I am just thankful that this is a busy month and should keep our minds off of the wait for awhile.  I guess one good thing about not receiving an answer yet is that we can spend the month focusing on Christmas and our family instead of rushing around getting a home study done and filling out a bunch of paperwork.  This also gives us more time to save money.

I am trying so hard to keep my faith alive that this will all work out, but it is not easy when so much time has gone by.  I just have to keep trusting that we are in the Lord's hands and that if this little girl is meant to be a part of our family then everything will work out in His perfect timing.  I am just not the most patient person and really hate waiting.  I know this is nothing compared to our long wait for Joshua so I shouldn't be complaining, but it is still so hard.  I am really hoping that we hear something this month.  That would be the best Christmas present ever!  If not I'll just keep pushing on with the hope that we will hear something soon - whenever that is!

Waiting Is So Hard

Waiting is so hard!  I know it is worth it in the end, especially after experiencing the tremendous joy we felt after our excruciatingly long wait for Joshua, but that still doesn't make it any easier.  After we decided we wanted to try to adopt the little girl we found, we had to submit a profile about our family, along with a note from my doctor explaining my medical condition, to the adoption board in the Philippines.  The board will read through our profile and decide if we would be a good fit for this little girl.  If they decide to accept us they will put her on hold for us while we get our dossier and other paperwork put together and submitted.  This way no one else can adopt her while we are getting all our paperwork done, which can take a couple months.  We have already been waiting almost a month to hear back from them, and finally today we received an email from our agency.  Unfortunately it was not exactly what we wanted to hear.  It wasn't a yes or a no.  The adoption board just informed our agency that there is another family who also submitted a profile for this same girl.  This means that it is going to take them more time to make a decision because they will now be choosing between two families.  We were told that this could take a couple more weeks.  So frustrating!

I'm happy that another family wants her.  This means that if they decided not to accept us then she will still have a family soon.  This also means that if they turn us down it might not be because of my medical condition.  It might just be because the other family was a better match for her.  I really wish I knew something about the other family so I knew what we were up against.  I guess we will just have to keep praying and trusting that the Lord will help them make the right decision, so this little girl will end up where she is meant to be.

Even though I know that if we do not get accepted to adopt this little girl that we still have a daughter out there somewhere that is meant to be part of our family, I feel my heart will still break.  It is so hard not to get attached to a child when you spend so much of your time praying for them and thinking about them while you are waiting for decisions to be made.  I just don't have it in me to do anything part way.  When I do something or decide on something, I put my whole heart into it.  It's hard to explain unless you have gone through something like this, but I have so much love for this special little girl and I want so much for her to be part of our family.  All this waiting and not knowing is so hard.  My greatest fear is that we will have to go through this all over again if this adoption does not go through.  I don't know if my heart can take it again.  I am putting all my hope and faith in the Lord's hands and praying that everything will work out.

How Do You Know

How do you know when you have found the one - that special little person who is meant to be part of your family.   We have received a couple of waiting child lists so far, one of which had over 100 children listed.  It breaks my heart reading through their profiles and learning about each of their struggles and challenges that they have had to face already in their precious young lives.  I wish we could adopt them all.  They all need a family so badly.  Unfortunately we can only choose one of them.  On the list we received last week there was a little girl that we felt really drawn to.  She has a pretty significant disability that would present quite a challenge for us, but it is also one that I feel we could take on.  We decided to pray about it as a family and ask the Lord if she is the one for us.  So far we have not received any lightning bolt answers, so how do we know if we should move forward with this and try to adopt her or not.  I have pondered this question a lot the last few days and have come to a couple different conclusions.  I have come to realize that you don't have to receive a "lightning bolt" answer for something to be right or good.  Sometimes you have to decide things for yourself and then act on them.  If it is something right or good then you will start to see the Lord's hands directing the process and helping you to accomplish it.  Something can also be right or good but not be the right thing for you or your family.  I believe that in these cases when you act on your decision the Lord's hands will still be in the process but He will be working in the opposite direction that will eventually lead you down a different path.

We decided today to go ahead and try to get matched with her.  We feel that we were drawn to her for a reason and all of us agreed that we wanted her in our family.  My husband and I, along with our oldest daughter, are still a little apprehensive about how we will deal with her special needs but we still feel that it is something we will be able to handle.  Our younger kids have no apprehensions about it, because they really don't understand what it will be like to have a sibling with disabilities.  They just think she is adorable and are excited they might get to have a little sister.  I have chosen not to give out very much information about her on this blog for now.  I feel it would be better to wait until we know for sure if we will be able to move forward with her adoption or not.

Special Needs Adoption

The biggest challenge for me since we picked up Joshua from the Philippines has been my health.  Just a short time before we were matched with him I was diagnosed with Hashimotos disease, which is an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid.  I also developed Leaky Gut Syndrome which caused me to become allergic to almost 90% of all the foods I had been eating.  It was quite a challenge for me in the beginning, but I am now at a point where I am feeling really good and have adjusted well to a whole new way of eating and preparing my food so I am almost symptom free.  I wish my disease was only a physical challenge, unfortunately it has also affected our ability to adopt a healthy child from the Philippines.  While we were waiting for Joshua, the adoption board in the Philippines came up with a whole new set of requirements for potential applicants in order to eliminate some of them to shorten the waiting times.  One of the new requirements was that you could not have any autoimmune disease, with no exceptions.  This was pretty disappointing and discouraging for me, especially since I knew we were suppose to adopt from the Philippines again.

 I decided to do some research to see if we could at least submit a dossier and see if the Philippines would accept my condition since I really have no symptoms as long as I take my medication.  We found a wonderful agency(Hand in Hand)  that has been amazing to work with.  They advised me not to go that route, because we would have to spend quite a bit of money to begin with and might end up being denied and all the money we spent we could not get back.  They advised me instead to look into adopting a child with special needs.  They said that in many cases the adoption board in the Philippines will make exceptions to their requirements for parents willing to adopt a special needs child or sibling group because they are harder to place.  I knew that somehow the Lord would open the way for this adoption to happen, I just never would have guessed that this would be the path we would need to take.

We had looked at the special needs list before and knew that it would be a challenge to find a child that we felt confident and comfortable with parenting.  A lot of the children on those lists have quite a number of challenges.  I strongly believe that every child deserves a family, but I just never saw myself as being qualified enough to parent a child with special needs.  We decided to trust in the Lord and asked to be put on the email list to start receiving the waiting child lists as they came out each month, hoping and praying that we would be led to know which little girl was meant for us.

 Sometimes I wonder if the Lord gave me my disease so we would be led to consider a special needs child.  As hard as it has been to have to face the health problems I have had, I am so thankful to have had them because they are what has led us on the right path to finding our daughter.  The interesting thing about all of this is, a couple years ago, when I was at my worst and had become so sick that I reached a point where I honestly thought I was going to die, it was the knowledge that I had of our daughter I knew we would one day adopt that kept me going.  I woke up every morning thinking that I had to get better because I knew we had a little girl out there somewhere who was relying on us to find her.  I knew the Lord was not finished with me yet, and that I had to be alive to be a mother to this special little girl.  That knowledge is what gave me peace and strength to get through my toughest days.  She got me through my greatest challenge so far in this life and now I am going to have the opportunity to help her with her challenges.  Although the thought of adopting a child with special needs is intimidating, I know that the Lord will be there to help us every step of the way.

One of the benefits of adopting a child with special needs is that, once you find them, the whole process is much quicker than that of adopting a healthy child.  The whole process to get Joshua took almost 4 years.  The entire process for a special needs child is less than a year.   It will just be a matter of getting all the paperwork done and waiting for it all to get processed.  I am so excited that we will hopefully soon be finding out who our daughter is and that we will have the incredible opportunity of being parents to such a special child.  I'll admit that I am a little scared also, but I have no doubt that whom the Lord calls He also qualifies and we will be given the ability to parent whoever it is that He has chosen for us.

Adopting Again

 The path that led us to decide to adopt again started a long time ago.  It actually started before we were even matched with Joshua.  In July of 2008 I had a dream that we would one day adopt a little girl.  This dream was so vivid and real, but even more than that, I felt so much peace and love in my heart that I knew this dream meant something.  I thought for sure that one day, when the call came, we were going to be matched with a little girl.  When we found out we were matched with Joshua one of my first thoughts was that we would one day adopt again.  At the time I didn't know if we would adopt from the Philippines again or from somewhere else.  When we went to pick Joshua up I prayed that while we were there I would be inspired to know if that is where our daughter would be from.  I didn't realize then that the dream I had years before would help to answer this question for us.  One of the very specific and unusual things I remembered from my dream was that I saw a beautiful tree with purple blossoms on it.  I had never seen a tree with purple blossoms, so it kind of took me by surprise and was one of the things that I remembered most about my dream.  While we were in the Philippines, before we picked up our son, we decided to take a trip to the LDS Manila Temple.  This is a place that is very sacred and special to us.  On the drive to the temple we started seeing trees with purple blossoms and then at the temple we saw more trees with purple blossoms.  This is when I knew that the Lord was telling me that our daughter would be born in the Philippines.

Because Joshua's adoption process was so long, so frustrating, and so expensive, I knew it was not going to be easy to get my husband to agree to do it all over again.  Fortunately, after a lot of prayer, a couple years, and a really big miracle his heart was touched and he finally agreed that it was time to adopt again.  He was not the only obstacle on our path to this next adoption.  We have already seen many miracles where the Lord has opened the door for us to allow this to happen.  There was a time when I didn't think it would ever be possible for us to adopt again.  Thankfully the Lord knows more than us and He has made it possible for us to adopt again.  I am so excited and can't wait to see where this journey leads us and what very special little girl will soon become a part of our life and our family.