Thursday, December 22, 2011

Second Home Visit...Check

Our second and last home visit to be approved for adoption is done!  And we passed!  The next time our adoption specialist is in our house will be when our second child has come home with us and has been living with us for several weeks.  Our house no longer has to be a museum and we can go back to living life at home as normal.  Phew! 
We aren’t fully approved quite yet, however.  We still have to do individual interviews.  We have these interviews scheduled for January 10th and they will be at the agency office.  I am feeling like the hard part is behind us now and these individual interviews will not be too difficult.  Over my Christmas break I will be working on our profile book and our “Dear Birthparent” letter and then we should be home free.  A giant cloud of stress has been lifted!  Now I can move on to the stress of having 9 adults and 7 children over for dinner tomorrow night!  But, that is a nice, happy stress and I am so happy to be able to have this milestone in our adoption process to celebrate with great friends!

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Phew, DONE...with the first home visit

I have been cleaning for days.  Literally.  I started cleaning last Thursday and it is now Tuesday.  I cleaned and organized the basement, the garage, and deep cleaned every square inch of my house.  But, no matter how much I cleaned, I just seemed to find more that needed to be done.  I am pretty sure the garbage man was cursing us as he loaded our garbage in his truck for a good 5 minutes at least this morning.  So, why the big cleaning frenzy?  Well, it isn’t because I just watched a Hoarders marathon and resolved to get every last thing that I haven’t used in the last 15 minutes out of my house.  No, it was for the big home visit for our adoption.  Our adoption specialist comes to our house to make sure that it is a safe and stable environment for a child.  Does this mean that the house has to sparkle from top to bottom?  No, but I am pretty sure you would be just as cleaning crazy as I have been if you knew that someone was coming over to judge your house to deem you fit to get something you really wanted.
Our adoption specialist came over tonight, talked with us about some of the forms we filled out, and took a look at our house, the whole house including the basement, garage, and yard.  My husband was not super thrilled that I had shown concern last week during a phone conversation with our adoption specialist that our basement would be part of the home visit.  He thought she might think that we had dead bodies down there or maybe that we had a special kind of garden growing.  Thankfully, we have neither of those things in our basement so we passed that section of the home visit.  However, on our way up the stairs, I was trying to open our baby gate and it fell off.  Great, she is looking for safety in our home and our baby gate just fell off the wall.  Luckily she didn’t seem to dock us points for that, at least in any way we could tell.  At the end of the visit she told us that everything looks good so far…and that we could schedule our second home visit then if we wanted to.  Wait…what???  A second home visit?  She is coming back?  Oh yes, I will have to enter stage two of the cleaning marathon!  *Sigh* well, at least we passed this visit.  Hopefully we will pass the next one too. 

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Next Phase, At Last!

At the end of October I wrote a post when I was very excited about turning in all of our paperwork.  I thought that we were just waiting for our background checks to come back and for my husband to get his physical sent in.  We were waiting for those things, but it also turned out that my daughter’s physical form had a mistake on it and had to be re-done.  So, now a month later…our paperwork is finally, officially DONE!  We are moving on to the next phase at last!  I am so excited because I was seriously starting to think that this day would never come. 
So, what is the next phase, you ask?  Well, we have been assigned a social worker and she will now do a home visit to make sure our house is safe for children and will interview each of us individually about our family history, our life, and our marriage.  I plan to be cleaning like a mad woman for the next week and a half.  This is also great motivation to get some projects finished around the house and get it cleaned for the holidays.  I think there is a good chance we will be officially a “waiting family” by the end of December or beginning of January!

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Fundraising

When we started fundraising I had all kinds of worries.  Would people give just because they felt obligated and then harbor negative feelings towards us?  Would no one give?  Would people feel that we are asking too much?  Would people think that it is odd for us to fundraise for ourselves instead of some other more worthy cause?  Would we miraculously get pregnant on our own and make everyone who gave to us feel swindled?
Well, maybe these fears are founded.  Maybe people are talking about these things behind our backs or thinking negative things about us.  But, what we have seen so far has been just the opposite.  We have been so lucky that people have seemed happy to help and have shown amazing generosity.  We are putting ourselves out there to either be rejected or encouraged, but I guess if we didn’t take the risk, we would never be able to see how generous and encouraging those around us can be.  That, and we would not be as financially stable as we would like to be in order to welcome a second child into our home.
We started out our fundraising small with a garage sale.  We asked friends and family to donate anything they wanted to get out of their houses.  We were so excited to get so many items from friends and family.  This was a nice easy fundraiser to ask for help on because I think many of the people who donated were almost as happy to get these items out of their houses as we were to take them in.  For three days we set up our little store in our driveway and catered to a woman who swore that Ann Taylor Loft was closing its doors for good, a man who wanted to buy a piece of lingerie and a “tickle stick” for a “special lady”, a boy who wanted to know if we had a return policy, and a woman who felt that 50 cents was way too steep a price to pay for a small toy.  The garage sale shoppers kept us entertained and helped us raise money for our first payment to the adoption agency.  Overall, it was a success.  If we had more time with nice weather we would have done at least one more garage sale.
Our next fundraiser event is a restaurant night which will be held on December 6th.  We were given two options that the restaurant offers.  We could either invite people, have them order whatever they want and we would receive 10% of the cost of their bill if they had proof that they were with our group or we could sell tickets to the event at $25 each and we would receive $10  for each ticket sold.  We went back and forth and asked friends and family for opinions.  We worried that $25 per ticket was too much to ask, but we also knew that getting 10% of the revenue of those with our group probably would not make the event worth it.  We decided to sell the $25 tickets so that we could have an event that would make our efforts worthwhile.  We are hoping that we will be as pleasantly surprised with this event as we were with the garage sale.  We know that this event is really our one big fundraising opportunity.  We feel that it would be rude to continue inviting the same people to more fundraising events.  So, if you are a friend or family member reading this, you can breathe a sigh of relief!  We are crossing our fingers and hoping that it is a success.
We hope to come up with some other great ways to raise money as we continue through our journey.  Perhaps we can use our newly polished garage sale sales skills on ebay and craigslist.  We have a long way to go to the final cost of the whole process, but we have time and we will keep working at it.  If you are reading this and you have already donated to us in some way, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!  I am still trying to figure out some way that I can repay everyone who has helped us.  I don’t think that anything I can do would be good enough because you are helping us add another child to our family.  How can I even come close that?

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered!

Today was the day!  I hand delivered all of the paperwork that we have been working on over the past month and a half to our agency.  I have been looking forward to this moment since we started working on the mile-high stack of papers.  Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite a mile, but it had to be close! 
Before dropping everything off, I went to Kinkos to make copies of everything we had done.  I watched as our life in paper went through the copy machine.  There were birth certificates, our marriage certificate, driver’s licenses, social security cards, tax records, shot records for our dogs, the answers to every question about our past asked by the agency, and bunches of papers that we had to sign agreeing with this and granting permission for that.  I then went through the packet of paperwork to make sure everything was there…again.  I think I may have done that ten times before actually handing our hard work over.  I am not sure why.  If something is missing, I can always add it later.  Yet, it was important to me to have it all there and to hand everything over in one big chunk. 
I walked the paperwork in and handed it to the woman at the desk.  I met this woman once before when I came into the agency.  Due to this previous encounter, I knew that she was new.  Do I dare hand over everything about our lives that we have spent so much time compiling to a new employee??  Do I have a choice?  It looked like she was the only one there at the time and I certainly wasn’t going to demand to wait for someone else.  I gave the large manila envelope to her with some hesitation.  But…now… IT IS DONE!!!!!
As excited as I am about this step, it still can’t manage to escape the anxiety that I seem to experience in every step and stage of this process.  We are really doing this…we are really doing this!  I have excitement and anxiety about that.  My anxiety comes from the money, the uncertainty of the unknown, the worry of how our future child will feel about this whole adoption thing.  But, we ARE going to be parents again and we are now closer to that!  I couldn’t be more excited about that!

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Our Family Story Through Photos

As a follow up to my last post, our formal application has been approved!!!  Yay!!!  We now move on to the next phase of approval in which they meet with us as a couple and individually to discuss our life and find out more about our family.  They also do a homestudy to make sure that our home is safe for children.  Considering that we already have a child, I would certainly hope we will pass that!  So, it looks like one hurdle has been passed and we can begin worrying about the next one.  Now on to the topic of the post.
If you had to tell the story of your family with pictures, what photos would you use?  Would you have enough pictures to tell the whole story?  For our adoption, we need to do just this.  We need to tell the story of our family in a photo book.  This book will then be shared with birth parents who are making an adoption plan for their child.  Birth parents will be shown the photo books of all families who match their preferences.  The birth parents also have to match the preferences selected by the prospective adoptive families.  After reading the Dear Birth Parent letters and looking over the photo books, the birth parents make a decision about which family would be best for their child.  Obviously, this photo book is a pretty important project to a prospective parent like me.  The fact that I need to start gathering pictures together for this book enters my mind regularly.  Have I started doing it yet?  No.  Every time I think about starting to look for pictures I stop because I have this fear that I am not going to find “the right” pictures.  I think about fun times that we have had together that I would love to include in our book.  Then I remember, we were having too much fun to take pictures!  I would think about the camera later and say to myself, “Aw, we didn’t take any pictures…oh, well.”  I never realized how helpful those non-existent pictures might have been in the future!  I also know that as I start looking through the pictures I will run into a problem with any pictures taken after our daughter was born.  Pictures of my husband and I together, just as a couple, suddenly disappear.  Our pictures are either of our daughter or of one of us with our daughter.  So, I am sending a plea out to friends and family, if you have any pictures of Nick and I together please e-mail them to me!  I will also gladly take any good pictures of all three of us or even individual pictures.  The more pictures I have to choose from, the better the book will be. 
Even though I am a little worried about starting this project, I am excited about it as well.  Not only will this photo book help us adopt a child, but it will also be a really nice book for us to keep.  I might even think about making a photo book about the story of our family if we weren’t adopting, just to have.        
In addition to the photo book we will also submit a Dear Birth Parent letter.  In this letter, three pictures are included.  The letter will be uploaded online so that Birth Parents can look at it just by going to the agency’s website before even coming in.  It was suggested that one of our pictures be a video montage of pictures set to music.  The woman from the agency said to make sure that the song we pick is current and that it would appeal to people in their teens and twenties.  I wanted a song that was upbeat so I am thinking of using “Brighter Than the Sun” by Colbie Caillet or “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson.  The Colbie Caillet song has started to be played on the radio so often that I am not sure I should use it, but I am not sure how well known the other song is.  I am hoping that at 34 I am not that far out of touch with “current” music that would be enjoyed by people in their teens and twenties, but if I am, please tell me!  Any input on my choices would be appreciated and feel free to offer different song options!

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Is "Good Enough" Good Enough?

I have always felt pretty good about my life.  I rarely questioned whether we were like “everyone else”.  Instead, I pretty much assumed that we were.   I figured that the home lives of our friends were a lot like ours.  Sure, my husband and I have arguments every now and then.  Yes, I lose my patience with my daughter sometimes and need to walk away or give myself a mommy time out.  I am pretty sure this happens to most spouses and most parents from time to time.  Even with these imperfections, I was confident that my life was “normal”.  Entering the paperwork and home study phase of the adoption process, I would have to say that even the most confident person would feel anxiety having someone else judge you and your worthiness of having a child.  Suddenly, my assumption of being like everyone else doesn’t feel so secure anymore.
In mid-September my husband and I went to the information meeting for our adoption agency.  We received a thick envelope of paperwork that we needed to fill out.  Along with the paperwork, we had to get our fingerprints done for an FBI background check, get physicals for ourselves and our daughter, and submit our employment records for our current jobs.  Being a person who likes to get things done quickly, I happily tore into the paperwork the next day.  However, my progress was stalled when I stumbled upon what I would call the “difficult questions” section.  I knew that they would have to ask personal questions, but I didn’t realize it would start in the initial paperwork.  People who have already been through the process will probably tell me that the difficult, personal questions have just begun.  The first question that caused me to pause was, “How often do you and your spouse argue?”  I really have never had any reason to keep track of how often we argue.  And furthermore, what would be a “normal” amount of arguments to have in any given period of time?  The next question was, “What are the major areas of conflict in your relationship?”  Here we ran into a disagreement.  I wanted to just put a couple of things that we argue about more regularly.  That was my interpretation of “major areas of conflict”.  My husband had a different interpretation.  During this process I was thinking that they should include a question saying, did you get into an argument while answering this questionnaire?  Luckily, we did get through it fairly well without too much disagreement, but I wouldn’t call it easy!
I am still working through a lot of this paperwork and I find myself asking am I good enough?  Is my husband good enough?  Is my marriage good enough?  Is our house safe enough?  Are our finances good enough?  Is “good enough” good enough?  Now, instead of assuming that we are like everyone else, I am picturing these perfect-beyond-belief people who are applying to this agency.  I am imagining that next to them our flaws look ridiculously huge and there is no way that they will approve us.  Then, I think about my life from my old vantage point.  I realize that we have a happy, healthy, well-adjusted daughter as proof that, even with our flaws, we are able to provide a good home for another child.  I think that we will probably be approved and then I will move on to be neurotically worried about the next aspect of this process.
In my last post, I said that adoption gives me hope and allows me to take control of the situation back.  I still feel this, but it doesn’t mean that the process will be easy.  I didn’t write this post for sympathy or to have people reassure me that we are great parents or that we are “normal”.  I do still think that we have done pretty well as parents so far and I still feel pretty normal.  I wrote it to share the adoption experience.  I am sure there will be unbelievably hard aspects of this process and unbelievably amazing aspects.  I will try to give an accurate description of what it is like to adopt (for us).