Another Adoption Update

It's been another two months so I figured I needed to update everyone on where we are in the adoption process. I think I'm going to start writing about it more often now. I had to read my last post to remember what I wrote about. Things have changed again - but I think it's a positive change. I wrote in my last note that we had applied to another agency to adopt from Russia. At that time, in March, we believed Russia to be our only option. We are committed to adopting and are willing to go wherever we feel God leading us. We applied to the new agency in early March. There were multiple levels of the application. Not something we had encountered with the first two agencies. As April turned to May we started to get impatient. It was taking forever. During this time, we were able to look on their list of waiting children. These are special needs children that are available. We came across a little 12 month old girl from India who we were very interested in. They reviewed our information to see if we qualified. She had a Limb Difference which was a special need we were open to and developmentally she was doing well. Everything seemed to look good. We told them we wanted to be 'matched' with her and pursue her for adoption. All this happened in a matter of a couple of days. Well, they decided they wanted to contact their people in India to make sure we looked favorable to be approved by the Indian court. Our income was borderline for what they would accept. Well, it came back that they thought because we don't own a home they were worried we would have problems and that they didn't want us to move forward. It was disappointing. We had tried not to get our hopes up but they had a little more than we thought. When we first started looking into her information, I had prayed that God would make it obvious to us either way. If we were supposed to adopt her we wanted to feel completely sure of it, and the same if she wasn't to be ours. So we were thankful that God made it so obvious.

Well, when we found out we couldn't peruse the little girl in India, for some reason it made me start researching countries again. In March we had concluded that Russia was our best option but I couldn't help looking. And the fact that the agency was taking so long to approve us was making me want to research. Well, I ended up finding an agency in New York that can place children from Korea in Texas. Korea is different from most countries because each adoption agency can only place children in a few states. In any other country it doesn't matter where they agency is located, they can place children all over the country. We had looked into Korea before, but had found only two agencies that could place in Texas and both of those agencies were not accepting any new applications because they were so backlogged with waiting parents. Well, I came across this random agency in NY that has some sort of contract with a Texas agency and can place Korean children in Texas. We were cautiously optimistic. We spoke to the agency and decided to apply - our fourth agency! Must be a record. We got a call a week ago Friday telling us we were accepted to the program - just like that. No second or third applications. We're still waiting to hear from the other agency about Russia. The one downside is that they are making us use their TX agency to update our home study for Korea. If you remember, our home study was done for Kyrgyzstan. So instead of having our home study agency updating it to Korea (only costing about $100), we have to actually have a new social worker come out and meet us and go through an 'official' process to have it updated - and for a higher cost. But, on a good note, the same day we applied to the new agency, we also applied for the home study update. They called last Tuesday saying that they had all of our paperwork and were assigning us the social worker. Unfortunately, they were going to have to do our Texas background check again because our was done in mid-January and is only good for six months. They were afraid that USCIS (Immigration) would reject the home study if it was too close to expiration. Luckily she said it only takes 3 days so hopefully they got it back by yesterday (Friday). I was hoping we'd get a call from the social worker by the end of the week to set up our home visit but it didn't happen. Hopefully it will get set up by next week. They said that doing the update should be pretty quick and easy since it only requires one home visit and they can use most of our old home study. Home studies are about 10 pages all about you and your family so it can take a while for the social worker to write. We're optimistic that it can be completed in a few weeks. Getting the home study done is important because we can't get our I-171H (our immigration approval) until USCIS has our home study. Well, actually, they do have our Kyrgyzstan home study right now. We can do one "change of country" for free (thank goodness because it's like $900). The way the USCIS Immigration approval works is that you send in a form (the I-600a for us since we're adopting from a non-Hague country) along with your home study. Then they send you an appointment date for biometrics (a fancy name for getting fingerprinted). We had our appointment last Thursday! Yeah. So now we wait for our approval. The approval comes in the form of an I-171H. We'll have to send this form to Korea with our home study. I'm hoping we can get our change of country form in with our home study soon. Otherwise our approval will be for Kyrgyzstan and I'm afraid it will take longer for another one for Korea. It was really exciting to have our fingerprints this week because it was just another small step forward. All in all, we're feeling optimistic. It's been a while since we've felt this way about our progress. Here are some positives and negatives about adopting from Korea:

1. Less paperwork! In one of my other posts I talked about the dossier. Korea doesn't really have a dossier. Dossier papers have to be both notarized and apostilled. There are usually about 15-20 documents. For Korea you pretty much just send your home study. So easy. One thing that scared me about Russia is that it was on the opposite end - it has about the worst dossier requirements of any country. That just makes everything take longer.

2. A negative about Korea is that when you bring your child home, he/she isn't actually yours. They are officially under the guardianship of your adoption agency. I guess it's like you are sort of fostering them. During the next six months you have three 'post-placement visits' and after they approve everything you can go to a US court and make the adoption official. Every country requirements post-placement visits but the difference is that usually you have already officially adopted the child. This isn't a huge deal necessarily but it may put a snag in us moving overseas. During the first six months you can't move out of the state much less the country. In fact, you have to notify the agency if you are even leaving the state with the child. The good thing is that you can travel overseas during the six months so if we've identified an overseas assignment at that point and want to travel to get things set up we can.

3. The wait for Korea isn't horrible. Of course, that is of today and things in International adoption can change in an instant. Our agency quotes that it can take up to 10 months from the time your paperwork is sent to Korea to get a referral. When we talked to them last week, they told us that though they say "10 months" the recent time frames have been "4-6 months". But they don't want to say that because it's possible to be longer. But even better, they said they recently had a family who was open to quite a few types of special needs (like we are) and got a referral in 1 1/2 months! I'm seriously trying not to get my hopes up. But we are hoping it's under 6 months. We just need to get the paperwork in!

4. Korea has no requirement for owning a home or having ridiculously high income. (Yea!) They do have high medical standards. You may have heard that you actually can't weigh over a certain amount. Luckily we fit into their requirements. Our only worry is if we have to get physicals again (ours were done 6 months ago so they may not be recent enough). Damien's cholesterol and blood pressure were both borderline. They were in the 'normal' range but were close to being high. Please pray if we have to get physicals again that everything will still be normal. Damien has been running about 5 days a week for the past 2 months so hopefully that will help. I take his BP at home and it's normal but close to high (like 137/65)

5. Korea doesn't allow you to specify the gender of your child unless you have two children of the same gender and none of the other. That's us! There are a couple of countries we considered (like the Philippines) but decided not to go ahead because we couldn't specify a girl. If we had two girls, we'd want a boy. If we had a boy and a girl we probably wouldn't care. But, we have two boys so we'd like a girl.

6. Korea only requires one trip to pick up your child. Some requires two trips, some months apart. Which means you get to go meet your child, but have to leave without them and wait an excruciating 3 or 4 months to be able to go back and bring them home. Plus with only one trip we'll be able to afford to bring the boys.

7. One other interesting thing about Korea is that there are no orphanages. All of the children live with foster families. Most people really like this. Orphanages are, for the most part, terrible situations for children. Children can have attachment issues from not getting any love or attention when they are young. The foster care in Korea didn't attract us there. Our desire is to adopt a special needs child who is less desirable and less likely to ever get adopted. It doesn't matter where her background is - orphanage or foster care.

I'm sure there are other positive or negative aspects about Korea, but I can't think of them now. I'm still afraid that something will come up that will disqualify us. Or the social worker or adoption agency will make a mistake and it will take us months to get our paperwork in. But we are cautiously optimistic. I'm beginning to hate the weekends. Why? Well, nothing happens. No one works. Which means our paperwork doesn't go anyway. Mail doesn't come. And this weekend is a holiday! I guess I'll have to wait until Tuesday to see how things move forward.