We're going to meet the girls!

The last week has been a crazy blur!

On November 21st, we were asked to travel to Haiti from December 2 - 16th. We had conferences we couldn't get out of, so we asked if we could arrive in Haiti a few days later. It was confirmed on November 22nd that we could book our tickets for December 7th.

I can't believe I am actually going to Haiti to meet Naldje and Melissa. Can't believe it. Here I am writing the blog I've been waiting to write for years.

We are headed to Haiti to meet our beautiful daughters. We are the parents of 6 kids. We have 3 boys and 3 girls. This isn't a dream.

We have exactly 8 days (we need to be done before the conference starts) to book our flights, pack for Haiti, wrap up our year end stuff at the Ranch (that sounded way easier than it is), and get ready for Christmas. Thank God I'm an adrenaline junky.  I can do this!!!

I haven't bought anything for the girls yet. Not one dress or pair of shoes. I couldn't let my heart hope that much. But now I'm standing here like a big dumby with nothing to take over for them. What person in their right mind goes to Haiti to meet their kids without at least a suitcase of stuff? So, with the help of family and friends, I've filled a suitcase with lotion, toothbrushes, cute dresses and hair ribbon and we're off in a little over a week.

Pray for us! Our hearts will be all over the place in the next few weeks. The anticipation before we go is huge, our joy will be overwhelming while we are with the girls, and I can only imagine how sad I'll be when we leave for home without them. Pray for the girls!  They're little hearts will be on a roller coaster too.

I hope to be able to upload a picture or two while we're in Haiti, but there isn't reliable wifi at the creche, so we'll see. You can rest assured that the photos will be off the charts once we're home. I'll comfort myself with blog posts.

This is the exciting stuff!

Absolutely Fantastic News!

We have had great news this week!

Our paperwork has cleared IBESR and we got a presidential dispensation! We are so excited. After months of waiting this is the best news! Our paperwork only took about 6 months to get through both of the offices. That's a real answer to prayer, so, if you're one of the people praying for our adoption, "Thank You!"

We started our Canadian paperwork in March of 2011, so it feels like we have been at this forever, but the end is in sight.

Next steps?

Sit back, smile, hug ourselves and say, "This is really happening." (Up until this week, I wasn't sure).

Pray that our paperwork keeps up the good pace through all the offices it needs to travel through. We still need our paperwork to clear about seven more desks, and it could take as little as six months, or ..... let's not talk about the or...

Travel to Haiti to meet the girls. It looks like we could go as soon as December. (insert extra big smiley face here) While we're there we'll be evaluated by a social worker to see if they think we can bond. I wonder how you act in front of a social worker from another culture to show your bonding abilities?

Look for a very short term part-time job for myself. If we travel to Haiti in December to meet the girls, I should have at least 5 months before they come home that I can work an extra job to help pay for adoption costs.  If anyone knows of a part time job in/around Brantford/Ancaster/Hamilton, I'd have about 20 hours a week that I can work. I'm sure my current boss will give me a great reference :)   (Steve thinks he's my boss)

Try to learn Creole so we can talk to our girls when they come home.

Most importantly?  Pray for these two little beauties!!

I can't even begin to imagine how it would feel to be in an orphanage, have some people you don't know come to hang out with you for two weeks, be told they're you're new parents, then they leave, for about six months. Pray for their hearts, that deep within their little selves will be a feeling of belonging and hope that will be a life long anchor for them. Pray that they'll feel loved. Pray for their transition to Canada. Pray for us, that we'll know how to be good parents to these gifts.  

We hope you'll join in our happy dance with us!  

Beautiful faces

We have new pictures of the girls. Cold weather must be settling in, they are both wearing sweaters.

Our paperwork hasn't excited the IBESR yet, but we are praying that it is moving around from desk to desk in the IBESR. Getting closer to exiting, and on to the next stage.  Pray with us that our paperwork will get processed quickly.

We have a four year old foster boy living with us right now.  It has been nice to hear a happy little voice in our house again.  It's reminding me to petition the Lord that our girls will get home soon.  And has reassured me that we can still do "littles" :)  

I. hate. waiting.

It's a good question, "How's the adoption going?". The answer is always the same, we're waiting. Our file is on a desk, waiting to be read, waiting to be signed, waiting to be passed on to another desk.

When will the waiting be over? Well, in 6 to 20 months, give or take a month. Maybe. Honestly, that's the answer.

I can't fully engage in how sad that is, how long that is. I'm not going there. And then I feel guilty that I'm putting those emotions on a back burner. As if somehow I'm putting the girls on a back burner. But doing every day life with some guilt is easier than doing every day life with overwhelming sadness. I'm not sure if that's an approved coping mechanism, but I'm picking it.

And there isn't a thing I can do to make this go faster. Well, I can pray, and I do pray, but I wish there was something for my hands to do.

So we do awesome family weekends without our whole family. And I don't even know if they'll be here next year. I hope they're here next year.

New Pictures!

No new information, but new pictures!

Yes, we only get one picture a month... and that's the one they chose for Melissa.
I'm glad Naldje looks happy in at least one of her photos!

We have a referral!

We are so excited to let you know that we have a referral for two sisters.

Two beautiful little girls Naldje and Melissa.

Naldje is 4 years old, and Melissa is 2. We know a lot of their story, and we still have lots to learn about them.

There is still a lot of paperwork to happen before these little girls can come home, but we have faces and hearts to pray for.

Pray that the presidential dispensation giving us permission to adopt even though we already have 4 children goes through quickly. Pray that the girls will feel loved and secure while they are waiting to move to Canada. 

It is a strange thing to call two girls who you haven't met yet daughters. Pray for us as we wait for all this paperwork to go through that we'll allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to love these girls even when the outcome is uncertain.  

We hope you'll count down the days with us as we wait to bring Naldje and Melissa home. We haven't been given any sort of timeline, except to say that there is no timeline. I'd like to say it could take as little as six months, but I have this feeling that it could take well over a year.  

Sometime in the near future we'll be heading to Haiti to meet the girls. A Haitian social worker will evaluate whether they think we are a good match with them. Their report will need to be filed with the government, and if we pass that 'inspection' other paperwork will be allowed to move forward.

Look for more updates, as the creche will be sending us monthly pictures and news about the girls.  

Yippee!

That was a bumpy week

There are certain processes you have to follow when you are adopting internationally.

You don't really have any options in following them. They are prescribed and you have to do each one. We've done them, in order, with vigor. So I foolishly thought that meant that we wouldn't have glitches. I knew adopting would take a lot of time, but I hoped that by doing exactly what we were told we would miss missteps. And because we paid a lot of money to professionals to help us I thought most of this would go smoothly, if not slowly.

Early in our homestudy and in our ongoing discussions with the agency handling our adoption we've made it very clear that we wanted to adopt two children. All of our conversations about fees, ages etc have always referred to two children. What we didn't know (and to be honest what I think the professionals involved should have known) was that all of our paperwork would need to refer exclusively to a sibling group in order for that to be the only placement we'd be considered for.

So last week we got a really exciting call...with the words we've been waiting for months to hear..."You have a referral!". In .02 seconds my heart soared. This is really happening, we have a referral!!!!  And then approximately .02 seconds later it dropped as the social worker began to tell me about one little boy. I interrupted him and asked why it was a referral for only one.  He came up with an answer, but basically there were a few reasons, some his fault, some the agency's fault, and for once, not our fault at all.

I didn't let our worker tell us this little guy's details until I talked to Steve about whether we wanted to consider adopting one. Selfishly I didn't want to know the details of a little boy who is waiting for a family, who we might say no to. We did say no. It was heartbreaking. At the moment I feel personally responsible for a little boy being raised in an orphanage instead of in a family. In theory I know that the globe is full of children in desperate need of a family, but this was the first time I got a phone call about one of them joining our family.

This journey is not easy. If we say yes to this little guy, we would not be able to adopt a sibling group at this time, and if we wanted to adopt a second child from Haiti we would need to start all over again. Pretty much from scratch. I have some strong feelings about not having one child of a different race in our family, I want to have two kids who are the same in a sea of different. If money were not a factor, and if this process were faster, I'd take this little guy, and a sibling group in a heartbeat. My home would be filled with children who need a family. But that's not how the system works. It's slow and arduous and ridiculously expensive.

To top it off we have aggravated our agency in this process. They are not as quick as we are to see that they hold a significant  portion of the screw up responsibility. They aren't happy that they have to decline a potential match and explain to the Ministry why it happened.  I'm ticked off because this has eaten up more time and added at least a couple months to the process. I'm ticked off because we've been as clear as we know how to be and we're still in the middle of mess.  I'm ticked off because professionals are being paid to do this for us.

So here we are. Our paperwork is in Haiti and we are waiting for a second referral. Hopefully the next one will be what we've asked for.

From her to not her...

This adoption journey of ours has had a few bumps.

Steve had a radical shift of opinions about our family adopting when he visited Haiti for the first time. A part of his changing opinion was meeting the children in Haiti, and one little girl in particular.  He came home from his first trip to Haiti and hoped that we would be able to adopt a certain little girl.

She is beautiful. It’s hard to know how old she is because body size and development is very different in kids when there hasn’t been consistent nutrition. But she had a sweet little heart and sunny smiley face. 

Steve had been home about three weeks, when I borrowed his phone. He had this little girl's picture as his screen saver. If you know Steve you know that’s a big deal. We were becoming smitten with her in particular. It was her face that was tied to our emotions and our hopes. 

Within five phone calls and a little research on Canadian adoptions we very quickly realised it was really unlikely that we would be able to adopt this little girl. It just doesn’t work that way in Canada and there is very little you can do to work around it.  

So now we had some pretty big questions to work through.

Steve and I spent some time talking about it. We worked through asking if it had to be her or no one. Wondering if we should spend time and effort trying to circumvent the system. Wondering if we were specifically supposed to pursue her. Wondering if we should just quit the whole adoption idea before we really started.  And we decided that it didn’t need to be her. That there are many kids in Haiti who are waiting for a family. 

It was sad, I had rolled her name around in my head, pictured myself loving her, imagined her in our future family photos. 

We moved forward with the adoption knowing that we would be matched with whoever Mission of Tears proposed, and that it wouldn't be this little girl.

When we headed back in 2012 I was excited to see the little girl that had God had used to soften Steve’s heart. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to spend time with her, but I was looking forward to being there. I was surprised that she wasn’t there. She had moved home with a family member.

So dear sweet little one, I continue to pray for you. That the Lord will bless and keep you. That you will be loved and safe. It seems that you won’t be my daughter, but you will always have a piece of my heart. 

And now we are waiting to be matched with our children in Haiti. Our file has been submitted to a creche and soon they will send us pictures and bio's of the children who might be our children.  New faces to love.

  

(A disclaimer for anyone who is familiar with Haitian adoptions…Steve was very careful not to communicate to this little dolly any of his thoughts that we would like to possibly consider adopting her. It wasn’t unusual for Americans to go down to an orphanage as a part of their adoption to select a child, and as a result, many of the kids asked you if you were looking for a child, or if you would be their father.  Steve was way too early in his thought processes, and too unfamiliar with adoption policy, and lets face it, way too smart to be talking to a little kid about adopting them. In fact, he took less pictures of her that the rest of the kids because he didn’t want to show even the slightest bit of difference in interaction with her than the other kids.)

Encouraging News!

I've prayed a lot about how we would fund our adoption.

Just when I was starting to get my head wrapped around how we could make this work, we found out the total cost of the adoption was going to be at least $7000 more than we originally planned for. (There are a lot of costs that are determined in Haiti. You can plan/educated guess ahead, but if costs change, they change. It was very frustrating and discouraging.)

With the last increase in cost, Steve and I began to look fervently for help. We found Abba Canada Foundation.  A ministry that helps to fund adoptions in Canada.

We filled out an application for a grant, and sooner than we expected we heard that they would like to help us with a grant!

We are so encouraged this week!  God sees us and is helping us to bring our children home.

Approved :)

Journal Entry - May 28th, 2012

Our first government approval! The Ministry of Children and Youth Services has said they have no objection to us adopting. We have a letter of approval! Yippee! One down, many to go, but one down!

Now we can start working on finishing up our dossier. Most of the paperwork is already done, but there are some items that are needed for the dossier that we didn't do until we were approved by the Ministry.

A few more appointments, police checks and medical exams and we will have a complete dossier to submit.  

At the moment the Haitian Agency (IBESR) that handles adoption has closed for the summer. There are a lot of things going on in adoptions in Haiti and there is significant room for improvement. This break is intended to give Haiti time to sort out their adoption system, and implement rules that will make them Hague convention compliant.  I hope that Haiti can stay within their time guidelines, and that they actually begin to accept dossiers again in the fall.

Making babies this way is a lot of work....

Butterfly in a Hurricane

Journal Entry - March 21st, 2012

We are on our way home from a short term mission trip in Haiti. It was a great 10 days. I have felt so busy I haven't had time to worry about home much at all. I've missed the boys but have had so much kid time that it hasn't been the same kind of missing as other trips.

I'm leaving Haiti with a heavy heart. Usually I can fix things, or at least address situations, or set the wheels in motion to see some change.

But in Haiti, I feel a bit like a butterfly in a hurricane. There, and able to love for a very short time, but unable to make any significant changes for the kids.

Things I wanted to do, but couldn't? Get A to a doctor for his breathing. See if anything can be done for G's stomach.  Find some significant nutrition for M. Give the nannies the tools to deal with things like chicken pox. Set up a cleaning schedule so the kids could have cleaner places to sleep. Make the kids go to school. Have the older kids help out more. Find a way to give hope to those who aren't being adopted. Be truthful about a hopeful future. Help the older kids learn a skill.

It is really heart breaking to walk away from a child who you know will be hungry, or in pain and there isn't a thing you can do about it today. I know, I know, there are things I can do long term, but leaving a baggie of peanut butter wraps just didn't feel like enough for today.

I loved hearing the kids sing. Breaking out in spontaneous song, to me it meant that happiness still bubbles in their hearts. I love hearing them sing together before bed time. I love hearing their laughing. Bebe had the most delicious laugh, and was such a stinker she had lots of opportunity. I loved cuddling the babies as they fell asleep. I loved hugging the older kids.

Being in Haiti stirred up some feelings in me about our adoption. It has reinforced in me that I can expand my capacity to love. I have been encouraged that a whole range of personalities are lovable. It does make me hope that someone is hugging our little one while they fall asleep. I hope that someone is encouraging them to be kind to each other. I pray that their hope isn't being crushed.

I'm starting to pray that we'll get the special permission we need to be allowed to adopt. That us having four kids already won't limit us from adopting. I pray that this time will go quickly.

Every day they aren't home is a day they are in limbo. I see it in the kids at HCRM, they've been told they're being adopted, but they don't believe it. I don't want my kids to feel like that.

When we get home we need to send a payment to our adoption agency. This is the tipping point for me. I would still really like a sign from God that this is right, but I do feel ready to move on now without it. After spending a week in Haiti, I fully comprehend that we have endless resources. I have the privilege of making my dollar stretch.

On some levels I do wish Canadian adoptions let you choose your own kids. After spending a week with the kids at HCRM and getting to know their personalities I feel like it would be easy to figure out which kids would fit in with our family. I totally get why it isn't a good idea to let families go 'kid shopping' but the selfish part of me sees the benefits of it. Oh well. I'm praying now that the Lord's hand in the selection of our children is evident and strong.

Earthquake Anniversary

Today my mind keeps coming back to my Haitian children.  Today is the 3rd anniversary of one of the days that will always be a part of their story.  A turning point in their life.

There is no doubt that they lost people they loved on January 12th. Did they loose their parents today? Did they loose Aunties? Brothers or Sisters?  

How much of the devastation did they see? What did it do to their little personalities? Did they have to live on the streets until they found a place to live?  

Lord be with them today, give them hope that they have not been forgotten. That we are here loving them and waiting for them. Christina Perri's Loved you for a Thousand Years says it perfectly...

I hope that next year we can spend this day together.  

Be excited!

Journal Entry - March 5th, 2012

So I went out for dinner with Steve and talked about not being sure about this. His response? He's excited about having little people around again, and is eagerly anticipating our new family members. It was really good to hear his positive and and enthusiastic outlook. I'd been spending too much time in my worries and doubts.

I don't want to say he changed my mind but he did help to chase away my nagging doubt. I'd come to the place of deciding that yes, I'm on board to do this adoption, but somehow it was just something I'd resolved to do, I forgot that I should be excited about it. Steve reminded me.

I actually feel like right now it doesn't matter what I say. I don't feel like this is going to happen. I don't know where all the money we need is going to come from.  At all.  We haven't rented out our rental house yet, so that is a huge drain on the finances. How can I be here?  A year in and way further behind than I was when I started? Have we blundered this? I know God is in control, I get that, but have I screwed it up? I don't feel right about sending a check to Mission of Tears if we don't have renters. Mission of Tears is currently waiting for money, and I am stressed out. And to compound it, I feel guilty for feeling like we can't afford it.  We are filthy rich compared to the kids in Haiti.

Steve, Emma, and I are heading out to Haiti this weekend. Emma's friend Kirsten is coming too.  I'm excited about going there and seeing the kids at HCRM.

Steve said it will be tough for him to be in Haiti, to be so near his children and not know who they are, where they are, or how they are doing.  It is a weird thing to think that somewhere out there there are little people who will one day be our children, and we don't know them yet. At least we know they exist. Our kids don't even know we are here, working to get them home.  Putting in time, experiencing things, growing and changing. We're separate for now but hopefully we'll be together soon.