Ok People, I have news....we MAY have found our baby! We still have a long way to go before bringing him home, but he could be the one (and we hope and pray that he is)!
Here's how it went down...
We are adopting through a new program our adoption agency is offering in the country of Kyrgyzstan, part of the former Soviet Republic). The program is different than most international adoption programs in that you, as the adopting parent, need to be very proactive in finding the child you wish to adopt (as opposed to sitting at home and waiting for the agency to find your child and offer you a referral). The agency had an original list of about 30 children of all different ages (3 mos. to 7 yrs) from different orphanages. The list included limited medical information, pictures, and video of each individual child. Once you found a kid you "liked" you could request whatever medical reports the orphanage had on the child along with additional pictures or video. (This is all great info. when going through international adoption). You would then take the information received from the orphanage and send it to a US doctor specializing in adoption medicine from the region you are considering. We chose a doctor from Detroit who has been wonderful, kind, honest, tough, sincere, and even downright harsh, which I totally appreciate. It's too much detail to go into now, but she has been doing this for years and probably saved us from taking on way more than we could handle.
Anyway...back to the story... we viewed the list and saw some adorable children, but decided not to act at the time while we waded through all the decision making (how many, how old, boy/girl, medical conditions, etc).
After a few days of studing pictures and video, we found the boy we wanted to adopt, only to later find that someone else had already begun the adoption process for that particular child. Subsequently, this happened three more times. Frustrations began to mount and we felt like giving up. As some children were being referred, the agency slowly began adding additional children to the list. I spent countless hours on the agency webboard, waiting for a child to be posted. I probably checked the site 12 times a day.
The day I saw our baby's picture I knew we had to have him. I immediately sent a picture to my husband (at work) with no additional information - just the picture. He called me a minute later and said "So...can we have him?"
Fast forward to today and we are now going through the steps necessary to bring him home. We have been told not to get attached yet as things could go wrong. It will be months before we are able to travel to get him and a million things could happen between now and then, but it is downright impossible not to get attached. We need to prepare to bring him home and everything we do, we do with him in mind. His name is mentioned a hundred times a day in this house and Jerret has pictures of the kid posted everywhere! He is currently 5 months old so we will soon begin working on a nursery, buying his clothes, deciding his name, and learning everything we can about Kyrgyzstan.
It is all very scary, but we are already attached.
1 comment:
Great blog, keep on writing! We are also adopting from Kyrgyzstan and it is a small but mighty few who are doing so...congratulations on your decision!! I will keep checking and look forward to reading about your experience. Cindy La Joy www.lajoyfamily.blogspot.com
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