Adoption again

It took me awhile to get here. 

My blog was so covered in dust and ivy—it took some finagling to dislodge the magic keys that connect to the world wide web. It's been awhile. 

But here I am.

And, I want to talk to you about our second adoption.

But when I think about telling you, it's hard to find a good place to start.

Before we moved back to Eastern Oregon in 2012, we were already planning our second adoption. We had called our agency. We had hopes of adopting through Ethiopia again. As time moved along, it became less and less likely that that would happen. Adoptions were barely moving through the system anymore.

About that time—we got a call from a social worker in another state asking if we would be willing to care for the child of a distant relative. We stopped our process through Holt, and started working with said social worker.

Then she stopped calling.

We left messages.

We called...often.

The social worker never got back with us.

I assume that the parents eventually gained custody and that's why we weren't called. But, it was weird. It was hard. We had made a place in our hearts for this kid. It had put a stop in our international adoption, and now that we were getting ready to move we decided to start the process when we were settled in Oregon.

Durame back in 2010

When we got to Oregon, I was still set on Ethiopia, but the doors were closed.

We started the process with our agency again, in January of 2013 found out we were pregnant with twins.

I have to believe that all of this matters. And, that there is a reason for derailment.
Oh how I love these girls!

Silly Roosevelt and Serious Monroe.

Fast forward through lots of heartache and joy. One of the many things I came away with from my time in the NICU with my girls...was a strong desire to adopt a child with special needs. There had been a few precious babies with special needs that roomed with my girls. One of the babies went through quite a large portion of their time with very, very few visitors. 

It was heartbreaking.

We started to dip our toes back into the process again in January last year. Because we are weird and wanted to keep up our odd year birthdays with our kids—I started searching for kids born in 2011. That was it. Harrison was the first picture on the waiting child list with a birth year of 2011.

Harrison in Fuzhou

I know that sounds terrible. It is. I much prefer getting a referral call and just knowing that whatever name your agency utters from the other end...the answer will be, "Yes. Yes, I'll take him!"

I have a strong repulsion for shopping for kids online like they are commodity...but I realize they have often become just that. And, this is the world we live in today.

So, I typed in "2011" clicked on the little sweet face on the screen, and my heart said,
"Go." "Do it." "Fight for this kid."

When I called Holt, I was expecting to shoot the breeze for a few months. While we hadn't wanted to "shop," the process was different than before. There was so much urgency this time around. When I asked for his information, they told me he was about to time out of their system, and we needed to move if we wanted to pursue him.

Yes. We wanted to pursue him. Of course.

So January and February were a flurry of emails, calls, back-and-froths with a doctor at Doernbecher's in Portland, who was helping us better understand his medical condition, and then before we knew it about this time last year we had a completed home study. Everything felt backwards in those beginning days.

We've knocked out fingerprinting, compiled birth certificates, marriage certificates, local and federal criminal background checks, bank letters, reference letters, physical exams and labs, wrote engrossing autobiographies, watched a dozen hours of online parenting classes, our poor social worker endured a home study visit that involved spontaneous puking from more than one of our children (she was a champ), we've visited our accountant a bazillion times to have documents notarized, read way too many emails or not read too many emails and had to embarrassingly admit I wasn't keeping track of important adoption correspondence.

And now, in a few short months, we will bring home our son.