Step 1...? Check!

I’m not really sure where “Step 1” started, but we finally feel it’s complete and we certainly feel accomplished and filled with joy!

After arriving home from Salem Friday (which is 2.5 hours away) and having just authenticated several of the last (of the last) documents, we received the final USCIS document in the mail.  We could have been frustrated, but instead were doing the happy dance in our seats with the girlies giggling away and commenting on how they had never seen us soo excited!  Or maybe the giggling was from their dad's rhythm, or lack thereof, even when he creates his own. ;)

We couldn’t believe it had finally arrived and that it said we were approved for “2 children 0-3 yrs”.  NOW…I know we talked and talked about this...and it was included in the home study but, seeing it written on paper was quite exciting and a bit scary!

Rather than waiting 2 weeks for our next trip to Salem, we sent the document overnight to the Secretary of State’s office to have them authenticate it and overnight it back.

We received it Wednesday and I spent several hours last night scanning all the documents.  The agency needs the originals as well as a complete copy and we have to keep a copy for ourselves to take with us to Ethiopia. I then checked, re-checked, and maybe even triple checked ;) that we had everything notarized, authenticated and ready to send!

We wrote the checks today...(THELARGESTCHECKI’VEEVERWRITTENSECONDTOTHEDOWNPAYMENTONTHISHOUSECHECK!) and FedEx’d it all to the agency…all 3.5lbs.

Our agency will review the documents, then overnight them to someone in Washington D.C., who “get’s up really early in the morning to stand in line...” somewhere for the final authentication. (That’s all I remember about that conversation.)

 
This person better be responsible and treat these documents with the same TLC we have the last 5 ½ months!  Or heads may roll…

 

I’m not really sure how I’m going to spend my time now??  It likely will involve applying for grants (which I’m dreading the paperwork…), fundraising, tracking down what other paperwork we may still need to prepare ie. I received some strange document today regarding Visa’s and something about some paperwork sitting at the Embassy in Addis??  I’m not sure what that’s all about but need to figure it out and I know we need to look into immunizations and what we need in order to travel safely, etc. Not to mention TRAVEL! I need to round up our miles, figure out what we have, what we don't have, and on and on.

I guess besides patiently waiting for a match, we can patiently work through all these to-do's!

Speaking of patience, this may not be my best quality.  Being Type-A I generally know what I want, how to get it and don’t beat around the bush waiting for something to happen for or to me.  Adoption is a different beast however.  It sort of reminds me of my Ironman days and all the preparation I made towards the race. 

Months and months of preparation. Some days not really understanding the why or the when or the how, but knowing that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, it WILL pay off, and it always did. 10 times over.

 

The fight to get there was quickly forgotten by the glory of the finish. 

I think this will hold true in the adoption as well.  Once that baby (or babies :) are in our arms, the months of hard work and constant reminders to be patient with the process for the glory of the finish WILL pay off!

I feel I have handled this fairly well up to this point but I get inpatient and anxious just thinking about the next steps and how I will handle patiently waiting for our match, and then patiently waiting to meet our little girl once we’ve seen her beautiful face.  It makes me inpatient and anxious just writing about it! So I go back to Romans 5:4 – and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

xo ~Angela

Hospitals Schmospitals

Nothing like a little ER visit for hubby, to have time to sit and write. He has not been feeling well for over a week and now we are going on 12 hours of extreme vomiting and other dehydrating activities. 

There have been 7 ambulances arrive since we arrived 3 hours ago and as much as its annoying to have to wait longer because Brandon is not dying, I am thankful for the latter. 

We aren't sure what's going on yet. Could be as simple as food poisoning, the flu or as serious as the Hantavirus as he was exposed and inhaled copious amounts of mice poop several weeks ago and honestly, has not felt or been himself since. 

We are waiting for lab results so hopefully we will know more soon. 

As we wait... we have had a productive week as far as the adoption is concerned.  Let me clarify..as productive as you can at this point. We met with our agency and had them look over the documents we have ready for the Country Dossier. All look great! 

We are still waiting for the one from Homeland Security and apparently the criminal clearance document was sent off to DHS (as if we were adopting domestically) and it should have been sent to us. We will have to request the docs again, pay again and wait...

Frustrating....yes. But perhaps the timing will work out and we will have both documents back at the same time so we can finally move forward. 

Once that's complete the entire Country Dossier will be sent to Washington D.C. for the final authentication. Then translated and off to Ethiopia where we can finally be matched! Our agency said they will need to cut down some wording in the docs for translation as some of the docs are huge. Hopefully this doesn't cause further delays. 

We were talking to our agency about lodging options and where we would stay and it's looking like our agency's guest house may be the answer. For 50$/night we get a nice roof over our heads and 3 meals a day. We can even cook ourselves, which we may prefer as we are not quite sure how to trust the food or food preparation. We may be sending ourselves recurring care packages with an over abundance of oatmeal ;)

I asked about staying close to the orphanage as I mentioned perhaps staying from our first trip for court through  til we can bring baby Haile home. I told him I wanted to be close so we could spend everyday at the orphanage with her. He looked at me funny and said "if you are staying, she will live with YOU!" I began crying! He clarified and said after court (which will be our first week there) she will officially be ours. He said the waiting period after court is for her birth certificate, passport and visa. He said we could basically travel any where with her, meaning any other country! just not back to the states as we need those documents first, in order to get home. 

That is awesome news! Now we are just praying that we travel at a time that won't take a lot of time away from Brandon's girls. Meaning, if its during the school year, we only have his girls every other weekend so we would only have to miss a couple of weekends with them in order to stay in Ethiopia from court date to bringing Haile home. Approx 5 weeks if all goes well. 

That's all for now. I better get back to watching hubby try to rest while we wait for results.   Second liter of saline coming on board now. Please pray for "timing"  with all the adoption stuff and that hubby is not seriously ill right now so we can get out of this hospital and back to it. 

Disclaimer: I am not spell checking or re-reading. So this post is super raw. 

Xoxo -Angela

Little things..

Hello! It's been awhile...

But don't be fooled. Our lack of updates does not equate to slacking!  We have been busy busy preparing for this little one as well as taking some time out to celebrate some important days...like Valentine's Day and mine and Isabelle's birthdays!

We have a bit of a tradition in our house now in making each others birthday cake!  We each place our order (well, I've never really placed an order for mine... ;) but Brandon and the girls place their order and I do my best to make them a cake of their liking - decorations and all!  I struggled with Isabelle's last week as she wanted "Ariel" and not just any ole Ariel, but "Mermaid Ariel".  Do you think you can find Princess MERMAID Ariel in a store when you're looking??? Six stores later and this is what we wound up with ----->

It turned out much better than I thought it would and Isabelle was thrilled! At the end of the day, that's all that matters.  My best memories were of my mom always baking us a birthday cake as kids.  LOVE those memories.  I am happy and honored to pass it on to our girls :)

Last years...

Brandon has jumped on the cake making bandwagon with the two girlies as assistants. You must be careful in mentioning things around here however as I must have mentioned sprinkles at some point and you can see how last years turned out.  Tasty, yet a bit crunchy!  This year there was a little more restraint on the sprinkle application and the frosting did not come out of a can - I was soo impressed! It's fun to see them venture further and further into the baking world and even more fun for the girls to see their daddy bake - who knew a boy could bake?!

This years...

Every holiday that comes to pass we look forward to (hopefully) celebrating with little Haile next year. We are always day dreaming and talking about what we will do and how we will do it with a new little one around….or perhaps two.  Did we tell you that in our official paperwork we said we would consider twins or an older sibling? If not, well…yes we did! Twins would be a handful (to say the least) but soo much fun! We wouldn’t want to split a sibling group up so we would consider adopting both.

We are incredibly close to submitting the Country Dossier for translation and then the official waiting for a match begins!  We are waiting for a document from Homeland Security as well as a Criminal Clearance document. YES, we passed!  We just need the official paperwork ;)  We received a text from USCIS on Friday stating Homeland Security was processing our docs! So those are on their way.

Two weeks ago, we spent a lot of time at the Secretary of State's office in Salem Oregon.  What a treat! As you all know how much we LOVE Salem and always revel in the opportunity to spend as much time there as possible. If you don't know us, that's a joke! The staff was very friendly and helpful but apparently there is a computer system they look up the notaries in to confirm they are valid (ie authenticate them).  They do this FOR.EVERY.DOCUMENT. They struggled for about 2 hours with one document and to make a very very long story short, we had to order the document for a THIRD time and take it back this past Friday.  Luckily they were able to authenticate the document this time.

All in all, we have 27 of the 31 required documents authenticated.. A little fun fact for you…. Oregon charges 10$/document for authentication, vs 2$ per document in Vermont.  We had one document from Vermont. lol This doesn’t include the authentication in Washington DC that will happen after we submit all of these and before the translation I mentioned above. Confused yet? :) Whew! I'm surprised I made it through the paper maze.

We have been busy raising money with our vacation rental. We are happy to report we were full 23 of the 28 days in February and are booked all but 1 night this month! We could not be happier and feel soo blessed. It's really making a difference and we’re having so much fun meeting different people from all over the US.

We are 14% to goal in our fundraising! We are soo thankful to everyone who has donated time, money, prayers, and advice during this journey! We certainly couldn't get through it all without you!.  It may seem little to you, but every little bit is HUGE to us!

We are working on a few others things as well. We will be in the Portland area March 18^th and are setup with a fundraiser at Sweet Tomatoes from 5-8 pm. Sweet Tomatoes will donate 15% of all proceeds from families that bring in our special flyer and have dinner.  Contact me if you would like a copy of the flyer.  Everyone is welcome and we will be there to catch up with a bunch of our friends who we’ve missed the last few months. We'd love to see you there!

We are slowing building credits through airbnb that we plan to use for lodging while in Ethiopia.  We are busy doing research and talking to other families on where they stayed and if staying at someones home vs a hotel is a good idea?  We trust the airbnb process in the states but have never ventured this far from home. We want to make sure we are safe, close to the orphanage as well as the US Embassy. The orphanage is most important as I'm sure we will spend every waking minute we can there!

Airbnb would be a much cheaper way for lodging and hopefully have some of it paid for with these credits. If you are not an airbnb member, you can sign up for free through this link: www.airbnb.com/c/adrake1  You will receive $25 off your first $75 stay, as well as airbnb will give some credits to us!  If you plan on taking a vacation, check the site out. We've traveled all over the US and had excellent experiences and so far as a host, we've met wonderful, caring, tidy people!

I have a secret little prayer (well, not so secret any longer) but that we wouldn’t have to travel twice. Generally for an Ethiopian adoption you travel twice.  First to meet your child and work through some of the court paperwork, then a second time to bring them home.  There could be a 3 month period in between. :( As I hear more stories of families traveling once and having the entire process only take 6-7 weeks I keep praying perhaps we can travel once and stay the entire time from beginning to end.  I don't want to miss a beat with this little girl. She is going to grow up too fast as it is!

Obviously we will need grace where work and family schedules are concerned, as well as finances, but if it’s meant to be I know it will happen! It would likely save us a lot of money in the long run with saving on two round trip tickets.  I keep getting a pit in my stomach when I think of traveling once to meet her and then having to leave her until we are allowed to come back and bring her home. Prayers please.

I don’t know if I’m just becoming more aware, annoyed, or what, but there have been a lot of blog posts and other negative things flying around about Ethiopian adoption lately.  It's difficult not to want to read it all, or research every little tid-bit but it's also difficult to comprehend how a few people have become experts in an area that is difficult to navigate much less understand every idiosyncrasy of the Ethiopian government. At some point you have to trust, and not allow yourself to go crazy trying to discern everyone's comments and experience(s), or lack there of.

We're trying to be wise, then practice patience and leave the rest up to God.

xoxo ~The Drakes

Black and White

The last couple weeks have been a whirlwind of traveling, paperwork, home studies, paperwork, getting healthy, paperwork, 10hrs of adoption training, paperwork, fundraisers, paperwork, visiting with friends & family, paperwork, building community relationships, paperwork, then BAM, two+ feet of snow to stop us in our tracks. 

Thank goodness. We needed some time to reflect...

There are a lot of things going on in these minds but mine keeps going back to one subject that was brought to our attention during our training a week or so ago; Multiracial Adoption.

Something they said, hit me really hard: "the (white) majority doesn’t think anything is racist; the (Black) minority thinks everything is racist..." 

Really?!

I'm still not completely sure how I feel about this statement, a delicate subject, but a reality to many.  I would be ignorant to not give it some thought and look for some guidance given I'm about to bring a minority into a majority household.

We don't see color when thinking of this baby girl, so you could imagine my shock. Perhaps we do see colors...but they're all lovely red and pink hearts and colorful rainbows! Black and White never entered the equation.  All we see is a little girl who will have needs, wants, and soon enough, hopes & dreams of her own.

 As we continued through the training there were of course more bold statements to ponder and solidify my fear...You may be surprised to find that there was a certain sense of entitlement that you were not even aware of until it is suddenly in question.

Me?! Entitled? Because I am white...?!

This particular choice to adopt brings issues that before have been out there, right inside your home and right inside your relationships. If your child is black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or Middle Eastern, you may find it brings some very uncomfortable issues and drops them squarely in your lap, up close and personal.

Boy howdy, I'm trembling....

Whether you consciously signed on for it or not, you may now find yourself called on to be one of those courageous people breaking down that big wall.

Little ole me? How? My friends and family are all white -- I live in Central Oregon for goodness sakes -- the whitest of the white.  Where will I find mentors? How will I advocate? How will we expose little Haile to children of her own color so she doesn't feel alone? Do I really need to...?? Because I.DON’T.SEE.COLOR!! <stomping my feet>

And 1 Samuel 16:7 says..."The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Isn't that true?  I believe it. My husband believes it.  How could anyone not believe it?!

Will she still feel alone? In a house full of love? How is it possible that she may only see White?! How will I learn the right response when someone looks at our family and little Haile notices a question in their eye or a feeling of nonacceptance?  

It's on my heart & stuck in my head!  Never did we think we would have to deal with discrimination against our precious daughter.  I'm not worried about the many things parents worry about...providing for her, getting up at night, having a loving & supporting husband, working through bonding, trusting & attachment issues after adoption or any of those BIG things! <stomping my feet> I know and feel confident we have the resources & support to work through these things. But the first time someone raises their eyebrow to our family because our little girl is not our same color I’m contemplating how to tame my inner red-head!

I know its all fear and in time it will dissipate.  I'm just scared I won't have the proper reaction.  It's been made clear that no reaction is not an action!  This isn't something you can ignore like your 3 year olds tantrum. You must address it so little Haile knows she is accepted, loved and valued no matter her skin color.  This is her identity.  Silence is agreement.

I try to reflect and have confidence in having dealt with similar issues through step parenting, but all seem minor compared to this. You know... Working with little girls whose families are broken by divorce isn't easy but you can relate, and you try hard to show they are accepted and not abnormal.

It's easy to show examples when you're surrounded by blended families being the divorce rate these days. Sad but true. But we're not dealing with issues of color here.  Families who look at us think Brandon's girls are mine.  It's interesting however...I'm always quick to correct them;  “they are my "step daughters”.  Thinking I’m honoring them and their own mother. Maybe I'm already making a colossal mistake on their identity and making them feel different. Good grief. I need to stop thinking about all of this. It just keeps getting deeper and deeper...

Please pray for wisdom and peace in my heart and mind.  It's messy.

xo - Angela 

Our backyard.  Beautiful. Not messy.