It starts...

I got an email this morning that our little girl is officially our "personal referral"!! This means that nobody else can adopt her while we work to gather documents for our dossier, complete our home study, and get USCIS approval. The tricky part is that we only have 90 days or she goes back on the shared list and anyone can adopt her again. How on earth we are going to get everything done in 90 days is beyond me. I have sent every email I can and now I just have to wait on some answers. I'm hoping to get responses by tonight then I can begin calling to request documents! (One benefit of being in a time zone 7 hours ahead is that I can do things in the evening when it's convenient for me and it's still the middle of the day in the states so everything is actually open!) I'm trying to treat this as methodically as I can. We're still not 100% convinced that we will be able to adopt her, so I have to hold a shred of doubt or I risk my world caving in if it won't go through. Getting sleep over the weekend was hard enough! Once we get the I-800A approved, we will be able to breathe a sigh of relief and know that we made it through the major hurdle! Here's to hoping governmental agencies are cooperative and VERY quick!! (We may need more of a miracle yet!)

Preparing for battle.....

We might have a problem. Our next step involves a large sum of money to the agency for their services. While the money itself isn't a problem, D is worried that we are going to pay a lot of money and THEN somewhere along the process get denied because we live in Germany. This would leave us in the same situation we were in, but with a LOT less money as it is not refundable. (In our situation, they might be willing to make an exception, but we don't want to take the risk) Anyways, I tried to double-check that we will be ok and the answer was that we should check with US Dept. of State or Germany. I asked our home study provider and she agreed that it would be much better to get Germany's blessing before we proceed. She said there's a chance that we could do the entire process with no problems, but that it's a small chance. So, she is going to try to contact some people in Germany. I am not sure if I should try or if that might just make things worse if they keep saying no and become unwilling to hear me out. I may need to call the US Dept of State and explain how basically every expat in Germany (and from the sounds of it, possibly most of Europe) has been neglected as we live in limbo. Host countries won't let us use their agencies because we aren't fluent or aren't citizens, yet they won't let us use US agencies because in their rules-based system, there's no room for that option. The system is so frustrating I could scream! If things weren't so chaotic at home right now (not having a working van might be the biggest stresser there is!!) I might be willing to call and harass as many people as it took to overhaul the system because this is just ridiculous and everyone I have talked to agrees! The Hague Convention might be the worst thing that happened to international adoption. There's no benefit to it being this way! Just a lot of harm done, mostly to the children who desperately need the love of a family! I will not give up. This is FAR from over! God told me to bring her home and I will do that, with or without Germany's help. (Though, if they would be so kind as to give us a simple letter, it would make things SO much easier!)

To be continued.....

Good times all around!

A lot has happened lately. Yesterday, my sister's adoption was finalized! The first thing they did was to pierce their new daughter's ears. So appropriate!! I believe they also painted her fingernails and toenails for the first time, but I didn't see proof of that, so perhaps she wouldn't cooperate for that.

Today is L's 4th birthday! She was SO excited this morning when I told her that today was finally her birthday! (She started thinking every day was her birthday more than a month ago and finally decided her birthday would never come because I had to say no so often) Of course, this poor child will have to wait to have her party again this year. Last year, she was sick the day of her party so it had to be postponed nearly a month! This year, I still haven't received my package with everything I needed to make her invitations. (Thanks, Hurricane Irene for assisting with that, BTW!) She and N will probably have a joint birthday party. She wanted Minnie Mouse and fortunately I went with a gender neutral scheme of red with white dots. I can easily modify it for Mickey/Minnie and they can both have a fantastic party! L will not want to share the spotlight, but N will be happy with balloons and cake, so he won't take much more than he would if it was just her party anyways. I'm hoping my package arrives soon so I can get crafting! :-)

In perhaps my favorite news of all, we started the process of adopting a little girl!! I found her while browsing through the waiting children lists that I look through. It was love at first sight! Except that she's in C, the country we were told we can't adopt from. I tried to move on and I thought I had moved on, but God told me that we needed to get her. He reminded me of the parable of the lost sheep and basically said that we should do whatever it took, even if that meant I would have to move back to the states for the process leaving D behind. DJ, L, & N would probably come with me, though I hated the idea of taking DJ & L out of Kindergarten and having them forever lag in German because of it. So, there was the possibility of my taking only N and leaving DJ & L with D. As I emailed my agency contacts, I was not getting great responses. D would have to be with us in the states for the entire homestudy process (which is much longer than he could manage). The timeframe of adoption was often cited as being between 14 months and 2 years before I would be able to come back home. But that is too long for a family to be split up. I hated the idea of sacrificing my family and my 3 kids for 1 little girl. It didn't seem right. But, God kept nudging. Torn between doing the "obvious" thing and obeying God against what made sense, I finally got the email I had hoped for! My preferred agency said that we could do our homestudy here as long as the agency who performs it is 100% Hague accredited. Easy!! I have 2 options for that! So, we have submitted our application to them, received the little girl's file, and accepted her as our "referral". I'm not exactly sure what extra steps we will have to take to make this work with Germany, but I'm willing to do it! I'm assuming it will involved a trip to the states while we wait for things to be finalized before we can bring her home. Once she is a US citizen and has a US passport, I don't think Germany can do much about it. I hope! All I know is that God has made it very clear that she is meant to be our daughter. If Germany tries to stand in the way, they will have a very angry "momma bear" and an infinitely bigger "Papa bear" to recon with.