January 4th ...

is a big day for us!  The kids both have dentist appointments, and also we'll (hopefully) find out that our adoption has been finalized in Ethiopia.  It will all be over by the time we wake up that day, and we're hoping to get a call from Gladney that we are officially Ruby's family.  If so, we will post lots of adorable pictures on the blog so that you can meet her.  And then we get ready to travel!  Keep your fingers and toes crossed for us.
thanks.

New Year, New Resolutions

With only about a week to go before our court date in Addis, Matt and I are starting to get freaked out over all of the changes coming in our lives.  At this point, we've programmed our boys to essentially care for themselves.  They know not to wake us up early on the weekends, they can make pb&js for themselves, and more or less get themselves dressed (sometimes in shorts when it's snowing outside, but still).  We are also fairly confidant that they are not going to accidentally ingest coins, drown in the bathtub, fall off the top of the slide, or run away from us in the grocery store (okay, they still do that, but I can always hear them several aisles away due to their noisiness).  Anyway, it will be a shock to the system to go back to all of that, plus diapers, plus naps that need to be taken, plus bringing snacks around with us, plus a million little things that I've probably forgotten about.  But, truthfully, we can't wait to have her home.  As a major bonus, the orphanage reports that she sleeps really well all night.  The dreadful sleep habits of #1 and #2 were a large part of the reason that we decided to adopt a baby rather than have another one - we are pretty sure there is a missing sleep gene in our combined DNA.  You probably think that is an exaggeration, but it is absolutely not - ask anyone who knew us between 2002 and 2005.  So with that under her belt, she may move up to being our favorite child right away.  But even if she reverts a little (can you tell that I am worried that it might be our parenting skills, rather than our DNA, that were at fault), we keep thinking up all the things we want to do with her, show her, teach her, and on and on.
And that brings me to my New Year's Resolutions.  I am really going to try to be a better documenter of Ruby's life than I have been of Finn and Gus' lives.  Probably there were blogs when they were little, but I was not in the know about them and I don't think our old computer would have supported the technology.  Instead, I just took lots of pictures, never printed most of them, and generally ignored their baby books.  I know they did lots of things, very cute, exceptional things, but it's hard now to remember what they were.  Parenting for me seems to be an exercise in living in the moment:  I can't ever seem to see the kids as anything other that what they are right now.  Even looking at the pictures, it's hard to remember what it felt like to hold them when they were just born, or to believe that it was really them smiling like that.  It's the same for the future as well - when they are driving me crazy, I can't believe they will ever stop, or when they creep up the stair to snuggle up with us in the mornings, it's impossible to imagine a day when they will be giant things too grown up to snuggle with us.  So, I think maybe if I commit to recording it as it's happening, I can sit around laughing and crying into my soup (because I am remembering things, not because I have been driven totally crazy by my children) when they have all left to live their lives.  We'll see.

Why Ethiopia?

People have asked why we chose to adopt from Ethiopia. The answer is actually mostly a practical one, but of course we now feel drawn to Ethiopia emotionally as well. Matt and I had discussed international adoption a long time ago and knew it was something we wanted to do even before we had Finn and Gus. A few years ago, we began seriously researching our options.


As it turns out, there are not really all that many countries in the world willing to allow foreigners to adopt their children. I think I had the conception that if a country has a bunch of children who don't have families, they would be more than happy to let some nice American family take one off its hands. In fact, most countries have laws that make international adoption very difficult, if not totally impossible. There are a ton of reasons why that is so, which I won't go into here, but the bottom line is that the choices are more limited than you would think.

Anyway, we knew we wanted a girl, and we thought it would be nice to get a child as early as possible so that we could see her go through all those big milestones. Because we knew we wanted a baby (under 2), our choices were more limited. Children adopted today from more common adoption countries such as China and Russia tend to be at least two years old, as countries are making greater efforts to place orphaned children with families within their birth country. 


Additionally, many countries from which an American can adopt require multiple trips to the country and/or a lengthy stay in country around the time of the adoption. I know families who have adopted from Russia who have made as many as three trips during the adoption process, with trips of up to five weeks at a time. Because we already have two children, that amount and length of travel was not an option for us. In contrast, Ethiopia requires only one trip of a one-week duration. So Ethiopia started looking better and better.


Many people have asked why it takes so long to get a baby when they hear that there are so many orphans in Ethiopia. Actually, the process of adopting a child from Ethiopia is faster than almost any other country people adopt from. It takes a long time to adopt from anywhere, because the laws in our country and the laws in other countries require certain things to happen before a child can be removed from his or her country of birth and brought here.
 
Ethiopia, a country of 82 million, has an estimated 6 million orphans. I find that to be a shocking number, and, quite obviously, our adoption of one child from that country is not going to have a major impact on Ethiopia. However, we are not adopting a child for charity, or to save the world. We are adopting because we want another child, and we are so excited that we will get to meet her soon and make her a part of our family.

Nuts and Bolts

So, those of you who know that we are in the process of adopting a baby asking what's going on with it - in fact, many of you have asked "what's going on with the adoption thing." I am starting to see why many people going through this process have a blog about it, so here goes nothing!

Anyway, here's the deal:

After about 8 months of paperwork and waiting for government stamps and fingerprint checks and Department of Homeland Security background clearance, we were finally approved to adopt on April 3, 2009. At that point we went on to the official waitlist of our agency - Gladney, with an estimated wait time of 8 months for a baby girl (0-12 months). 


On November 4th, right before I left to to pick up Finn from school, our caseworker Sara called to tell us that we had been matched with a baby.  We coordinated with Matt and were all on the phone at the same time when Sara emailed us pictures and documents about Shurube.  It was such a wonderful, emotional experience to see our child's beautiful face for the first time, to read about her life, and to find out what she is like.  At the time of the referral, she was 12 months old and had been living in the Gladney foster home for three months.  During that time, she had been busy growing (she gained 7 pounds in 3 months!), meeting new friends, and bonding with her caregivers.  


Once we were finished exclaiming over how cute and perfect she is, Sara explained that we would now have to wait to be given a court date.  Because Gladney has power of attorney for us over in Ethiopia, they can take care of all the legal aspects of the adoption for us before we travel over.  On December 9th, we got a call that our court date will be January 4th!  We were so excited that there are only two months between our referral and our court date, since many families wait much longer.  Of course, we have to be prepared that something might happen on or before the 4th that would cause a delay, which is not uncommon, but we are all keeping every finger and toe crossed that things go well that day.  If they do, Shurube will legally be our child as of January 4th.

At that point - or whenever the adoption is finalized - we will be assigned a travel date, hopefully in February, when we will all head on over to Addis Ababa to meet her and bring her home.  The mailman just delivered Finn and Gus' passports, so we are all set to go and can't wait for the time to come.