Again, since each agency and country is different, your interview will probably look a little bit different but this is how ours went today.

Our social worker did a quick walk through of our house.  It wasn’t very detailed because our county requires separate health and fire inspections which we already turned in.  She did double check for smoke and CO detectors.

She asked the kids to draw a picture of them doing something with their prospective new sibling(s).  PJ drew all of us plus 2 (or 3) kids in Van-Go.  Mia drew us celebrating with balloons, and Ty just drew Mia.  Along the way, she asked each of the kids how they felt about adoption and if they would prefer a sister or brother.

As for Patrick and I, she asked

• why we wanted to adopt
• what our strengths and weaknesses were as parents as a couple
• what our expectations were for after the kids were home
• what our education plan was
• how they adjusted to the last adoption
• how our families, friends, and church community responded to our adoption news
• what our support network looked like
• if we kept weapons, drugs, and/or fire arms
• what our biggest parenting challenge has been so far
• how we felt about birth order (since we said we would be open to disrupting ours)
• how we respond to unexpected changes in life

For whatever reason, I was a little nervous about our visit (even though we’ve been through it before) but I shouldn’t have been!

For our purposes, I’m going to define the key words like this:

Strong-willed: Thrives on conflict.  Has difficulty obeying right away…ever.  Always fights to be “right.”

From a hard place: A child who was abuses/neglected, had a stressful prenatal or birth experience, has had multiple primary caregivers.  These children have deep-seeded insecurities that are often communicated through acting out and whose brains do not process high-level, cause-effect discipline in a way that it modifies their behavior.  In fact, traditional discipline may exacerbate negative behavior.

If you can identify with these terms, what has worked or is working for you?  Books, techniques, websites, forums, therapies? 

Ready, set, comment!

If you bake out all the collagen from a bone, and tap it with a mallet, it shatters.

The Pilgrims built rectangular houses out of lumber.

The Wampanoags built dome-shaped houses with large pieces of bark as walls.

In the midst of keeping up with schooling, we’ve been finishing the last of our paper chase.  We were assigned a home study social worker today which means we’re finally moving forward!  We have more physical to turn in and then some dossier paperwork to complete.

• Autobiography for each parent
• Birth/Death certificates for all household members
• Marriage certificates and divorce decrees
• Verification of employment
• Most recent copy of 1040 tax form (pages 1 and 2)
• Reference letters (usually 3 or 4)
• Guardianship statement (states who will receive custody if something happens to you)
• Financial statement
• Recent pay stubs
• Home sanitation survey (inspection by health department)
• Complete driving record
• Home fire inspection
• Medical reports for all adults and children living in home
• FBI and state police clearances
• Child abuse and child support clearances

To date, we are about 80% of the way through this list.  The end is near!

You’d think since we’ve adopted before that we wouldn’t be daunted by our second paper chase, right? Wrong.

Korea’s process is drastically different than most other international programs because the family does not adopt in-country.  Instead the trip is pretty much to just gain custody of the child.  I guess, the U.S. agency actually gains custody even though the child is placed with the family.  In any event, the family officially adopts in a U.S. court and after a minimum of 6 months.  All this to say there is no dossier in Korean adoptions.

Ethiopia is more like what I understand the process to be in countries such as China and Russia.  The family must submit a dossier to the country and that country’s court makes the final decision about whether to place a child with that family.  For reasons you can probably imagine, all (or most) documents in a dossier have to notarized on a local level and then certified at a state level and again on a national level by the State Department.  That means we even have to find a notary to go with us to witness our physician signing off on our medical form.  Since we have 4 adults in the house, this can get pretty tricky and time consuming!

Until a couple weeks ago I had no idea you could hire mobile notaries…Google it.  For documents that don’t require a mobile notary, check your bank.  Ours notarizes documents for customers free of charge.  Also, our agency recommends that the notary’s commission does not expire for at least 2 years at time of notarization.

It’s really my goal in life to never be “that” person. Since having kids, I strive to not be “that” mom. You know the one who thinks her little angel can do no wrong, or the one who packs a lunch for her kids wherever they go because they only eat organic/local, or the one who is always asking you to watch her kids but never has the time for your, or the one who has snotty, whiny, misbehaving rugrats having a major case of the “gimmes” at the grocery store. Sorry if I stepped on any one’s toes there.

I admit, the motivation to never be “that” mom is really pretty selfish but it is what it is.

Enter Ty. 

He spent his first 6 months walking around on a leash.  Yup, I was that mom.  I couldn’t even trust him to walk from our van to our front door.  He spent many a visits to the library running to the end and throwing a tantrum because he couldn’t explore freely like the older two.  I was that mom with a screaming, misbehaving toddler.  I hated it.  I could imagine people thinking, “Can’t that woman get her child under control?” because that’s what I would have thought.  Before Ty.  I felt like I wanted to wear a sandwich board that read, “This child has recently been uprooted from the only family he can remember–a family he loved.  He has switched languages and cultures and was born 15 weeks early.  Cut him (and me) some slack.  Just look at my other children and please don’t categorize me as ‘that’ mom.”

At a recent training for our current adoption, we got an excellent article from Empowerd to Connect entitled, “Ten Questions for Parent Preparing to Adopt or Foster.”  After our experience with Ty, the questions hit me square in the gut.

5.  Are you willing to be misunderstood, criticized and even judged by others who do not understand your child’s history, the impacts of that history and how you have called to love and connect with your child in order to help him/her heal and become all that God intends?

6.  Are you prepared to advocate for you child’s needs, including at school, church, in extracurricular settings and otherwise, in order to create predictablility and promote environments that enable your child to feel safe and allow him/her to succeed?

7. Are you willing to sacrifice you own convenience, expectations and desires in order to connect with your child and help him/her heal, even if that process is measured in years, not months?

Boy, I wish someone had asked me these questions before we adopted the last time.  Or maybe it’s better they hadn’t.  I might not have run screaming in the other direction like Jonah and missed out on all this growing and stretching God had planned for me.

Today was another perfect example. 

We have VBS at our church this week.  Ty is not allowed to have chocolate because of the way it affects his behavior.  For the past couple weeks we’ve restricted gluten as well to see if it’s a factor.  Because they’re not allergies, I forgot to list them on his form.  As much as it pained me, I was totally “that” mom on Monday when I dropped of his special gluten-free, chocolate-free snack with him and politely asked the group leader to make sure he only ate what I had provided.  It was even more painful when I explained it wasn’t an actual allergy but was behavior-related.  I could feel the guy rolling his eyes on the inside. 

Today (Day 4), I dropped off his snack as usual except today they didn’t use it for some reason.  Ty was super-excited when I picked him up to announce that he had OREOS for snack.  Seriously!?!!?  We were doing so well.  And OREOS!?!?  Couldn’t they have slipped up on Goldfish day? 

So I sit him down at our volunteer lunch (like I have every other day this week) with a bowl of raspberries for him to eat while I get our main course.  I had my back turned for less than 2 minutes and he had put a handful of mulch into the berry container and then proceeded to wash the berries off in his siblings’ lemonade cups.  The rest of the afternoon was downhill from there.  The human part of me wanted to make him “pay” for his bad decisions.  How dare he do that?  I wanted justice for the older kids who had done nothing wrong to deserve to miss out on lemonade at lunch.  Because of his background, he does not respond to high-level, cause and effect discipline.  Even though I wanted to push him away because I was so angry at him, he really needed me to spend extra time with him so he didn’t have any other opportunities to misbehave while the chocolate wore off and so my connecting to him would help him re-regulate and process why eating an OREO had been a “thumbs down” decision.  It meant I wouldn’t get to decompress after VBS while the kids played quietly together.  It meant he had to be glued to my side while I gave him my almost-undivided attention because he has even more trouble self-directing when he’s on chocolate.

When I drop Ty off tomorrow, I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll reiterate Ty’s snack policy.  It’s the battle of pride versus setting my child up to have a “thumbs up” kinda day.

Lesson learned?  Sometimes you just have to be “that” mom. 

If you’re planning on adopting (especially toddler or older), you will have to be “that” mom.  I’d encourage you to check out all the resources at Empowered to Connect.  They have been a life line to us.

Road #2: The president of the non-profit with which we are heavily involved returned from Ethiopia in February with a huge burden to minister to a Jewish community with a Messianic Rabbi in the heart of Addis. Grafted Families/ICARE will Lord-willing play an active part in supporting his community (especially in their care for their orphans and widows).

Road #3: Welcoming Angels’ pilot program was with kids from Ethiopia.  As event and donation coordinator, we had a lot of interaction time with all the kids and they stole our hearts!

With all the Ethiopia buzz in the air, we were feeling pretty certain that our next adoption would be from Ethiopia.  Our interactions with AWAA during Welcoming Angels gave us lots of opportunities to get to know their staff and their philosophy.  We knew an Ethiopian adoption through AWAA was probably in our future but we weren’t sure when.  Then we went to Summit and felt God’s calling to continue to walk outside of our comfort zone as we sought to care for orphans around the world.  We came away with lots of ministry ideas but also a specific personal calling.

Then, Patrick said something along the lines of “Let’s see what it would take to bring a sibling group home from Ethiopia.” 

And our second adoption journey began. 

To date we have submitted our pre-app, our application, and received our acceptance into AWAA’s Ethiopia program.

All updates will be filed under Adoption Updates if you want to follow along.

We’ll also post an adoption timeline on the right all the way at the bottom.

So yesterday, 2 years ago, Ty took his first steps onto American soil.  The crazy thing?  He’s still spent the majority of his life in Korea.  While, he’s come a long way from those first harrowing days in our hotel (where he cried/grieved 90% of the time and could occasionally be distracted to feed Patrick), I never imagined he’d still have so far to go after 2 years home.  But then again, he’s only been here 2 years and he was in Korea for 2 1/2.  Crazy.

One thing that went exactly as we hoped is that PJ and Mia embraced him.  No questions asked with unimaginable grace and patience given.  He’s definitely one of them.  This was taken less than a week home in early May 2009.

Looking back through pictures, I regret not taking more pictures that told the whole tale of those first 6 months. I’m a visual girl after all. But it is nice to know that even though my memory tells me those months were so trying, there were so many happy moments worth capturing on film digital camera sensor.

Ty’s been going once a week since September and loving it!!! I’m so glad we chose to do it and not just because I get 2 whole hours of “me time” every week. It’s been a great gradual entry to group learning and socialization. Ty has learned so much (he actually raises his hand to talk at home now) and we’ve learned that he can function is a group setting…at least in this scenario.

Today was the end of the winter session and he got to do a little routine and recieve his A-W-E-S-O-M-E ribbon.

Backstory:

Two years ago (or so), Patrick and I envisioned our church getting pysched about orphan care by participating in an Ethiopian host program.*  Turns out there were none to be found and we didn’t feel called or equipped to start one so we shelved the idea and worked on other things like Grafted Families.

*Orphan host programs give older, healthy, international orphans a chance to come to America for 4 to 8 weeks.  While the stay is beneficial in itself, the ultimate goal is for these children to find families.  The hosting experience gives them and their plight lot of exposure (almost 80% find families).  In addition, it takes some of the “scary” out of older orphans and puts a face to a staggering statistic.

Fast forward to last June.  We receive a call from Patrick’s college roommate’s sister.  Are you still with me?  She had heard our names from a mutual friend in orphan care (who had no idea we had a heart for Ethiopian host programs).  She called to tell us that she had just been hired by AWAA to start an Ethiopian host program in Maryland and would we help?!?  Don’t you love when God shows up that way?!?

Needless to say, we dove right in.  So here we are.  Five children are coming to Maryland (only one to our church) in April and we need your help.  The families are partially funding the trip with help from AWAA.  We want them to be able to do some activities with the children while they’re here without incurring extra expenses.  Plus we want to send stuff back to their orphanage.  Plus…well we have a wish list.  That’s where you come in.  If you have a heart to support this program and these families, please click the image below to peruse the list.  Thanks in advance!