October Adoption Update

We have completed several of the biggest milestones in the process! Our homestudy was completed mid-August. In mid-September US Citizenship and Immigration approved us as suitable to adopt. And our dossier was mailed off to Colombia in early October.

Now we are waiting for the dossier to be translated, which takes about a month (and costs $3000 - gulp!) After that is done it is sent to Colombia's adoption committee for approval. Next they will send us Jean's referral which we accept then send back to US Citizenship and Immigration for approval. Once that happens we will be approved to travel to Colombia for the actual adoption.

As far as when this will happen, we are not sure. Our best guess right now is January.

PUZZLE FUNDRAISER UPDATE

It has been two weeks since we kicked off the puzzle fundraiser and it is so wonderful to see the outpouring of support for Jean!

We absolutely love how beautiful of a keepsake this will be for him. After we frame it in glass on both sides, not only will Jean be able to enjoy this as a wall-hanging in his room, but he will also be able to see all the names of those who were a piece of his adoption story on the back of the puzzle. Our family will also pray for all who contributed each time we look at the back of his puzzle with him!

After so many years of feeling unwanted, being passed from foster family to foster family, and thinking that he would probably never be adopted, this is going to mean so much to Jean to see how many people - many of whom have never even met him - already love him from afar and want to help him to finally belong to a forever family. We can't wait for him to see it!

Here is what the front of the puzzle looks like:

And here is the progression as puzzle pieces have been purchased over the past two weeks, showing the names of donors written on the backs of the pieces:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3 

Day 6

Note that at this point the word "orphans" has disappeared! That's the whole goal here, right?

Day 14

As of now, about two thirds of the puzzle pieces have sold! We are so very thankful for everyone's generosity.

We are hoping to fundraise $15,000 of the $40,000 we need for the adoption. We are at $6,387, almost halfway there!

If you would like to participate in this fundraiser, each piece is $20. When you donate through our AdoptTogether profile (tax deductible!), we take however many puzzle pieces your donation represents and write your name on the back of the pieces. 

You can choose to buy 1, 2, 5, 10, or however many pieces you like. When you make your tax-deductible donation, please put a note for how you would like your name to read (i.e. "Jane Smith" or "The Miller Family"). If you donate anonymously online, but would like to have your name on the puzzle, please email or message me. If you prefer to send a check, let me know and I'll give you our address.

Thank you again for everything, especially for your prayers for Jean, that the process be speedy and smooth, and for all orphans, that they may find forever families too.

A Piece of His Adoption Story

Adoption is expensive. International adoption, even more so. This adoption will end up costing around $40,000. We are hoping to raise $15,000 of that through fundraising. The other $25,000 we are fortunately able to cover through Tom's bonus earlier this year and me teaching some extra cooking classes.

We are super excited about this PUZZLE FUNDRAISER! Here's how it works:

I had a 500 piece puzzle made from this design I came up with. We are "selling" each piece for $20. When you donate through our AdoptTogether profile (tax deductible!), we take however many puzzle pieces your donation represents and write your name on the back of the pieces. Once the puzzle pieces have all been sold, we will frame the puzzle with glass on the front and back and it will hang in Jean's room. 

I know Jean is going to love looking at all the names of all those who were a piece of his adoption story, helping to bring him home to his forever family!

You can choose to buy 1, 2, 5, 10, or however many pieces you like. When you make your tax-deductible donation, please put a note for how you would like your name to read (i.e. "Jane Smith" or "The Miller Family"). If you donate anonymously online, but would like to have your name on the puzzle, please email or message me. If you prefer to send a check, let me know and I'll give you our address.

Those who have already donated already have their names on the back of the puzzle! I will post pictures every few days to show the progress.

Here's what we have so far:

I goofed up and wrote one person's name upside-down (sorry Margot!) Thanks in advance for all your help and prayers!

We Finally Get to Tell Him!

The day finally came! The day that we could tell Jean that, contrary to what he thought, we DID want him to become part of our family!

The last couple of summers, it has taken about four months before adoptive families were able to tell their host child that they were adopting them, as they had to wait until they were very far into the official adoption process. Thankfully however, this summer Colombia has decided to allow families to tell their host children as soon as the the process has officially started, with approval of the Letter of Intent. This means that Jean only had to wait one month to find out. Still painful for him (and us!) but much better than waiting four or more months.

In early September we got word that our Letter of Intent had been approved, and that they would inform Jean that we were adopting him just before our next Skype call. We could not wait to finally be able to talk about it with him! I imagined how the call would go and prepared what I would say. We did a test run 30 minutes prior to verify that computer microphones and webcams were all working properly.

At the appointed time, the call came in, but neither Tom or Jean could see the boys and I. They could hear us, but not see us. We could not figure out what the problem was. I called my tech-savvy brother-in-law in Florida and he informed me that Skype had just put out an update, and that if we didn't all have the same version of Skype that might be the problem. Sure enough, my version of Skype was not as up-to-date as Tom's and Colombia's, so I downloaded the update. After installing it, a message popped up saying I needed to reboot my computer. I rebooted and watched the screen turn black, then come back to life with the blue screen. "Wait a minute," I thought, as a message appeared - OH NO!

This was one of those random Windows updates that they don't warn you about, they just do without asking if it is a good time. It was SO stressful and frustrating, the whole time I was worried because it was towards the end of the work day, and I knew that the worker that Jean was with had to leave soon.

Thirty-five minutes later ....

The update finally completed, I was able to be added on to the Skype call and finally we could talk about the adoption! Jean had been told about the adoption just prior to the call, but then he had had to sit through about 45 minutes total of technical difficulty. So our "moment" wasn't quite what we expected it to be!

"So Jean," I said, "I think you know that we wrote a letter saying that we would like you to be part of our family." He smiled. "Does he say yes or no?" Tom asked the interpreter, "Sí, o no?"

Here is the video so you can see for yourself what Jean said:

But there was something else we needed to tell him.

"Jean," I said, "we want you to know that from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to adopt you, but we weren't allowed to tell you. We knew we wanted you to be part of our family before we even met you in person. We so wanted to be able to tell you before you went home. It made us so sad that you thought we didn't want to adopt you, but we had to follow the rules and wait until we had permission to tell you. We want you to be part of our family forever, and we can't wait until you can come back to us!"

And now he knows!

The Backstory

It happened right after Easter, when we were discussing the possibility of getting a dog. Our cat had died last December and the kids were asking for another pet. I had spent days researching the perfect breed, and asked Tom whether he thought we should buy a puppy from a breeder (so that we could be relatively assured about what traits the dog would have), or whether we should adopt a dog from a shelter. My husband said "If we're going to adopt anything, it should be another child!"

I was surprised, as we are now in our late forties and early fifties and our children, adopted domestically at birth, are older too. We had always wanted more children, but after three more adoption attempts that all fell through, we assumed that God's plan for some reason was for us to have only two children. "Adopt again, now?" I wondered, aloud. We decided to pray about it.

The next day was Divine Mercy Sunday, and we attended a healing service after Mass. As the priest laid hands on me, I asked God to help us discern his will, and to make it clear for us what he would have us do. THE NEXT DAY, while the Gospel account of the Annunciation was being proclaimed at daily Mass, I heard the Lord tell me, a woman who was not expecting to be a mother (again), that he was asking me to be the mother of a very special child. Both the Psalm and the Old Testament readings contained the verse "Here I am Lord, I come to do your will."

Who, me?

That clear sign I had asked for? It was right there. Unmistakable.

I called my husband to tell him, he responded "You don't have to convince me, let's do it!" Only TWO DAYS from idea inspiration to confirmation in prayer. It was definitely from God. If it was from me, I'd still be hemming and hawing about it, researching it to death and stuck in fear, unable to make a decision.

But now what? We didn't feel the desire or call to adopt an infant or toddler. We wondered, could we be called to adopt an older child? This is something that in the past we would never have considered. Everyone knows that those children are too damaged, too hard, too scary.

Except that our God is the God who removes all fear. Who opens hearts and gives grace. Who calls us to care for the orphan and tells us all things are possible with Him.

I called a friend who adopted two orphans from China over the last couple of years. I didn't know which countries were doing international adoption right now, which agencies were good in our area, how to even get started. I asked if she knew anything about how to find older children. She told me that there was such a thing as older orphan hosting, where a child would come live with your family for a month or so during the summer, and you could meet each other to see if a match might be a good for both that child and your family. She suggested that I start researching this option at RainbowKids, an advocacy site for special needs orphans (being older is one type of special need).

I started visiting several of the eighteen different hosting programs and quickly became overwhelmed. I contacted my friend to ask:

I clicked on photolisting after photolisting. The blonde-haired blue-eyed kids from Poland, Latvia and the Ukraine were darling. The Chinese children were precious. And of course there were plenty of kids in the U.S. foster care system as well. Hmm, Colombia has a program? I'd always wanted to improve my Spanish, and had an affinity for Latin America, having vacationed in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

And then it happened.

Jean Carlos

Jean is an outgoing, agreeable, and affectionate 12 year old. He is in the 5th grade and is a good student. 

He currently lives in a foster home in Colombia and is in good health. Jean is helpful, cooperative, and attentive to his foster mom and others in the house. 

Jean Carlos is Catholic and drawn to everything religious. He attends Mass every Saturday evening with his foster family and prays the rosary every night before going to bed. 

Jean would like an adoptive family that loves him, supports him, guides him, spends a lot of time together, and makes him feel like part of the family.

That smile. Those eyes. He shares our faith. And most especially, he looked like he would fit right in with our other brown boys.

I called Tom at work and told him I was sending him links to a few different photolistings from different countries and asked him to take a look. I didn't mention Jean, as I was curious to see if Tom would feel drawn to consider any other children.

He called me back a little later and said "Did you see Jean Carlos from Colombia? I really like him."

They say "When you know, you know." They are usually talking about finding your spouse. In this case it is about finding our child. We know. We have been called and we have been led to our child. We knew before we even called to get more information that he was the one. We knew so clearly that we started our homestudy before we even met him.

That not understanding why, years ago, those other three adoptions all fell through? Maybe, just maybe, it was because God had a different, better idea. One that required us to have space in our family, as it is not usually a good idea to adopt children older than your oldest child. One that necessitated us having some more parenting experience under our belts. One that foreknew that a very special child was going to need a family now, in 2016.

And thank God for that.

A Long Overdue Update

Those of you you follow Jean's Journey probably noticed that I haven't posted in a while. As the time approached for Jean to return to Colombia, I found it really difficult to think about. In four short weeks, Jean became a part of our family - we didn't want him to leave!

At one point, I asked him "Do you like our family?" to which he wholeheartedly replied "Yes!" I had wondered because we had some issues with one of the kids getting pretty jealous of all the attention Jean was getting, and because - let's face it - with a visit of four weeks, we could only be on our best behavior for so long, and he definitely got to see the real us. I pointed this out to him, saying "We aren't a perfect family." His response? "You are for me." That brought tears to my eyes!

As departure day approached, Jean hinted around, telling us "I don't want to go," "I want to stay here," and "I want to come back someday." The day before he left he told my oldest son at the pool "I want to be adopted, but mamá doesn't want me." Nathan didn't know what to say, since he knew that we actually did want to adopt Jean, but that we weren't allowed to tell him yet.

Kidsave has a lot of experience with this, and they know that such a big decision shouldn't be made in the heat of emotion. We had to wait until two weeks after Jean left before we could send in our Letter of Intent to adopt. Later we found out that the first two or three days after returning, Jean spent a lot of that time in tears. I can't imagine how that must have felt for him, thinking that we had rejected him, that his one chance to finally have a family was lost forever!

Three and a half weeks after he returned to Colombia, we finally got to Skype with him. It was wonderful to see Jean's smiling face and hear his sweet voice again. We heard about how his classes are going, how he's learning more English, and about the festival that is going on where he lives. He asked the boys and I to play some piano for him and we obliged. We remembered some of the funny things that happened while he was here and made silly faces at each other. Then he held up a hand-lettered sign that said, in English, "I REALLY NEED YOU" with a little sad face drawn underneath. My heart broke since we still could not tell him that we were adopting him.

But the next day we got word that Colombia accepted our Letter of Intent, and that they would tell him very soon that his dreams of having a family are finally coming true! Soon I will write about finally getting to tell him that he is going to part of our family - forever!

Fun in the Sun

Imagine our surprise when we learned that despite living in a country that enjoys both Atlantic and Pacific coastlines,

Jean has never seen the ocean, never played on a beach!

Well, that was easy to rectify. Living in Maryland, we are just a couple of hours from many great ocean beaches.

We arrived at Cape Henelopen, Delaware at sunset.

Jean REALLY enjoyed the beach! The boys were on the beach for seven hours straight and would have stayed longer if we'd let them.

DC Reflecting Pool