Author: Tricia

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WE ARE ON THE WAITLIST!

Last week we received an email from our Gladney caseworker that started with:

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Hello, Jay and Tricia!

Congratulations! You have officially been placed on waitlist to receive a referral as of 11/16/2010!

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HOORAY!!

Time for a little happy dancing….

So what does “being on the waitlist mean”?

Waitlisted means that all our paperwork for the application, homestudy, and dossier part of the adoption process is complete. We are on the list now in Ethiopia, and in line to eventually receive information about the little one that Gladney has for us. For the next several months, we will be waiting. Waiting, praying, learning all we can until our agency Gladney matches us with the child they feel best fits, based on her needs and what they know of our family. Jay and I will complete a good bit of required education and training as part of our preparation before we receive our referral.

Are you asking for a girl or a boy? How old?

Many friends have asked if we get to choose boy or girl. Yes, with Ethiopia you get to choose. Jay and I were truly open to either gender. Practically speaking a boy would be “simpler” with bedroom arrangements in our current house. However, our sweet daughter has prayed faithfully for a sister since she was about four years old. Part of the backstory to our adoption journey is that she began asking about adopting a sister several years ago. Though we laughed, and brushed her off in the past, when it came time to specify boy or girl, we felt for her sake that we had to ask for a little girl. And we are truly delighted at the thought of another girl in the family!

We have asked for a little toddler girl somewhere between 18 to 30 months of age, with the caveat that if Gladney has a little girl in care that is a bit out of that range on either side but who appears to be a solid match from their point of view, to please let us know. We have to set an age range based on our agency’s advice and what we feel is the best match for our family.

This was an agonizingly hard decision, but from the first moment Jay and I each began feeling pulled toward adoption, we have never envisioned a tiny baby. Separately, without ever talking about it to each other, we both felt pulled toward a toddler. We absolutely adore babies, but the reality is that we have been blessed to enjoy four tiny babies in our home. Once children hit toddler age the chances of them being adopted drop somewhat, though in actuality there are a lot of families on Gladney’s referral list who ask for toddlers, and many of the people we know who have adopted or are adopting here in Dallas bring home toddlers. We are very, very excited about our little girl, and finding out who she is, and how old she will be.

So, when will you get this referral?

These days, referrals are taking around 9 or 10 months on average. So we do not imagine we will receive a match for quite a while.  At the time of referral, we are given every bit of information that Gladney has about our daughter. Medical history, family background, her story.

So….you will bring her home in about 9 or 10 months, after your referral?

No, not yet.  🙂 After we are given and accept a referral, there will be a first trip to Ethiopia several weeks later to meet our daughter and complete a court hearing, and then a second return visit another few weeks later where we will receive custody and bring our girlie home.

Then how long WILL it be till she is finally home with you?

Average wait times are just that: averages. We have no exact times, and things change in the adoption world depending on factors often out of the control of our agency’s workers, etc. Given current wait times, estimated time till court dates are issued, and then the two trips are completed, it will probably be about a year before we bring our girlie home. Again, that is the best estimate we have at this time, and could change.

Does Gladney already know who your daughter is?

No. At this time (based on the age we have asked for), our daughter is already alive but neither Gladney nor we know who she is. She may or may not still be with her birth family. At some point she will be processed through a government orphanage, spend a bit of time there, and shortly thereafter be brought into in Gladney’s foster care. Once in Gladney’s care, we know she will receive excellent treatment as they have plenty of people to love and care for these little ones as well as staff and resources to meet their medical and other needs compared to the resources in the government orphanages.

How can we pray for your ongoing adoption process?

* Please pray for our daughter: that the Lord will be protecting her and have His hand on her whatever her situation may be. That she might have precious time with her birth mother or other close family before whatever tragedy occurs which will ultimately separate them.  The fact that this little one and so many millions of others in Ethiopia are in need of a family to adopt them and give them homes means that there has been great tragedy in their lives. Our hearts are heavy for her and for her birth family.

* Please pray for us: that God will be preparing our family to welcome a daughter, a little one who has known loss and hardship at such a young age that most of us cannot even begin to fathom. Pray that Jay and I will be given wisdom, patience, and the ability to meet her needs. Pray that our children will be equipped to be good siblings to this little girl. They are all so excited about their new baby sister.

* Pray for Gladney as they work with so many in the country of Ethiopia, both those who will be adopted, and those who will not. We are very thankful for the good work our agency is doing in Africa to help better the lives of people, and especially children there.

* Pray for God to provide the remainder of our adoption expenses. There are still costs we have not yet incurred which are due upon referral, and we also have the expenses for our travel to Ethiopia to account for. We are so thankful as God has provided beautifully to this point, and we trust that this will all work out.

We are thrilled about this step in the process, and feel it is a huge blessing to get this good news right before Thanksgiving. I had secretly been hoping and praying for waitlist status by the New Year, so this is a wonderful surprise!

Happy Thanksgiving to All of you, dear Readers.

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Adoption Tee-Shirts!! (and Sweatshirts, Coffee Mugs, etc…)

Alrighty, Folks!  The people here at House of Horne have been busy, busy, busy working on a new project. And so, without further ado, it is with great excitement that I announce the opening of:

To visit our store, please click here:

www.AdoptionTee.com

The designs are our own, and we currently have four different ones up to choose from. Come in, have a look around, and think about buying a T-shirt (many different styles, fits, and colors available in each design):

a sweatshirt:

a tote bag:

or even a mug for that warm cup ‘o’ joe or hot chocolate!

BBQ Apron, Anyone?

And where else do you suppose you will find a frosty adoption stein to hold your favorite chilled beverage?

In all seriousness, it is our hope that these shirts and other products will appeal to folks all over who have a heart for adoption, and help encourage the message of adoption within the church.

On a personal note, a part of every sale at AdoptionTee will go toward helping us bring our own sweet little girlie home from Ethiopia.

Thanks so much for looking around and supporting us, and please do spread the word to anyone who might be interested that AdoptionTee is open for business!!

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Texas Wait No More

A local Dallas church, Watermark, is holding a huge conference this weekend in partnership with Focus on the Family, Dallas CPS and area Adoption Agencies to help focus efforts on finding adoptive families for the children currently in the custody of the state of Texas.

Right now there are over 3500 kids who have legally been declared orphans living here in Texas waiting for families.

Previous efforts like this in the state of Colorado have helped to reduce the number of waiting children in that state by over half. Amazing.

For more information or to register for this event, go HERE.

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Navigating the Waters of the Adoption Dossier

We are in the stage of gathering the final documents needed to complete our dossier.  This is very exciting because it means we are near to being officially placed on the waitlist for our little girl! (What will not be exciting is the following explanation of one of the more technical aspects of the whole adoption thing…my apologies in advance for boring the few faithful readers we still have!)

In any international adoption process, there are three  main components to the paper chase:

1-the Application Packet for your adoption agency,

2- the Homestudy, and

3-the Dossier.

The Dossier feels more daunting mostly because some of the documents are more challenging to obtain, and most every document included must be notarized, and then go through an authentication process both at the state and the national level. There are four or five levels of authentication required depending on which state you reside in.  They are:

1. Notary

2. County Clerk (this level is not needed in all states)

3. Secretary of State

4. United States Department of State

5. Ethiopia Embassy

Given the Dossier also requires two sets of official government fingerprints for each parent, you must also wait on approvals, fingerprint dates, responses to applications, etc. Sometimes the wait stretches out so long, that it can seem as if your file got lost in a box somewhere in Gov’t office #547.  (And some of my adopting friends will tell you that their have, poor things!) There are a total of 34 documents needed just for our Dossier, and unfortunately the work of gathering just one document can potentially stretch into weeks due to errors with dates, notarization mess-ups, etc.

This week has had its fill of highs and lows in the Dossier process. We are so very close to the end, and yet little glitches each day have prevented my FedEx’ing the final set of documents off for authentication.

First, this past Monday, November 1st, we were delighted to find an envelope from Homeland Security in our mailbox. YAY! We received our I-600A Customs Approval that I referred to back in this post in record time! Happy Dance! What a wonderful and appropriate way to kick off National Adoption Month!

Then, oops, the joy was short-lived, it appears there was a mix-up with our paperwork from Homeland Security. Yours truly was listed as the main adoptive applicant parent which wouldn’t be a bad thing except that wisdom dictates that the parent with the higher income always be approved as the main applicant. In this case, Jay is the only parent with ANY income, at least for right now, so that was a little bit of an issue. We got that settled…only to run into repeated issues with a medical letter.

A letter from Jay’s personal physician is a mandatory part of the packet, and for whatever reason repeated instructions to the doctor’s office about how the letter is to be dated, notarized, etc, have not been followed. We are currently on our fourth try to get this one little piece of paper correct and I am pretty sure our doctor’s office is rather weary of seeing me in their lobby. Wondering what fault I will find today with their latest draft of the aforementioned letter. Ah well….All other documents are now in order, have been officially notarized, except for one. Like I said, we are so close!

Throughout our dossier process, we have had the blessing of working with a lady who is a pro at dossier preparation. She has been invaluable to us, and because of her, instructions have been laid out very clearly, and so far we have not had to redo documents due to little errors here and there. She is amazingly organized and attentive to details, and knows exactly how to navigate the waters of the process. She is always calm and reassuring, and has answered so many questions for me, and streamlined the process so much for us as we’ve worked together the past few months to put our dossier together.  Jay says the money spent on the fee for her services is the smartest cash we’ve spent thus far on the adoption, and he is right!

Kate at KBS Dossiers already has the endorsement of Gladney as well as so many adoptive parents who testify to what great work she does. In fact, I heard about her way before we began the adoption process because so many adoptive parents give her shout outs on their blogs! But she has been so wonderful to us that I had to mention her.  If you are preparing to work on an international adoption, give her a call!

Truly, we are overjoyed that the process is moving along, and that we are many steps closer to bringing home our little sweetheart from Ethiopia.  I hope to be back before the end of the month to give you the wonderful news that we are officially waitlisted!!!

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Article on Ethiopian Adoptions

The Washington Post ran a very encouraging article in October about adoptions from Ethiopia, and I wanted to share it here.

(Click to read)

I do not know the McDurham family personally, but they are friends of friends. I have seen their beautiful little daughter, Ella, featured in another publication recently. Gladney, the agency we are working with, is mentioned in the article as well.

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National Adoption Month

If you didn’t already know, November just happens to be National Adoption Month. In honor of the focus on adoption during this month, I have high hopes of trying to catch up on our sad neglected little blog, particularly updating our readers with news pertaining to our own adoption, answering some questions we have been asked by friends and family as we go through the process, and maybe posting a few reviews of books we have read that might be of interest to some of you.

(And while I am aware that we have very few readers left here given the dearth of posts of late, if you have a question you want me to answer, please leave a comment and I will do my best to spend a post – or an email if you prefer – answering your question!)  THANKS!

National Adoption Month seems a good time to say that we are very grateful to our agency, Gladney, for the wonderful work they are doing with us and with so many other families who are pursuing adoption both domestically and internationally. Gladney is also actively championing efforts to provide in-country aid to many of the places in the world where they operate. This is needful, as the reality is that only a very small percent of the 147 million orphans in the world today will actually be adopted into families.


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Happy Halloween!

What a fun but busy weekend we’ve had here at House of Horne!

Friday we enjoyed Covenant’s BikeAThon –

the kids rode 6 miles around White Rock Lake with their schoolmates as a celebration of the huge fund-raising effort they just finished.

Fun and festivities followed….

Little plug for our sweet school: It is an amazing place to learn, and a very loving community of teachers and families.  Covenant also places a priority on drawing a diverse student body, and toward that end, they allocate a large percentage of their budget toward financial aid for families who could not otherwise afford a private classical education. Over 25% of our student body receives some sort of tuition aid, and our school is a better place for it. God bless all those folks who give over and above so that many, many wonderful families can stay at our school!

Before BikeAThon was even over, I grabbed the 3 boys and we headed out to Irving, where we did some early Trick-R-Treating at Jay’s office.

Every year, Epsilon decorates the entire two buildings, and hosts the children of employees. There is candy galore, and we always return with enough booty to both eat and have extra left over to hand out on Halloween night! We ran into our sweet friends the Turners and grabbed a quick group shot:

Later that evening, Nana and Grandpa arrived in town for the weekend’s sporting events (no, not the World Series) and we kept them busy running back and forth all day Saturday to volleyball and soccer. Baby Jacob even talked his parents into taking him to his first soccer and volleyball games.

Saturday night after so many games I lost count (ok there were only 4) we crashed Uncle Peter and Aunt Katie’s where we donned costumes again and celebrated our sweet cousin Sarah’s 6th birthday. She dressed up appropriately in princess attire and was the happy recipient of many gifts and birthday wishes as well as a pink and purple butterfly cake which Cousin Abigail and Auntie Trish lovingly (if a bit hurriedly) created in her honor. Isn’t she sweet?

Some of the Cousin Chaos (note: it was hard to take pictures between Zorro trying to stab the Indian standing next to him, and the Indian retaliating with threats of scalping the masked hero). But we did our best:

Sunday dawned a day of rest and worship, YAY! In the early evening we joined hordes of kiddos to tromp up and down streets begging for yet more candy. (Don’t they ever get tired of so much candy?) This was such a fun night…here is the group in their entirety:

Baby Juliet is wearing the costume that our own sweet Abigail wore when she was teeny-tiny. Love that.

Even some of the parents got into the festivities: Here is Mr. O explaining the finer points of wearing Lederhosen to some fascinated onlookers:

I close with a pic of my littlest Cowboy who looked awesome, but suffered mightily in these snazzy red boots of his (turns out boots are not all that comfortable to climb hills in!):

This is the first year I can remember that I neglected to get a shot of our four kids in their costumes all together. Which is a little sad, but like I said, it was a full weekend, and I am thankful for the pictures we do have of all the fun. I am wondering if maybe next year we will have five little TrickRTreaters in the House of Horne??

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Today, You are Five

Dear Josiah,

It seems as I grow older that time passes more quickly.  It is hard to comprehend that the baby that was placed in my arms in the wee hours of the morning five years ago today has grown into 40 plus pounds of pure spunky boy! Oh how thankful we are for you!

Josiah, you keep us young and laughing. You are a joy to our entire family, and we cannot imagine life without you.  They say that the more children you have, the less attention the younger ones get. I’d like to think that far from that being the truth of the matter, you have not just two parents who think you are amazing, but a big sister and two big brothers who adore you as well, and are some of your biggest fans. We are all so glad you are part of our family!

These days you love music. You love to hang out with your two big brothers in the room you share together, turn up whatever song you are listening to nice and loud, and sing and dance your heart out. You also love Legos, Wii, and writing little notes to me which you seal in envelopes and tuck into little hiding places for me to find.

You are enthusiastic about almost everything. When someone gives you a gift, you unwrap it and exclaim over it with unbridled happiness.

You are BRAVE…braver than I’d like some days! You learned to do a backflip off the diving board this summer at our neighborhood pool. You will try just about anything, talk to just about anyone, and when you are hurt, cry very little.

You are AFFECTIONATE…maybe the most cuddly child we’ve had so far. Even at age 5 you will still sit in our laps to be hugged and snuggled. You give hugs freely and generously to your circle of family and many friends.

You are LOYAL…you are convinced that your siblings and cousins are your best friends in the world and you love them dearly. You tell us that your “Brudder, Nicolas” is your very best friend. You talk about your baby sister who is going to come home from Ethiopia someday, and how you cannot wait to meet her, and how excited you are to be a big brother.

You are OBSERVANT and CHARMING and DEAR…on most days, you will size up whatever outfit or accessory I am wearing and tell me, “oh Mommy, you look SO pretty today. I love your dress.” Or, “oh look Mommy how you painted your nails so beautifully, I like them!”  You are also fond of telling me that someday when you are all grown up, you will buy the house next door, so that you can live close by to me forever.

No matter where you live someday, or how grown up you get, in my heart you will always be my “Little Jo” and I will forever be so amazingly blessed to be your Mother.

Happy Birthday, Sweet Josiah!

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GLADNEY-APPROVED!

Last Tuesday we received an email from our caseworker at Gladney with the opening line….

“Congratulations, you are now Gladney approved!!!….”

This is HUGE progress, and means that our adoption agency and all the power vested therein has officially approved our full adoption application, home study, etc. From what my adoption friends tell me, this approval means we can officially say that we are “paper-pregnant” for our little girl! We are so excited! (Be sure to look for a little counting “Ticker” to show up soon on our web page.)

Currently we are waiting on US Customs to approve our application for our I-600A forms. This the biggest piece of red tape that remains between us and a spot on the waitlist in Ethiopia. What is an I-600A, you ask? Good question!

I found this sweet little explanation on an International Adoption Website which is pretty reader-friendly. I just love the ending note “Keep in mind that processing your I600A may take as long as 90 days – if everything goes smoothly.”

Jay and I are learning that expecting everything to go smoothly really isn’t very realistic in general in the adoption world. Rather, it is best to assume that things will happen when they happen for a reason, and that ultimately no waits, lags, mistakes, or even oversights on anyone’s part is going to thwart our being matched with the little girl chosen for our family.  Which is not to say these lags or delays are going to be easy or pleasant; after all, there is a tiny little girl waiting at the end of all this, and we’d love for her to be with her new family sooner rather than later.

For now, we are thankful for receiving our Gladney approval, and excited about the next steps in our process!

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Huge Progress!

WARNING:  Super-Long post to follow!

Please note: this entry should have been posted mid-August. I have been waiting to download a few pictures from Nicolas’ camera that I wanted to include with this post. Jay has a fancy way of tagging various pictures from various family cameras (our kids each have their own) and I cannot begin to understand his system, nor did I want to make a mistake and erase prior photos (as I have done before when I attempted to download any pictures except the ones from our “adult” camera!)

So forgive the delay…this news is truly about 5 weeks old…but I wanted to document it nonetheless!

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I figured that after I mailed our adoption application and supporting paperwork along with much of our dossier paperwork in mid-July, that there would be a lull in adoption activity and progress for a bit. Well, I was wrong.

Gladney, God bless them, wasted no time in scheduling our homestudy: 10 days after they received and processed all our paperwork, one of their caseworkers, Bethany C was here at our house conducting our home study. By way of aside, this home study just happened to take place in between three separate visits from various out of town guests, so it was a WHIRLWIND of a week for us here at House of Horne!

First, we enjoyed a wonderful weekend spent celebrating our newest family member, Baby Jacob, on the occasion of his baptism, and saw a TON of family:

On Sunday, my folks and the rest of the crew went home, and we changed a few sheets, washed a few towels, and got ready to welcome our dear old friends, the Moores for a few days of catching up after living on opposite sides of the country for 10 years now. Here’s a few of them…

The Charlies’ Angels:

and with the boys added in:

The day after we said goodbye to the Moores, we had our homestudy (more on that in a sec).

And starting the day after our home study, we were blessed by a weekend visit from a fellow “adopting from Ethiopia family”, the very fun crew from It’s Almost Naptime:

Well, back to the home study:

The actual home visit and interview process lasted much of a day, and mainly consisted of a lot of questions and answers about us, our family, both immediate and extended, our parenting, and our own childhood experiences, as well as our views and attitudes about adoption. It was helpful both to Gladney in determining if our family was a good candidate to adopt a child from Ethiopia, as well as to us in giving us a lot of information about the adoption process.

I was so glad to learn the level of care before, during and after the actual adoption that Gladney gives to their families. We chose this agency both because they are local, and because they have an excellent reputation and wealth of experience, and so far we are truly happy with our decision and feel they have been amazingly supportive to us. Here is a picture of us with Bethany, our social worker from Gladney, whom we thoroughly enjoyed spending the day with:

Another encouraging part of our homestudy was learning that within a five mile radius of our home live an abundance of families who have adopted or are in process to adopt children from Ethiopia. We already know a few of these families, and look forward to meeting more. How amazing to know that our future daughter will have the blessing of growing up in close proximity to other children from her birth country.

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The one other outstanding piece of our dossier that we had to handle at this stage was our FBI fingerprints. We actually need to be fingerprinted twice for our adoption process. This first set of prints goes to the FBI offices in West Virginia where they conduct a thorough background check for any sort of criminal record. We had been told to expect the processing and return time for these prints to take 12 weeks plus.

It has been on my to-do list to complete these prints since mid-June, but finding a weekday day when Jay and I could show up at the same police station during business hours proved challenging (he works quite a ways from home). And life has just been busy. We finally made the time on August 6th, the day before we left for vacation to get these prints done, since Jay had the day off. Friday afternoon, in the middle of packing for our trip, we dragged all four children down to the police station at SMU and for the first time in our entire lives, got fingerprinted!

Here’s my handsome guy getting ready for his fingerprinting:

The printing process:

And then it was my turn (love the little face peeking through behind us)

I dashed into the FedEx office at 8:57 that evening, just 3 minutes before closing time and popped those prints in the mail to the FBI. Less than 7 hours later, at 3:45 am we hit the rode for Alabama and I figured we wouldn’t hear anything more back on the prints till at least October. None of our friends have great stories to tell about the lag time on their FBI prints. One set of local friends who are in process to adopt from Bulgaria had their prints returned after 10 weeks of waiting this summer, only to learn that the FBI couldn’t read them much less process them, and they had to be redone. They are still waiting to hear back, bless their hearts.

So imagine my shock when a mere three days after arriving home from the beach, FedEx knocked on my door with an important looking envelope. I just knew it was our fingerprints being returned to us with orders to redo them; at least, I told myself, it only took them a few days to let us know they were unreadable.

But no….when I opened the envelope there were two stamped and sealed FBI approvals. Shocker. I literally began shaking, I was so stunned.  It had been less than 12 days since we mailed the prints: and 6 of those days were spent in travel back and forth to West Virginia. I called Jay, still shaking, to tell him we had FBI approval.

Jay is fond of saying that this adoption process is not a race, and that given all the different factors and pieces that need to fall into place, patience will be a blessing throughout. He is so good about just resting in the knowledge that God will orchestrate events such that our paperwork and approvals come through at just the right time for us to be matched with the little girl that God has chosen for our family.

Those prints didn’t need to come back as quickly as they did to prove anything to me, but I cannot begin to communicate what an encouragement it was to have them processed so lightening-fast!

The next big milestone we are waiting on is for Gladney to officially approve us to adopt. Our home study report has been sent for review and revision, and hopefully in a few weeks will be complete. After that, we will be Gladney-approved, and able to move on to the next step of this process! Hooray!