We still plan to go to China in a couple of years to adopt a baby girl--our LID is 12/11/06 and the CCAA marches on.  We'll need to update our paperwork to re-do our expired immigration stuff under the new Hague regs, and to reflect the new shape of the family, but with luck it'll all work out.  

So we're licensed through 2012, for 2 children.  It's weird to see it on paper - a license for the future we're hoping for.   

So far we've been shown to one potential mom, who didn't pick us.  Another potential mom is on the horizon. If someone does pick us, then we wait until the baby is born to see if she decides to place or not.  It's going to be a long, nerve-wracking few months/year.  This is why I didn't want to do domestic in the first place...but.  I keep reminding myself not to make it about me.   I'm wishing for it to happen quickly, and not to cause me too much pain, but I'm not praying for that.  My prayer is, "let the woman who needs me, find me."  For that to happen I have to be more open, more trusting, and have more faith, than I would have believed I could be.

Let the woman who needs me, find me.
 

Yesterday we sat down and budgeted to figure out where all of the different fees and costs are coming from. We'll be maxing out our credit, most likely, but it's doable, and we feel very fortunate to be in the position we're in.  Benefit of being middle-aged, I guess--our careers are in full swing, and things are going pretty well, financially.

So now I'm just trying to get a handle on having some kind of rhythm to my life while we wait.  I went for a run today, and I went two days ago, and with perseverence I can get back into my every-other-day habit that I worked up to before it got cold.  I have art projects to finish, and I have a lot of overtime to put in at the office, getting things ready for me to be gone for 4 weeks or maybe a little more.  So it's not like I won't stay busy.  But I've been doing paperwork for a couple of months straight, so it's odd to be back in the no-paper zone again.  

1. get fingerprinted for DCFS license - DONE.  Waiting for results.

2. send DCFS paperwork to SW - DONE except for med forms, which can follow later

3. see doctor on Feb 2 (self) and Feb 11 (hub) to get med forms filled out.  For China adoption, med forms require HIV status, TB test, assorted other stuff.  For DCFS, it's mostly about whether you can lift a child and if you're likely to die before 18 years from now.  No blood work, apparently.  Whew. Because Tanya, my doctor's needle tech, is great, but she skips my shy elbow veins and goes in through the back of my hand.  Which HURTS. 

4. take cat to vet for new rabies shot.  Need to do before SW visit so we have paperwork for her.

5. verify that batteries in smoke detectors are up to date

6. install bannister - DONE.  This wasn't strictly necessary, but when you show your SW around the house and wave a hand at the basement stairs and say "we're going to put in a bannister soon" it's probably good to do it before her next visit a year-and-a-half later.

7. re-caulk the basement shower.  Okay, ridiculous, SW won't care, but it really needs it, so we may as well tie that task to the adoption because then we'll get it done soon.

8. Go to Indy to meet with placement agency and get paperwork started with them, Jan 5.  EEK

9. reserve hotel for Indy trip - yeah, really gotta do that, like NOW.

10. write "dear birthmother" letter, a task which squicks me on several levels.  To be discussed in a future post, no doubt.

11. apply for 401k loan, which will cover about half the cost of the adoption.  Our already-existing home equity line of credit (taken out for the China adoption) should cover the other half.  Just in case, I also applied for an extra credit card, which hopefully will arrive soon.

12. re-work budget to figure out how to make the payments on the loans (totally doable) and daycare (doable with some sacrifices), possibly for twins (maybe not doable). (also totally unlikely to happen, but we need to know how we'd answer the question, should opportunity arise).

13. Take the online "conspicuous families" course recommended by our SW, soon

14.  Take the local workshop on adoption & child development recommended by our SW, Feb 23

15. SW visit.  She's been here before, so this is a followup/update visit.  Probably will happen sometime in January.

16. Talk to my bosses to let them know I might need some unexpected FMLA leave in 2008 - DONE

17. Talk to my staff to let them know I might be vanishing for a month - will do that once the process is underway.

18. Hub has to talk to his bosses and find out if they do paid paternity leave at his company.  If not, he has a lot of vacation he can take.

And in the land of China adoption, there's just one thing to do right now, and one to do later:

1. decide if we're going to file a new I-600, or if we let the I-171H expire and re-file in a couple of years when we're closer to a match

-and later- 

2. decide if we're going to stay in the China program at all.  Yeah, I said it.  We'll decide this AFTER, and if, we complete a domestic adoption.

As for the LID date...Our LID is December 11 of 2006.  As of this month, CCAA has matched folks through December 14 of *2005.*  They've been doing between 6 and 8 calendar days per month.  At that rate it will be approximately...[calculates]...one million years before we get a match.  So we celebrated by filling out paperwork for our DCFS clearance, and I'm sending it to our SW today.  This process will hopefully be a little faster, without interfering with the China process.  We shall see.

Hub and I have been waiting for 12 months, and we expect to wait another 2 to 4 YEARS from now before we travel.  Fortunately, China has explicitly said that if you adopt another child during the wait interval, it will not jeopardize your China adoption.  So instead of China baby being our first child...we think she should be our second.

So.  I've always wanted to adopt an african-american baby.  I like the idea of being an interracial family (hence China), and this is something I've thought about since long before I got married or started trying to conceive.  But over the years, I started to be unsure whether that's a good idea.  Some years back, the National Association of Black Social Workers famously characterized placement of black children in white families as "cultural genocide" and opposed it in every case.   And the difficulties of being black in america are so far beyond those of being asian, (both of which are so different from the white privelege I've always experienced) I've never been sure I would be able to teach a child to adequately navigate that.

But over the past two years, an interesting thing has happened. Every time I tell one of my white friends I'm adopting a Chinese baby, they praise me for my goodness (which, of course, has nothing to do with it - I just want a baby, damnit, and orphan adoption is my first choice...more on that down below).  When I tell one of my black friends, their reactions range from a polite "oh, really? interesting. Why not a black baby?" to a fairly angry "HUH? why not black?" 

So as we've been considering our options, I've been asking my black friends directly what they would think if we adopted a black baby.  ALL of them have been way beyond encouraging.  Not just "yes, do it," but "I'll help you, they'll have me as a resource, I know you're going to teach them to know their culture, it'll be great."  And "do it right away."  Total strangers at a party last night...WAY beyond encouraging.  There was a black social worker at the party and he said that he places children in interracial situations because children need love, they need to be taught, they need to be raised so they can accomplish things, and racial identity is secondary. 

Over the year I've been waiting for China I've done more research, and it seems like the "cultural genocide" idea is pretty hotly disputed; the NAACP came down on the opposide side of the debate, saying you can't deny a child a family based on his race.  And I've read that a lot of black american children are being adoped by white people in europe and canada, because they don't have enough parents here.  So they're losing their culture and their nation.

So we went and got fresh fingerprints, and I'm filling out paperwork to update our home study, and it's looking like we're going to do this.  By the time we go to China to get our "first" child, we could have a 2-year-old "second" child in tow.

The kicker is that this will be an open adoption, which is scary, scary, scary, but also the only right way to do a non-orphan adoption, in my opinion.  I have a family member who is a birth mother in a closed adoption, and I never, NEVER want to put anyone through anything like that.  I don't want to put anyone through being a birth/first mom in an open adoption, either, because from what I can tell, relinquishment is hell, pure and simple.  But some people don't have a choice, and hopefully we can craft something that will work without screwing anybody over.

More updates as we get our paperwork going and get 100% settled on our choice. 

I mean. Seriously. 

As for the basic concept, it's a chipper little satire about suicide.  Some of my friends love it, some don't, and some would be freakin' horrified by it, so I'm not showing it to them.  I expect many editors to reject it, either because they don't enjoy the concept, or because I didn't execute it well enough.  Which is fine...getting this little bit of validation makes me eager to sub it again, and (much more important) eager to try writing something with more heart to it, so I can take another crack at F&SF.

Yay!