Three Months Waiting

Today is our anniversary of waiting 3 months to be chosen by a birthmother. I haven't had too much contact with our agency. I've mostly just been waiting for the call, but I did get a concerning email from the agency about a week and a half ago. I had emailed them to check to see how everything was going and they responded by saying that several birthmothers had viewed our portfolio, but none had expressed interest in us at this point. However, they were concerned about our China adoption because they thought it may be upsetting to the birthmothers to know that we were also had another adoption pending. The strange thing is that we had put our China adoption on hold and had told out domestic agency that. Even if we hadn't put our Chinese adoption on hold, we still would have a 4 year wait period to be placed with a child and our domestic agency knew that, too. Anyway, I didn't think too much about it. I just figured that they had forgotten about the hold, which is ok, everyone gets busy. However, the more I think about it, I'm becoming concerned that when they introduced our portfolio to the birthmothers, they mentioned the Chinese adoption because there's no other way the birthmothers would know. As we are not pursuing the Chinese adoption, it's not in our portfolio. So I called the agency today to talk to them about this and clear everything up, but our case worker is out until Friday so I'll have to wait for that call back.

The wait has been ok. On the bad days I just keep reminding myself how short our waiting period has been. It had only been 1 month, then 2 months, and now we're at 3 months. But mostly I don't think about it too much and I don't get down about it very often. It's actually been a pretty content and happy time for me because I finally have a sure thing to look forward to. I've had a few friends tell me that they are trying to get pregnant, are pregnant, or are about to have babies recently. Before, this news would have killed me. It was so painful and while I was very happy for my friends, I would drown in self-pity at every announcement. But now, I feel like I know that I'll have a baby in the next 9 months, too, so it's exciting to receive news from friends because I know that I'll have friends with kids around the same age.

Anyway, we are ready. We are so ready that I feel like we're leading a life that has a big "insert baby here" sign stamped on it.

Update on the Nursery

This is a quick post of pictures of the nursery now that we have it complete. Insert baby here:

Our Portfolio

If you're caught up with the other posts, then you know that the last step to our domestic adoption process was to submit a family portfolio for potential birthparent(s). I spent about a month piecing our portfolio together. Our agency had given us two other sample portfolios from other families and a few tips, such as:

1.) Make sure that there is no evidence of alcohol anywhere in any picture. This is a big no-no with birthparent(s).
2.) Don't include pictures of me and Michael with our nieces and nephews. It's a bonus to birthparent(s) that we don't currently have children and if they are preliminarily flipping through, looking at the pictures instead of reading, we may get dismissed because they'll think that our nieces and nephews are our other children.
3.) Be sure to include traveling and hobbies.
4.) If there are other adoptions in our family, write about it so the birthparent(s) will know that our family is already experienced with, and accepting of, adoption.

Number 1 was easy. There aren't a lot of pictures of Michael and I that include alcohol anyway. Number 2 was understandable. I did include tons of pics of all of our nieces and nephews, but was careful that they did not contain me and Michael, too. Number 3 was fun - we love traveling and have great hobbies. And I came up with a way to fix number 4. We have one adoptee in our family, and I tried to get his permission to mention it in our portfolio, but he didn't get back to me by submission time. So, since the importance of another adoptee to the birthparent(s) is that it assures them that our family is and will be supportive of this adoption, I figured that we could still portray this through letters from family and close friends to the baby. I sent out an email to all of our loved ones and the response was overwhelming. We received more loving letters to the baby than I ever thought we would get. It ended up taking up 7 pages of the portfolio. It meant so much to me that we had everyone's support and love. I still get teary-eyed when I read them.

Without further ado, here's our portfolio:



(Editor's Note: We tried to embed electronic signatures into our personal letters to the birthparents, but it never looked right. We decided to just actually sign each copy after they were printed. The version here does not have signatures, but Michael's is the first and mine is the second - if you couldn't already tell from the content.)

The Nursery

When deciding on our nursery theme, Michael and I perused through many modern nursery themes that had clean, simple, gender-neutral designs. I found this organic fawn set that I really liked:

This set cost $355 for only 3 pieces, so it was a little expensive, but it was the only one that we liked. Then, when we were in Babies R Us registering, I found this nursery set in the store:

It's organic fabric, gender-neutral and still has the modern design of bunnies in a meadow. While it wasn't as desirable as the fawn design, it was still pretty close to being perfect and it cost $179 for 6 pieces - much more affordable. So we went with the bunny theme. I had decided early on that I didn't want to have to repaint the blue walls in the nursery and therefore the meadow theme was perfect because the walls represent the sky.

The first thing I put up were the window treatments. I bought new blinds, curtains to match the green in the bunny design and then brown window scarves to match the brown borders. The last touch was to put window valances up of the actual design. Here's what the windows look like now:

Then I waited for the furniture to come in. Choosing the furniture was relatively easy. All of the wood furniture in our house is espresso and we wanted to match the nursery with the rest of the house and our wood floors. Espresso colored baby furniture is only made in a few designs so there wasn't much of a selection to choose from. I knew that I wanted a convertible bed that could one day be a full bed for our child, so that further narrowed our choices. And we were looking for something that was classy and had clean lines. We ended up choosing Da Vinci's Kalani design in espresso and also bought the dresser and hutch to match.

The furniture arrived soon after it was ordered and I spent a few days in early December assembling it.

Now the nursery is almost complete - I've even washed all of the sheets, blankets and baby clothes per instructions by the adoption agency (they want us to be ready for that call any day). Our espresso glider was shipped yesterday and should arrive any day now. I'll most likely be assempling it this week. I need to figure out if I want to put a table next to the crib for a lamp or somewhere to put things on, and there's a few other small decisions that need to be made, but we are definitely ready and waiting for baby.

Health Insurance

When I quit my job, I received individual health insurance from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. All was well until a few months later when BCBS started to "investigate" my application.

Several months into being covered, they decided to retro-decline my application due to the fertility treatments that I had in the past. I argued with them, filed a grievance, argued with my doctor to give them additional information about the fertility treatments and my health (which is great), but it was all for nothing. They still declined me. The "funny" thing is that when I received a check from them returning the monthly payments I had made less any money they had spent on covering me, it turned out that I had paid about $1,000 for the coverage for several months and they had paid $50 for me. Ridiculous. I don't know why BCBS can't figure out that it's worth their bottom line to cover me because theywere making a killing off of me when I was signed up.

Then I tried to sign up with two other insurance companies and they both declined me due to the fact that I had already been declined by one and because of the fertility treatments. This all seemed very unreasonable. Although - don't get me wrong - I had no notion that health insurance companies are reasonable.

So, then I called an independent health insurance agent, whom Michael had used when he signed up for individual health insurance, and explained what had happened and told him that I was seeking health insurance of any kind, whether that be temporary or high risk or whatever. My thought was that I needed to be covered while we got this all straightened out. Meaning, until I was able to find another job and forget about massage therapy - at least for now - so that I could get health coverage.

What I didn't expect to hear from the agent, and what none of the other health insurance companies I had applied to had told me, was that if you have a pending adoption, you cannot change individual health insurance coverage (which includes gaining coverage for individuals) until the adoption is complete and the baby has been given a clean bill of health. I was completely blindsided. No one had ever told us about this and I've never read about it in any the many, many adoption websites and information hubs that I subscribe to. I didn't, and still don't, understand what my receiving health insurance has anything to do with the adoption. I, of course, pushed him for a greater explanation to which he just answered that I should check out more information about it on the TX Department of Insurance's website and then I should write letters to my state reps. If I had known that I would categorically be denied individual health insurance coverage due to our pending adoption, I definitely would have done things differently.

This health insurance deal is truly a stressful mess for us. Considering that I'm completely healthy and still having this many problems getting insured, at whatever cost, I'm looking forward to the industry being overhauled and regulated by the feds. Viva Obama!

Introduction

Family planning has always been very important to us, we just didn’t realize how much of it we were going to get to do! Here’s a brief summary of our adoption path so far:

Michael and I have been trying to conceive since July 1, 2005. We spent a year attempting naturally, and then a year and a half with increasingly invasive fertility treatments. From the very beginning, even before we knew we would have problems conceiving, we strongly considered adoption as a viable option for our family. At the end of 2007, we decided to call off the fertility treatments and start working on adopting. Immediately the stress, pain, and disappointment associated to unsuccessfully conceiving began to melt away - adoption was the right choice for us.

In December of 2007, we signed up with an agency who specialized in Chinese adoptions. There is a lot of documents, 64 in all, that a family has to gather for an international adoption. While we got started on it right away, it still took us 10 months to get everything together and ready to send off to China. Each document had to be notarized, and then the notaries had to be certified by the Secretary of State for each state that they came from (for instance, Michael’s boss had his employment letter notarized in Colorado, so therefore we needed to send that letter to the Colorado SOS), and then you send the entire package to the Chinese embassy that covers your specific state to be authenticated. The document that takes the longest time and is the most difficult is the I-800 immigration form. A copy of your home-study and a large sum of money accompanies the I-800 form when submitted to Homeland Security. And then families just need to wait until they receive a notice for an appointment to be fingerprinted by the FBI. I think Michael and I waited about a month before receiving this appointment notice. We were told to carefully watch what we do with our hands two weeks prior to our fingerprining appointment because the slightest blemish could disqualify us and we would have to start all over. Our agency recommended that we don’t do any manual labor and out lots of lotion on and wear gloves to sleep in at night to plump-up our fingertips. Turns out, we were in Scandanavia the two weeks prior to our appointment, so we threw caution to the wind and it ended up being fine. About 2 months after our fingerprinting, we received our final approval on our I-800 application and were ready to move forward. However, we chose to hold off for a bit and here’s why…

Since the time that we signed up with the agency for the Chinese adoption, our wait period was pushed backfrom 18 months to 4 years. When I heard that it was going to take 4 years, I called our agency and spoke with our case representative. I asked her if they were expecting the wait period to get any longer, and she reluctantly - and after much prodding - told me that they are expecting it to get a little longer and then they expect it to get much better after that (because fewer and fewer families will sign up for Chinese adoptions).

We had already become concerned about the trend of our wait period getting longer and longer and Michael and I had heard that many families have back-up adoption plans. About 6 months ago, I started looking into domestic adoption and state laws, but Michael wasn’t mentally there yet, so I sort of dropped it. Then, at a conference, Michael ran into a colleague and they started talking about adoption. As it turns out, his colleague has adopted two children from a Texas domestic adoption agency and only had great things to say about the agency and the adoption process. Michael came home from that trip excited to tell me about their conversation and seemed ready to start to consider a back-up plan. Michael’s colleague and his wife invited us over one night to talk about their adoption experience. We spent several hours with them, met their beautiful children, and left there with the decision to look into the agency. I spent the next few days researching the agency, domestic adoptions and Texas state laws around adoption. Then we set up an appointment with the agency and ended up spending about 4 hours talking with the executive director and a caseworker. We were very impressed, and felt very secure signing up with this agency. We sent in our application and most of all of the paperwork (because we already had a lot of it from our China paperwork) that was needed the next day - mid-September 2008.

Our agency was able to do their homestudy mid-October and then I spent the next few weeks gathering pictures and information for our portfolio. On November 16, we attended the last requirment for our adoption process, which was an all-day seminar, and we gave our case-worker copies of our completed portfolio at that time. She told us that the next day, November 17, she had 3 birthmothers already to give the portfolio to and that they get about 6 interested birthmothers per week to whom they send family portfolios. That doesn’t mean that all birthmothers who receive portfolios chose a family and go through to complete the adoption. Our agency is relative small and completes about 12 adoptions per year.

All we have to do now is wait. I touched base with our caseworker on Monday just to see how our process is going. She said that our portfolio, along with other families’ portfolios, had gone out to several birthmothers but none of the birthmothers has chosen anyone at this time.

The next step in our Chinese adoption is to send all of our notarized, certified, and authenticated documents to China. However, when we do that, the paperwork accompanies another big, fat check, so Michael and I have decided to wait a little while before moving forward so we can see how everything goes with the domestic adoption. If it’s as smooth and fast (at least faster than China) as we think it’s going to be, then we may, at that time, decide to cancel our Chinese adoption, suck up the money lost, and move forward on a second domestic adoption.

We’ll see - and in the meantime, we’ll wait. :)