Who's Idea Was it That I Should be Born in New Jersey?

My parents are in trouble...

I am a Washingtonian! I swear I am. It's the only place I can remember living. Okay, so there's some pretty strong documentation that indicates I spent a bit of time early on in New Jersey, but hey, that was not my fault!

My mother is a native of Washington, shouldn't I get credit for that? My wife and both my kids are native Washingtonians. I like that word, Washingtonian. I like Bellinghamster even better, and since I've lived here longer than anywhere else, I claim that designation too! Hey, are people from Vermont called Vermontsters?

Anyway, my birth certificate has to be "Authenticated" by the Secretary of State of New Jersey's office.

Apparently you can just walk right in there on any business day and they'll take care of it for you while you wait. Isn't that convenient? What a great service! Maybe I'll just head on over there on my lunch break tomorrow and get that thing authenticated. Oh wait, their office is in Trenton!

Time zones, UPS, Return Postage....

Heavy sigh, count to 10

yi
er
san
si
wo
liu
qi
ba
jiu
shi

(that's counting to 10 in Mandarin)

So, I wonder if Kai will think of himself as a Washingtonian? As he grows up, will he remember anything from his life in China? I hope we can visit the SWI where he is living, and that we will meet the "aunties" who are caring for him. I want to have video for him to see as he grows up, so he can see and remember the people who have loved and cared for him.

Hmmm... His birth certificate is going to be from China. Man, I hope that's not a big problem for him when he's 43. I guess I'll quit complaining about the whole New Jersey thing...

Destiny and Adoption

Everything is happening for a reason...

This idea of destiny has really been on our minds a lot lately. This feeling that Kai is meant to be with us and that we are meant to be with him.

The concept of destiny is popular with adoptive families. It is reassuring in many ways. I recently read an article in the magazine "Adoptive Families" by Bonnie Perkel that talked about this, at one point Ms. Perkel says:

"

I spoke with some of my philosophy professors about the theme of adoption and destiny. One said that international adoption may be a new kind of conception, in which “a being may be going through whatever body they can” to arrive in the family and culture where they belong. In other words, destiny will bring them to a new kind of family not based on biology."

When I read this I thought her philosophy professors must be anthroposophists (Waldorf word, sorry). This idea of incarnating souls choosing a path into this world fits right in with their ideas.

Could this be what's happening? What explains all the coincidences and strong feelings we have around this?

I like the quote from the end of the movie, Forrest Gump, where Forrest says, "

I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it's both, maybe both happening at the same time."

I-600A Is Off To Yakima

Great News From Work!

School Specialty Announced a New Adoption Assistance Benefit Program.

This is one of those amazing things that comes along and makes you think, "maybe we are supposed to be doing this now!"

Today at work I got an email with the following information in it:

School Specialty, Inc. has established an Adoption Assistance Plan to reimburse Associates for all or a portion of the cost of adopting a child. The Plan will apply to adoptions that become finalized on/after February 1, 2005. The maximum aggregate amount that will be reimbursed for the adoption of any one child under this Plan, less applicable withholdings, is $5,000.00.

WOOO HOOOO!!!

This is SO cool!! Major kudo's to School Specialty Inc.!! Which is a pretty amazing thing coming from me as I usually have a pretty good rant on the evils of this corporation. So anyway, in recognition of their potential help with bringing Kai home, here's their logo:

And it's even linked to their corporate website. If you'd like to check them out, click away!

We Finished Our Home Study!

Monday was our home visit, and the boys officially gave their permission for us to adopt.

It's been pretty busy, so the blogging is slowing down a little.

Yesterday was Monday, and we had our home visit with our social worker, JoAnn. She has really been a great resource for us as she has so much personal experience. She has three adopted children of her own: a 24 year old son from Colombia, a 20 year old daughter from Korea, and a 15 year old son from Colorado.

She's very easy to talk with, and I know she's on our side, but I still would feel somewhat anxious when thinking about our interviews beforehand. When we actually did the interviews, I focused on relaxing and just being as honest and open. It was actually a very interesting process. It's kind of cathartic to talk to someone about your life. At times I would get somewhat self conscious, as the conversation seemed kind of one sided. I like talking about myself, but I usually try to keep things balanced, and ask questions about the other person. That's now how these conversations go.

Anyway, she came to our house on Tuesday afternoon. We had cleaned and cleaned and cleaned! I don't think she cared much about the cleaning though. She had us show her around, and she was very nice and complementary. Tina thought that she really liked our house. I think she probably did, but I know that she probably looks as lots of people's homes so the cynic in me can't help but think she might just have been being nice. She did want to see the labyrinth because she had read about it here on the blog. We talked to her about the neighborhood, and showed her the different things we had done to the house. We even dragged her into our bedroom closet to see how amazing it is. I think that it's hard to appreciate though if you haven't lived with it in it's prior condition for years and years.

She didn't seem concerned by the fact that there is no obvious nursery. She asked to see the fire extinguisher, and that we demonstrate a working smoke detector. Thankfully she had warned us she would need to see these. We had a working smoke detector, but we didn't have a fire extinguisher before, so we had picked one up over the weekend. we also had replaced the battery in the smoke detector, just to make sure. And we added two more smoke detectors: one in the kitchen, and one in the garage. Our friends Alex and Kim will be so proud of us!

All that left was her interviews with Cam and Ben. We still don't know exactly what she asked in those conversations, but they each lasted about 15 minutes, one on one, in the other room with the door closed. JoAnn told us that she asked each boy if we had their permission to adopt. This is a requirement of China's. She told us they both said yes.

I was really glad that this was part of the process. Because no matter how much time and energy the boys see us focusing on this, I worried that to them this might still be just some abstract dinnertime conversation. I think that having an outside third person take them aside and directly ask what they think about it makes it much more concrete and real for them.

So that's done! she will be sending the final draft of her report to the agency later this week. It will be translated and put into our dossier for China. Now that we have completed this we can apply for the I-600A, make appointments to be fingerprinted, and even apply for some grants.

And lastly, we asked JoAnn what she thought our schedule might be looking like now, She said we might be traveling as soon as May or June!

Nesting - or... Closet Excavation

A very busy weekend

On Friday Tina and I each met with our SW individually. We both felt like our meetings went well. JoAnn is very easy to talk to, and has been very helpful in providing information and perspective on international adoption. She scheduled her home visit for Tuesday; she'll meet with each of the boys at that time.

Now so you know, I think we keep the house pretty clean. We're not as compulsive about it as my sister, and we don't use a housecleaning service like my brother, so the place isn't spotless, but considering the amount of stuff we've got in the amount (or lack thereof) space we have, it's pretty clean. Okay, so that being said, a home visit from a social worker doing a "study" is probably more than enough motivation to kick the weekend chores into overdrive.

Our ultimate goal right now of course is to convert our "extra" room into a nursery. The problem with this is that this room is not really "extra". There is no extra space in the house. We don't call the room the "extra" room, we call it "The Green Room", because when we remodeled about 10 years ago, we wallpapered one of the walls dark green and decorated with green colors. We started jokingly referring to it as The Green Room. It eventually stuck, and now it is The Green Room. And that Green Room is used for everything!

Now pretty much everything has to come out of there. But where will it go? Time to rethink all the other storage spaces in the house. Step one, Scott & Tina's closet. This was a crazy idea, but it did need to happen. We bought 2 of these ClosetMAID Systems. Then we took everything (I mean EVERYTHING) out of our closet so we could install them. When we got everything out of that closet we rediscovered the walls had needed painting when we moved into that closet 18 years ago. Se we went and got spackle and paint. Good thing we got up early.

While the paint was drying we took the old dog house to the dump, and the old dresser out of our closet to GoodWill. We were ready to start installing the closet systems by about 4:00PM.

I wonder which of the language sets on the instruction sheet has all the instructions? It's not the English set. Since we had two full sets to install we actually did the second set correctly the first time through. We planned to sleep in the living room if we didn't finish the project in one day, but we pressed on through, till 1:00AM and got the whole thing put back together, and slept in our own bed. I have to say, it was worth it! Tina and I both go in the closet now and marvel at the space. It is very different than before. We took a second huge load to GoodWill the next day, and got through most of the housework. Thank goodness the SW's home visit isn't till Tuesday!

We are going to do pantry and the coat closet too. We are hoping that we will gain some more space there for relocating stuff out of The Green Room.

Soon to be "Kai's Room"!!

A Complete Set...

Cam's passport came today so now we have all four!

LOI in Translation! - Plus Nesting & Hand-Me-Downs,

We got an e-mail from Stefani, boxes from friends, and managed to dig a bit out...

We received the following email today:

From: Stefani
Date: February 3, 2005 10:58:52 AM PST
To: Tina Ocheltree <

tocheltree@mac.com

>
Subject: Re: LOI

Charlene is translating the LOI now so hopefully we'll see it off to China in the next couple of days. So glad the other Christine Ocheltree didn't hold you up and we are off and running right on schedule.

Stefani Ellison
China Program Coordinator
Children's House International

http://www.childrenshouseinternational.com

Fully Licensed in Florida, Utah, and Washington
Read about my incredible daughter Taisha at

http://www.waitingchild.org/taisha.html

This feels big, like it's really happening now. Someone is translating our letter into Chinese and it's going to be sent to the CCAA. I know that the wheels have really been in motion from the moment we sent in our application, but now the little steps we've been taking are starting to add up!

We have also begun to receive unsolicited hand-me-downs. One of Tina's pre-school parents brought her a box of clothes yesterday, and a woman I'm friends with at work brought me a bag of clothes her grandson has outgrown. It's funny looking through piles of little boy clothes.

We cleaned out a dresser to make room for the clothes. We are beginning to purge areas to make room. I think I'm going to try to take before and after pictures of the reclamation process in the "green room".

We ended our evening by watching some videos on China. We're down to the dregs of the library's collection. I'm going to have to start reading books now.

What Matters Most

I have really been enjoying writing this blog. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback, and I'm glad people are taking an interest in it.

In reading through the last several entries, some of them sound to me like I'm complaining. There is a lot of anxiety around the waiting, and the paper chase. It's easy to get caught up in the little petty details and lose perspective. Sometimes I forget what it must be like for Kai, and all the other little ones on the other side of this process.

Tina forwarded the following text to me. Our agency administrator, Stefani Ellison wrote this and posted it on a website. It makes me stop and think about why we are doing this, and helps me remember that bureaucratic mix-ups, walk-in clinic fees, and closet space doesn't matter. These are all just the little steps along the way. If we're going to get there, we need to keep focused on the goal, and not let the little stumbles along the way distract us.

So if I haven't made you cry while reading this for a while, I'll let someone else take a shot at it. This is from the perspective of someone who has been through the process of international adoption...
.

There is a reason that we call this an adoption journey. It’s because it is process and there is actually no end. Yes, the adoption is completed but its effects last a lifetime. Your mind is changed, your heart is changed, and you are no longer the person you were when you began.

So, when you come home and you don't fit in, you are right... you don't. No longer can you sit through pointless social gatherings and you become glassy eyed at the long spirited conversation your neighbors have about whose dog upset the trash can like it really matters. THINGS and the chasing, collecting and maintaining of those THINGS lose their glitter when you think of the sparkle that could be put on the face of a child for mere donated pennies or some of our time tying blankets. You lose patience with those who cannot understand the urgency of the task before you.... that children are crying. Children are dying. And the world keeps on shopping. Spending billions of dollars on things... that... don't.... matter...

When you look into the eyes of a child in the SWI you visit, your eyes never see the world the same again. Most of the world "doesn't get it" and to those that do, we must stick together because otherwise it’s a lonely place. For those of us who continually hear in the back of our minds the crying of the children left behind, we cannot rest because we cannot forget. There is no silence. Our friends, families, spouses may not understand and we ourselves may not understand why we cannot make the crying stop or make the urgency end. So we do what we can do. We give what we can give. And often, we join in the crying.