Special Delivery!

Our friends have passed court and will be traveling very soon to pick up their daughter at the orphanage! They have offered to deliver gifts to our children from us and to take more photos of the children! It has been eight months since we have gotten photos! Unless someone hand-delivers packages to the orphanage, it is almost impossible to get gifts to our children due to the high cost of taxes. It will be an amazing opportunity and huge blessing to have trusted friends deliver these gifts and meet our children. Also, it will be a step in preparing our children's hearts for when we come for them. We are so excited that someone we know will be stepping foot into the orphanage! There are so many questions that we have, and due to the language barrier, our questions have remained unanswered. My friend and I have both daydreamed of how this meeting will take place. Praying hard that things go according to plan! I quickly created two photo albums for A and S last week when we knew that this opportunity might arise! Also, the girls picked out some hard candy for the children and made them friendship bracelets. We decided that it would be a sweet idea to take a picture of the girls holding the candy so that A and S could see that it was a gift from them. A's photo album busted in half late last night and all the pages fell out. Fortunately, the store reprinted another album within two hours for me. I made a mad rush to Walgreens at 11:30 PM to pick it up. Whew!

PREPARING

Once NOC was issued, I allowed the preparations to resume. The rooms are not complete, but they are getting there. It feels good to be doing something... Note the lack of leaves on the trees in the first few photos. Those were taken in January before we realized we were s.t.u.c.k.

Court

Our case arrived at the local court on August 13, 2013, and was registered on August 14th. We are going on five weeks without a court date being scheduled for our first hearing. That is very concerning as we continuously seem to experience delays anytime our case is in the hands of our children's state. We have discovered how to follow all of the court cases online, so I am back to obsessively checking the internet over and over again hoping for news. The Irish families were registered in court about two weeks after us, and they have not seen any movement yet either. Our assigned court does not seem to have any movement on any cases at all. It's like a black hole. We do know that our attorney is pushing our case and has spoken to the judge, so hopefully we will make it to the top of the judge's pile soon. We expect to have three hearings over a time frame of three months. Time will tell...

NOC! NOC! NOC!

One would think that word of the ARC approval would have been cause for relief and celebration, but it had the opposite effect on me for some reason. I experienced several weeks of health problems--heart palpitations, hyperventilating, headaches, toe going numb. It was a little scary, but the symptoms have gone away, so I guess it was all related to anxiety. The thought of going through another long wait with the NOC absolutely terrified me.

Fortunately, we were blessed with an immediate approval by CARA. Our case arrived at CARA for NOC--No Objection Certificate--on July 23, 2013 and we were approved on July 24, 2013. Our orphanage received and signed the NOC on July 30, 2013, and we were given the good news on July 31, 2013. The Irish families received NOC on the same day as well! Our paperwork is traveling together from agency to agency! Receiving the No Objection Certificate means that lnd!a does not object to our adoption, and the children are ours. They cannot be given to another family! Next step is court in the children's state.

THE WAIT...SARA Nov. 2012-July 2013

I can't even believe the title of this post. The Wait. One looooooog wait in a list of many waits. SARA.

Our paperwork went to SARA--State Adoption Resource Agency--in November 2012. A new step was added to the process that my friends didn't have to go through...either because they were working with a different state, or because they were slightly further in the process. But we got stuck in it. Each SARA has an ARC--Adoption Recommendation Committee--who scrutinizes the cases before issuing an RC--Recommendation Certificate, after which it goes to the federal level--CARA--Central Adoption Resource Authority--for NOC--No Objection Certificate. Confused yet? Because our children are considered special needs due to their age and sibling status, this should have taken 15 days, but it took 9 months. We don't know all the reasons for the wait. It took awhile for them to receive the Article 5 letters, and the approval cannot be made official without that...then our RIPA's (Registered lnd!an Placement Agency, AKA orphanage) license expired and had to be renewed (are you kidding me?!?)...then the kids had to get a medical done by the civil surgeon...then it was issued, nope false alarm...then it was issued, nope another false alarm...it was one thing after another.

This time was HARD. During these months, I watched all of my friends bring their children home. Their children were home and we had not even been given approval at the state level, let alone the federal...at any point in time, an lnd!an family could have taken our children from us as they have priority over Americans. In January, we began to prepare for the children. We found beds for the children (even drove to Nashville to pick up one that we found on Craig's List) which we started painting, we started working on their rooms, we started purchasing their clothing...Preparations were in full swing, and there was still time for them to be home by spring if lnd!a would have honored the timelines! By February, I knew we were stuck. By March...well, I don't even remember much about the month of March. Usually my calendar is booked, but in March I did one cake, one social event, one consignment sale. That is it. I slept a lot, prayed a lot, and checked email obsessively on the rare chance that we would have a message from our agent. After March, I snapped out of my daze. Instead of wasting entire months away, I wanted to make a point of enjoying the present and treasuring my family every day.

We experienced some confusing times during this wait. It reached a point where we weren't sure if God wanted us to act...to fight for our children...or if He wanted us to be still and allow Him to fight for us. Unbelievable potential contacts seemed to be coming out of the woodwork...congressmen, foreign business tycoons, high-ranking government officials in our children's state. I was angry and excited all at the same time that we might be one of those cases that would have to fight to get our children home. (Google the "Stuck" documentary by Both Ends Burning.) I did not want to fight... I wanted to love my children's birth country and have pride in their state. None of that panned out in the end, and thankfully, things eventually moved without our interference. One thing that became clear through the confusion is that this adoption is bigger than me and my desired timeline. I am a tiny speck in a much larger story. There are so many individuals, families, organizations, officials and more tied up in this process. The wait doesn't make sense now, but I trust that when we look back when the adoption is complete, that we will see a fuller picture of how God's timing was perfect. Already I can see that if our process had completed in the spring, there are three more families who have children in our orphanage that I would not have met. There are congressmen that would not have heard our frustrations with the Hague. We have had valuable time to mentally prepare our girls for real hardships that we may face when the kids come home. During this wait, our girls have developed a real desire for their siblings to come home, and they have experienced true excitement in preparing for them.

Even though this time seemed dark and dry with no end in sight, God revealed himself to me throughout the weeks. It seemed like every day I opened my Bible, He would have an encouraging word for me. Some that I clung to are as follows:
Proverbs 21:1 "The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will."
Exodus 14:14 "The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still."
Romans 8:28 "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
Mark 11:23-24 "Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
God was merciful in that while the wait in SARA was long, the weeks did fly by. Not sure how that worked, but I am thankful for it.

During the wait, we found two new amazing contacts--two families from Ireland who were also stuck in SARA! These families had been stuck for over a year! Our children are in the same orphanage, same state, same SARA, and their agent is the person who my agent is umbrella-ed under...What are the chances of THAT!!! We were able to share information with each other during the SARA process to get a fuller picture of what was going on. We were all three approved by the ARC around the same time-- July 2013. Praise the LORD! We thought this day would never come.

Remembering While We Wait: July 27, 2013 PARK WITH THE PARKISONS!

One of the most amazing parts of our adoption journey has been to experience the way that God has brought people into our lives just as we have needed them. God used our baby to plant the seed of adoption in our minds, God used Xavier to tug at our hearts and lead us to international adoption, God used Tiffany to explain the adoption process and to lead us to Jenny, Jenny connected us to the world of lnd!an adoptions and led us to our agent. God physically moved us from Atlanta into the middle of an adoption community just as three other families were also contemplating and choosing lnd!an adoption. We have had the amazing blessing of walking this process together. And now as I am writing this, there are new families entering the process to make a total of eight lnd!a adoptive families in our community. Having a supportive crew like this is nothing short of a miracle!

So about a year ago, God connected us with another incredible friend. Our agent told us to contact K because she was a genius at fundraising and she would be able to give us ideas to raise money for our adoption. K and I made a connection right away, and it felt like we had been friends forever. K is quite an amazing person--She is a former Miss South Carolina beauty queen and has also competed in the Miss America pageant. Speaking of amazing, K also competed on the reality TV show The Amazing Race--season 7--which happens to be my favorite season of all time! She and her teammate made it to the final episode, and they were one of two teams that I really wanted to win! How crazy is that! If someone would have told me that a random contestant on that show would come into my life years later and become a dear friend, I would have been so surprised! Anyway, the most amazing news of all is that K and her family are adopting a daughter who happens to be in the SAME orphanage as our two children! I almost cried when I found out! At that point, we were one year into the process and did not know of anyone else who had or was adopting from our orphanage (except our agent over a decade ago). Despite the support of our local friends (whose children were ALL together in the same orphanage), we felt a bit isolated in this part of the adoption until we met K. What a sweet connection! K and I have talked LOTS on the phone over the past year, but in July, we finally met each other in person! Her family was passing through from the beach headed back to their home in TN, so they stopped and stayed for the night. All of the Columbus friends knew K from our online support group, so she got to meet them in person as well. We had a picnic at the park which was loads of fun. K was also reunited with Jenny, who happened to be a childhood friend who had also connected her with our agent! Tanwar, an lnd!an soldier taking classes at Benning, joined us as well. For dessert, we had cupcakes and ice cream to celebrate Smita's 9th birthday. After the picnic, we crashed G's house and hung out in her playroom until 2 am. G had just brought home her little daughter from lnd!a and wasn't able to leave her house, so we came to her! I love these ladies so much!

The next day, K and her family came to church with us, then to the Taj Mahal for lnd!an buffet! YUM!

Another highlight of their visit was that her husband and Jeff got to spend time together and they hit it off! They are keeping in touch by writing each other on email, too. I'm so excited that Jeff has a new friend...these adoptive dads need someone to confide in, too.

We had been hoping that it would work out for us to travel with the Parkisons. As soon as their case would stagnate, ours would move forward...but then theirs would move and ours would stagnate. It is very clearly looking like they will travel before us as our case has not progressed in five weeks. As disappointed as we are that we won't be going with them, we are thrilled that they will finally be united with their daughter. We are praying that they will be able to meet our two children and deliver gifts to them for us! Other than being there ourselves, I can't think of a more exciting thing to happen!

Remembering While We Wait: January 22, 2013 ARTICLE 5 TIMES 2

We woke up to our Article 5 letters for both children via email from the U.S. Embassy in D3lhi! The letters were issued on January 18, 2013.

Article 5

An adoption within the scope of the Convention shall take place only if the competent authorities of the receiving State –

a) have determined that the prospective adoptive parents are eligible and suited to adopt;

b) have ensured that the prospective adoptive parents have been counselled as may be necessary; and

c) have determined that the child is or will be authorized to enter and reside permanently in that State.