Three Little Letters

If you read my blog during our last adoption, you know that the road to an adoption from Ch*na is marked with initials: PA, DTC, LID, LSC, TA. Ever since we committed to Li'l Bean, we've been racing to be DTC (Dossier To China).  Unfortunately, getting our dossier from my trusty purple accordion folder to Ch*na has not gone smoothly.  There was the little snow/ice issue at the FedEx facility in Memphis.  Then our agency suggested they hold on to our dossier for a few days because offices in Ch*na were closed for Ch*nese New Year.

Last Friday morning, our agency was getting our dossier ready to go when they ran into a computer glitch. They were hoping it was a temporary issue, but the glitch was still there Friday afternoon.  And Monday.  Even after the staff in Ch*na went back to work Wednesday, our file was glitchy.

Thankfully, our case manager loves me even when I email her 178 times a day has superpowers.  This morning she emailed to let me know that she was finally able to access our file in Ch*na's computer system. So, as of this afternoon, we have some new initials.

We are FINALLY...

Can you tell one of our li'l superheroes is pretty excited about being one step closer to meeting her sister? 

Ice Storms and Shipping Delays

The paperwork for this adoption is trying to kill me.  I thought I could breathe a big sigh of relief when our dossier went off to the Ch*nese Consulate or at least when it got picked up from the Consulate and overnighted to our agency.  Not so much.  

Our courier retrieved our dossier on Monday and handed it off to FedEx Monday afternoon.  It was supposed to arrive at our adoption agency sometime Tuesday.  Tuesday afternoon I got an email from our case manager saying that our dossier had not arrived.  When I checked the FedEx tracking, I saw something like this.

"No estimated delivery date available at this time"?!? That is not a message you want to read in connection with a stack of papers that you have shed blood (well, almost), sweat, and tears over.  Apparently a giant snow/ice storm hit Memphis this week and caused a "sorting issue" at the FedEx facility.  Ack!

So, Tuesday night I had a minor emotional breakdown and may or may not have chosen to drown my sorrows in two bowls of snickerdoodle popcorn.  I actually freaked out less than I could have; perhaps because this process has already been filled with more surprise paperwork issues that I could possibly have anticipated.  (All of this is totally preparing me to be a better mom of four kids, right?)

Thankfully, our package escaped the snow and made its way to our agency Wednesday afternoon. Our case manager was sweet enough to email me to let me know it was safely in her hands.  Maybe now I can breathe that big sigh of relief.

They aren't expecting any hurricanes over the Pacific next week, are they?

The Amazing Officer B

If you read this post, you know that February didn't start off on a productive note.  After lots of incredible progress in January, the beginning of February involved more redoing than doing.  In fact, after I wrote my sad post, I got a call from our courier saying that yet another document had been certified incorrectly and had to go back to the Secretary of State.  Another document to fix, and I was already losing my mind over the fingerprint appointment letters that still hadn't shown up.

Fast forward to Friday, February 6.  I rushed home from school pick-up, absolutely certain that the long-awaited fingerprint appointment letters would be in our mailbox.  After all, it had been 15 long days of waiting, and U.S. Immigration had pretty much promised 10 to 14.

The mailbox was empty.  Again.

I confess, all my determination to wait patiently left me.  The clock was ticking ever closer to Ch*nese New Year, which would mean delays in getting our paperwork through the final stages of certification.  It just wasn't right that getting fingerprint appointment letters in the mail was taking longer than our entire twelve-page home study.  (I mean, you should be able to print and mail a one-page appointment notice infinitely faster than you can write a short novel about someone's entire family, right?)

So I called U.S. Immigration, and in my best my-daughter-needs-heart-surgery voice, I told them that this process was taking way. too. long.  We had a letter from a pediatric cardiologist requesting that they expedite our case because of our daughter's need for surgery; however, I'd been told I couldn't submit it until we got fingerprint appointment letters.  Thankfully, the Immigration Officer who answered the phone gave me permission to send my expedite request.

I quickly pulled up our expedite email, which I may or may not have written earlier that week and saved in my Drafts Folder.  I glanced at the time as I sent it.  It was after 4:00pm on a Friday afternoon; I couldn't imagine there was any way someone would have time to look at my email, let alone actually respond, before the weekend.

About 32 minutes later, my phone rang.  It was Jeremy saying that the Immigration Officer assigned to our case had read our email and responded. The Amazing Officer B had called him to say that she'd gotten our email, that she would be working the next day (Saturday!), and that she'd be glad to email our fingerprint appointments if we did not receive them in Saturday's mail.  What?!?

I mentioned before that we've been blessed by some pretty awesome people who have walked with us in one way or another on our adoption journeys.  The Amazing Officer B is absolutely one of them.  True to her word, she called the next afternoon.  Our letters still hadn't arrived, so she sent them via encrypted email with some totally adorable password like "sweetgirl".  Not even kidding.

With appointments in hand, we were able to drive to our state capital that Monday to walk-in for fingerprinting.  (Our actual appointments had been arbitrarily assigned for a date later in February.)  No one in the office mentioned we were there on the wrong day, and we were in and out in less than ten minutes.  It was a fun little date, and we even had Cheesecake Factory gift cards to pay for a super yummy lunch.  (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

Officer B said she should have our fingerprint results in her computer by the next morning and would email our approval as soon as she finished it.  Getting the approval certified would involve another trip to our state capital (about five hours roundtrip), so I made sure my schedule was clear for the next day and found a friend to hang out with my boys.

Then things started to get crazy.  Before bed, Li'l Dude had a fever, so I canceled the babysitter.  The boys would just have to join me on my adventure across the state.  The next morning we hung out at home, waiting for the phone to ring.  When it did, it was Jeremy with bad news.

The Amazing Officer B had our approval ready, but there was an issue with our home study.  She needed three words taken out.  Easy enough, right?  Except those three little words were on the notarized signature page.  She would need our social worker to make the changes, resign the page, and have it notarized again.

Thankfully, our social worker is also amazing.  She had a new page emailed to Officer B in no time flat.  There was just one little problem.  Now that we had a new home study, I needed a certified copy of that too.  Which meant I now needed to drive to our social worker's office (an hour away and not any closer to our state capital), pick up a new home study, print our Immigration approval, and still make it to the state capital by 5:00pm.  Yikes!

I decided to head to our social worker's office, hoping and praying that our approval would be done and could be printed when I got there.  Just as I was leaving town, I got an email from Officer B.  Our approval was done, but their entire computer system had crashed.  I'm not kidding.  I truly didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this point, so I tried really hard to laugh and set off for our social worker's office anyway.

Over an hour later, I had our new home study but still no Immigration approval.  I also had two little boys and a lot of Chicken McNuggets in my car and a R-E-A-L-L-Y long drive ahead of me.  I decided to email Officer B to see if she had an update on the computer system.  This is where her superhero alter-ego kicked in, and she completely saved the day.

She started emailing me regular updates (including smiley emoticons and bold lettering and a profuse apology).  Then, the system came back up and she emailed our approval right as I pulled into a friend's driveway.  A friend, a printer, an emailed approval...perfect.

Just after 2:00pm, I hit the road...again.  This time I had all the paperwork I needed in my trusty purple accordion folder.  (That thing has been with me on more trips to the Secretary of State than I can count.)  We made it to the state capital with time to spare, and enjoyed leftover Cheesecake Factory yumminess and some Incredibles on our drive home.

About eight hours after leaving our house, Li'l Man, Li'l Dude, and I made it back.  The day had started out disastrously; but, thanks to the Amazing Officer B, everything worked out in the end.  The rest of our paperwork was certified and on its way to the Ch*nese Consulate.  It should be picked up tomorrow and on its way to our agency before the closures for Ch*nese New Year.  Phew!

Once again, I'm left feeling incredibly thankful for people who have gone above and beyond to help us bring our sweet girl into our family.  All of my you're-so-amazing emails can't really express how grateful I am to people like our social worker and the Amazing Officer B.  The things they have done, even the things they might consider small or routine, put the wind back in my emotional sails and make this roller coaster of a journey just a bit easier.

Oh, and that's not all. Officer B has already offered to expedite the second part of our Immigration approval.  I told you, she's amazing.

Li'l Bean's Broken Heart

Some of you may have noticed that our adoption process has been moving along rather quickly.  (Or maybe you've just noticed that I've been making the 2-1/2 hour drive to our state capital about every other day lately.)  We officially started this adoption from scratch on December 30.  In spite of some paperwork drama, our entire dossier should arrive at our agency -- notarized, sealed, and ready to go to Ch*na -- on Tuesday!!!  

Part of our rush is because we absolutely cannot wait to hold this sweet girl in our arms.

(Can you blame us?  Look at the sweetness!)

But there's another reason, too.  As I mentioned before, our Li'l Bean has an unrepaired heart condition.  Most children born with her heart condition have surgery when they are between four and six months old.  Our girl will be two in May.  

Being as this is CHD (Congenital Heart Defect) Awareness Week, I thought it would be an appropriate time to share a little more about our Bean's broken heart.  Li'l Bean has a condition called Tetralogy of Fallot or TOF.  People with this condition usually have a combination of four heart abnormalities (although some have only three and some have even more).  Her medical records are a little vague, but it appears that Bean's heart has five defects.

Here's a quick summary of what's going on in Bean's heart.  (I'm a newbie heart mama, so this is a very basic description.)

1.) Pulmonary Infundibular Stenosis - The outflow tract of the right ventricle is narrowed.  This makes it difficult for blood to leave the right ventricle.

2.) Overriding Aorta - The aorta is the largest blood vessel in the body and usually connects to the left ventricle.  In Bean's heart, the aorta is connected to both the left and right ventricle.  Thus, it is said to "override" the right ventricle.

3.) Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD) - This defect means that there is a hole in the wall between the two ventricles in Bean's heart.  This hole allows oxygenated and unoxygenated blood to mix in her left ventricle.

4.) Right Ventricular Hypertrophy - The heart is a muscle.  Because of the narrowing of the tract leaving the right ventricle, the wall (muscle) of the right ventricle works overtime to pump blood through that opening.  The muscle is thicker than normal because it is working so hard.

5.) Left Pulmonary Artery Stenosis (This defect occurs in 40% of people who have TOF.) - I'm not 100% sure that Bean has this abnormality, but it appears that she might.  This means that her left pulmonary artery is narrower than it should be.

What does this all mean?  Basically, the combination of defects in Bean's heart are working together to hinder the flow of oxygen to her body.  TOF is a cyanotic heart defect, meaning that people with unrepaired TOF have low oxygen levels and often appear blue because their body is receiving a mix of oxygenated and unoxygenated blood.  This lack of oxygen is exacerbated when they are upset or exerting themselves.  Li'l Bean is cyanotic and has clubbing (abnormal curling) of her fingers due to a lack of oxygen to her extremities.  

After we requested to review Bean's file, we got this sad little video.  (Yes, we have a real live video of our daughter!) In the video, Bean is very upset.  You can see how blue she is (especially over her upper lip).  If you look closely, you can also see the clubbing of her fingers.

The Child Advocacy Specialist from our agency emailed the video to me the week after Christmas.  The first time I watched it, I just knew Bean was ours.  I remember I was walking into Target and clicked on the link right away.  It seems strange to see a little one screaming her head off and think, She's my baby; but that's exactly what I did.

So...what does the future look like for our Li'l Bean?  First, she needs to surgery to fix her little broken heart.  Hopefully her heart can be repaired in one surgery.  She might need a series of surgeries.  There's also a slight possibility that the doctors will be able to help her heart but not fully repair it.  And, while we certainly hope this isn't the case, she's ours no matter what.

And after surgery? Well, maybe she'll be an Olympic gold medalist like this guy.  (Betcha' didn't know Shaun White has repaired TOF.)

Photo Credit: www.shaunwhite.com

Photo Credit: www.theoldergamers.com

Or maybe she'll just be a little girl who loves to ride bikes and play princess and get into all kinds of mischief with her big sister and big brothers.  A little girl who is loved.  A little girl who knows what it means to be part of a family.

We can't wait to make her part of ours.

Slogging through the Paperwork Jungle

I've had a yucky week...and a half.  It's absolutely February's fault.  (Oh how I despise you, second month of the year.)  I admit, the snow-covered world outside my window is breathtakingly gorgeous.  And I love it...for the entire month of December.  And January.  By the time February gets here, my toes are itching for flip-flops, and I just want to go camping.  Whoever decided to make February the shortest month of the year is one of my heroes.  Seriously.

It hasn't helped that all the brilliant progress we were making on our paperwork has come to a complete standstill.  Instead of trekking through the paperwork jungle, I pretty sure I'm getting strangled by an anaconda.  Or drowning in quicksand.

When I last posted, our U.S. Immigration application had zipped across the country and been received at their lockbox.  The next step is for them to send us an appointment time to be fingerprinted.  (Because, you know, our fingerprints have gone all spy ninja since the 14 times we were fingerprinted for our last adoption.  Just sayin'.)  In spite of my dramatic daily sprint to the mailbox, the mailman hasn't come through for me yet.

So...that stinks.

While I wait ever-so impatiently for that appointment letter, I've been trying to finish up a few other loose ends with the rest of our dossier.  Last week I collected all of our out-of-state documents and prepped them to go to a courier in D.C.  Both our birth certificates and our marriage certificate are from out-of-state, so they can't be processed by the Chin*se Consulate that oversees our state.  Instead they have to go through the Chin*se Embassy in D.C., which requires that they first go through the U.S. Department of State in D.C.  (Complicated, I know.)  

So far, these documents had been ordered from our birth counties and then sent back (or carried in by my lovely mom) for authentication from the Secretary of State in our birth states.  I had then wrestled them into a package with two checks, a money order, a request form for the Consulate, copies of our passports, a cover letter for the courier, two sets of copies of each document, and a return F*dEx envelope.  (I managed all this in spite of having a total breakdown getting a little anxious when F*dEx.com would not open on either computer in the church office as 5:00pm rapidly approached.)

Our three little documents flew off to D.C. overnight.  The next day, someone posted in one of my adoption groups that birth certificates and a marriage certificate are no longer required for families who have previously adopted from Ch*na.  I frantically called my agency, and they confirmed this change.  Really?  I mean, I'm all for less paperwork; but I would have loved, loved, loved to get that tidbit of information 24 hours earlier.  Thankfully, I contacted the courier in time so our two checks, our money order, our birth certificates, our marriage certificate, and our return F*dEx label are now flying back from D.C. after their fun little field trip.

Not to be deterred, on Monday I collected all our other documents to go to the Consulate that oversees our state.  I printed/copied/dug up pretty much all the same things I had sent to D.C. and read over the courier's instructions 47 times.  One line said, "Please check your authentication pages from your Secretary of State, as they do make mistakes."  I chuckled at this one.  Surely that wouldn't be necessary.  I have total confidence in my Secretary of State to correctly print the notary's name and the date the paper was signed on the authentication sheet.

But, I'm a tad OCD.  So I checked.  And two of our nine documents were authenticated incorrectly.  The authentication sheets list the woman who signed the document instead of the notary.  Ugh.  I guess I'll be taking a little field trip to the Secretary of State's office.

So, tonight I need to remind myself that these are all all small things.  They're easily fixed.  When it comes to bringing home our girl, I can drive to the Secretary of State one. more. time.  Or fill out one more paper.  Or send one more F*dEx.  I need to ditch my stinky drowning-in-quicksand attitude.

In that light, seven of our ten documents are headed in the right direction. My mailman will show up with that fingerprint letter sometime soon.  And February?  Well, it's already 14% over.

A Little Christmas Surprise

We've been talking about starting the adoption process again for awhile.  Over the last 25 months we've added two adorable boys to our family, bought a house that had been empty and unloved for a very long time, owned two houses at once for a very long time, listed and then tried to sell a house for a very long time (showing a house with three preschoolers is pretty much at the top of my list of 10 Least Favorite Things Ever), and fixed the garage door/carpet/drywall/toilets/cabinets/appliances/lighting/doors and more in our new house.  So, even though some of us have been sick with baby fever for quite a while,  those of us who tend to be a little more rational stinkin' slow to get on board suggested that maybe waiting to bring another child into our family would be a good idea.

For the last few months of 2014, Jeremy and I talked and prayed about the right time to begin the adoption process.  We included our kids in this discussion, and they were not slow to get on board.  (Li'l Miss has been asking for a sister pretty much since we got off the plane in 2012.  Li'l Man keeps announcing that he wants five boys and five girls, while proudly holding up both hands full of fingers. Li'l Dude...well...we're counting on him getting used to the idea.)  As a family, we decided to move forward at the beginning of 2015.  

Then we got a little Christmas surprise.

On Christmas Eve, our agency posted the files of several newly assigned waiting children.  When we woke up on Christmas morning, even more little ones had been listed.  One of those sweeties seemed like a good fit for our family.  (Actually, most of them did, but someone is cutting me off at one this time.)  We asked to see this little one's file and received it right away; because the awesome ladies on our adoption team work to find kids families even on Christmas.

On December 30, we officially told our agency we were ready to begin the adoption process, and that we would like to ask Ch*na's permission to make that little Christmas baby part of our family.  We've been quiet about this news because we've been waiting for Pre-Approval (PA) from Ch*na.  This is the first step in the process of adopting a specific child (basically the "matching" step).

This afternoon we got a call from our adoption agency.  They said that we have officially received PA for...

...OUR DAUGHTER!

I am beyond thrilled to introduce you to our Li'l Bean (who, in our unique family tradition, will probably not have an actual English name until the day we meet her).

Li'l Bean is 19 months old and has an unrepaired heart defect (which I will share more about in another post).  She has stolen our hearts, and we can't wait to meet her.  We are working hard to keep our process moving along.

In the meantime...girl names, anyone?

Baby Steps

Our happy little F*dEx envelope was sent on its way Wednesday evening and arrived at the U.S. Immigration lockbox yesterday morning!  (An ice storm that canceled school did its nasty best to keep me from picking up our finalized home study on Wednesday, but this mama wasn't going to be stopped by some slippery roads...Mom, just pretend you didn't read that part.)

Next step, Immigration approval!  This part of the process is super unpredictable and can take anywhere from just over two weeks (very optimistically) to 2-1/2 months (please, no!).  Thanks for your prayers and support as we take the next step on this adventure.