No news yet.  As of Thursday our orphanage will have had our fully translated Dossier for two weeks.  I am planning on emailing our country specialist on Thursday to see if she thinking it will be days, week(s), a month, or several months before we have the orphanage “approval” she spoke about in her last email.  I thought we may have had it by two weeks since they have had our homestudy for a while already.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that no news is good news.

I’m sure they are busy with all the children and other couples arriving to adopt.  Congrats again to Melissa and Ryan who will be traveling this Saturday to finally meet their new baby.           I’m so happy for them!  Hearing about others getting their referrals and traveling makes me smile as I know families are being created and it reminds me that our day will arrive someday too.     :)  

We received an email from our country specialist last Thursday morning  11/5/09.

This is part of it.   The rumor is that they believe we may get our referral quickly  (a long story).  So I am really hoping to get a call this week or next.  I haven’t heard anything more yet. 

Dear Amy and Jason,

I just received word from our rep in Colombia,  that your dossier has been submitted to your orphanage! Now we will wait for their review of it, and approval. When I hear about “approval.” I will call you. Then we’ll wait for referral, timeline I can’t even guess at this time. When you get the approval, though, I will ask for her best guess, and we’ll see what she says. Each adoption house has its own methods, and then it depends how many children they happen to have ready for referral, but beyond that we just need to be patient and see how it falls. But this is movement and good news!

Two weeks has gone by quickly! It is funny to think we have only been “officially waiting” two weeks when we have been in the adoption process for 1 year and 8 months, and have been wanting to start a family for 2+ years prior to that.  To think that all that time doesn’t count when someone asks how long we are waiting it amazing.  Does it make our family/experience better if we are “officially waiting” for years to start our family? 

Our agency sent our Dossier to Colombia on 10/15.  We were told it takes about 3 -4  days for the mail to get to our Translator in Colombia.  So I am guesstimating they received it on 10/19.  Translating normally takes 2-3 weeks, we were told ours may be shorter as they already had our Home-study translated.  Being overly anxious and trying to picture every step our of process, even the steps we are not a part of, I am guessing our Dossier could go to our Orphanage as early as today but should be there no later than next Monday 11/9.

I have no idea how long the orphanage reviews the dossier.  I do know that they send us a letter when they have completed reviewing it as a Welcome, and I have heard they give you a new wait time in that letter. 

The fastest I have heard someone got an infant referral after submitting their dossier to a private adoption home in Colombia was Two weeks and in the last 6 months.  It is unknown if that couple requested any special needs or if that was a special circumstance.  Most likely it was. 

I have met one nice woman who was told the wait was 2-3 years in her letter from the orphanage after being told the wait time was 9-12 months.  Luckily it looks like the wait time for her won’t be much over 12 months, I am keeping my fingers crossed for her.

I am hoping the rumor we heard that we may have a very short wait time is correct. 

I started a countdown on my desk calendar so I would know exactly how many days our dossier has been in Colombia.  If we do not have our referral by the end of the year I’m thinking it’s probably safe to assume we are back to the standard wait time we were given on 12-18 months. 

I would love to have our referral soon, for obvious reasons but am trying to be patient.

Now, back to staring at my phone wishing it would ring… with a 651 area code that isn’t work related.

Now that we are officially just waiting for the phone to ring  I feel more comfortable researching for baby items since the wait for our child is no longer in my hands…

I did a lot of research on Cribs and we picked it up on Saturday.  It’s a Bassetbaby convertible crib (picture in a post below).  Customer satisfaction ratings were 4.7 out of 5 stars.  Only negative comments were a couple people said the headboard was delivered to them cracked in half or the paint wasn’t perfect.  We opened the HUGE and I mean huge box and our crib is in PERFECT CONDITION.  luckily the reviews I read also warned me of that so we came prepared.  Our friend Greg was nice enough to help us pick it up in his truck, and the box just barely fit!  There is no way we would have been able to get this in either of our cars.  THANKS GREG!  We were lucky it quit raining. I don’t think they wanted their pictures taken.

Once the crib is up and in our Outrageous Green Baby’s room I will post pictures.  

Now I am researching mattresses.   I found this useful article as a starting point. It’s a great article!

http://www.expectantmothersguide.com/library/EUSmattress.htm

I am guessing we will get THE CALL sometime in the next 2 weeks to 2 years.

We received this email this afternoon from our Dossier Specialist. 

Dear Jason and Amy,
 
I’m very pleased to write you this email announcing that your dossier has been sent to Colombia. Congratulations on passing this huge milestone in your adoption journey!
 
**** will continually be working with you thru your adoption process. If you have any question about the process, please feel free to contact us.  
 
Congratulations once again!

Since I am overly anxious as all pre-adoptive parents, I immediately emailed our Country Specialist asking how long it will take to have our Dossier translated before it is sent to our Adoption house.  I also asked how long the adoption house reviews it before it is approved.  I advised her I am just curious to know if this part of the process takes days, weeks, or months until all the reviews are completed and we are just waiting for THE CALL. 

…it took to work through the adoption process to the point of our Dossier being completed. 

I spoke with our Dossier specialist a moment ago and our Dossier is being sent to Colombia tomorrow night.   It will take 3-4 business days to get there. 

She commented on how much she LOVED the photos we sent and the way we set them up.  They ask you for 3-4 pages of photos showing your home, bedrooms, living areas, you and your spouse, and your family/support system. 

Once I started printing pictures I knew there was no way I could accurately show all that in only 3-4 pages of pictures (only 2 pictures fit on a page).  I sent 15 pages of pictures and felt like I was still missing a lot.   I included pictures of the playground at the park that we live next too and pictures of our dog.  They didn’t ask for these items but they are part of our lives and will be a part of our children’s lives.

I purchased a couple pads of fun paper at Kinkos (I tried scrapbooking stores and was very disappointed in their lack of selection for 8 1/2 x 11 paper options).  Kinkos paper was perfect and much less expensive.

I used double sided tape and stuck 2 pictures a page and labeled each picture and left a spot for the translator to add Spanish to the pages.  

She wasn’t sure how long it typically takes to get it translated and told me to contact the Colombia country specialist about that tomorrow. 

I’m big on setting proper expectations.  I would like to have an idea if it will be days, weeks, or months before our Dossier is with our adoption house. 

Now we relax, and wait for the crib order to come in so we can set it up in my new favorite room of the house.  The outrageously green babies room.

After a lot of research; I ordered our crib today.   It is a white convertible crib that will go great with the green walls and white doors.  I can’t wait to set it up.

It should arrive 10/21 – 10/28.   WE can’t wait!  We ordered just the crib out  This is a picture of a picture so the quality isn’t great, but this is the babys room so far.    Can’t you picture that white crib in there? I sure can!

A little birdie believes we may need the “Learning Friend Lily” and a bunch of baby stuff sooner rather then later.          

Learning Friend Lily was a must have when I found her over six months ago.  She speaks and sings in English and Spanish.

We are so close to having our dossier finished.  I can’t believe how long the last little things take.  If it has anything to do with adoption it will take longer than you expect.  I know this but keep thinking I’m finally smooth sailing. 

I scanned and emailed everything we had to our country specialist on 10/1/09.  She reviewed it and let me know on 10/5 that everything looked good.  We are just missing the Orphanages’s application (which I thought CHSFS completed for us as I didn’t have a copy to complete).  I received that and have been working on completing it.  The only copy they had was in Spanish (I don’t speak Spanish – yet) so they sent me an application for a different orphanage as they said it was almost identical.  So that was a bit challenging but it is finished.  

We received Jason’s Employment verification in the mail yesterday.  YIPPEE

Jason picked up our long awaited psychological evaluation last night and it was very nice and favorable for us.  (Jumps for Joy) It did have a couple small errors that need to be updated.  As it said Jason was born 9/11/56 and he was 31 years old.   Jason had his birthday on 9/26 and turned 32.   Jason is working with the psychologist today to see if we can get that updated and we are hoping he can pick up the original tonight.

Who knew taking pictures of our house, home, family, and us would feel so challenging.  Granted, I am pretty sure I am over thinking it. Every picture I wonder if they will find something wrong with it.   It has been rainy and dark every day the last week.  Last weekend, I ran outside the house with my camera when the sun almost peeked out of the sky frantically snapping photos as I was so scared they would think it always looked rainy and sad at our house.    When I printed them last night they still looked a bit grey.  I am really wishing now that I took pictures a few weeks ago when it was pretty and sunny out, but now it’s too late.   

Took pictures of our downstairs from all sorts of angles trying to get the best shots, but nothing thrilled me.  I still have to take pictures of everything upstairs.  The den, bedrooms, and bathroom.  I’m hoping to be able to do this tonight.

We spent a long time last night trying to take pictures of us that we liked.  We both were worried that we weren’t smiling right,  the flash on the camera make us look like ghosts,  or the dog or cat would run across as the timer ended and the picture clicked.   Normally I enjoy being behind the camera so most of the pictures we have are of Jason at events because I love taking photos.  So finding pictures with both of us in them and that we both like I am also finding challenging.    I’m sure I’m over thinking it, but I can’t help but worry that if they don’t like one of these pictures will that effect our adoption or what children they place us with?  I thought I would just snap a few pictures love them and we would have another thing checked off our list.

We are planning on overnighting everything we have finished tonight after work to our Dossier Specialist.  The pictures I will probably have to send to them tomorrow night.  By the way, they do not let you use your own 3-ring binder to submit your dossier to Colombia.  You just toss documents in an overnight envelope and they put it together.  I’m sure it will be fine, I just really enjoyed the idea of putting a lot of TLC into our dossier and having nice neat labels and plastic sheet protectors.   I’m guilty of overthinking it again.

All signs point to our dossier being completed this week and they will most likely mail it out to Colombia on Friday or early next week.

We can’t wait to be officially waiting.  I like the term paper pregnant too.

Everyone says it’s so hard to be waiting and not hear anything for months on end.  I’m sure it is but after over 1 year and 7 months of meetings, classes, trainings, paper chasing and bumps in the road, I welcome a wait with no calls or checklists that I have to follow up on.