Roadblocks

We were scheduled to have our last visit with our social worker last night. She was going to bring the rough draft of our home study for us to look over and approve and would have had the final draft ready to go within two weeks. Early yesterday afternoon she called and asked to reschedule-for APRIL 15TH!!!@#$%! So now we will not see the rough draft until April 15th and will have to wait a few more weeks for her to finish the final draft. Waaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

We got fingerprinted this morning so we really are only waiting on this one last piece. I am so frustrated. I was so confident that we could be DTC in April, then resigned myself to May and now could have our DTC date pushed back until June. I feel like I could jump out of my skin right now. L keeps telling me that we knew there would be hurdles but darn it, my legs are short and I don't feel like I can cross over this hurdle right now. Time has taken on a whole new meaning for me since we started this process.

Ugghhh, I told you I hate not being able to control things.

What Did You Say?

I love my extended family. They are one great bunch of individuals. When I told them all that we were adopting, a few had their mouths open unintentionally, more began to speak enthusiastically, and a couple even cried (good tears, not holy cow are you absolutely out of your minds get the straight jacket kind of tears). The few that were shocked were classy enough not to say anything negative. I have two aunts that were present when I made the announcement. Boy do I love those ladies. Both were so loving and excited. I was engulfed in a room full of love.

After announcing to my family of our intentions and getting a really positive response I thought that I could tackle the world and everyone would be just as enthusiastic. I was so wrong. To anyone that is reading this (and you may or may not know who you are) let me educate you a little bit. We decided to adopt Koli (that's right, Koli-short for Kolaina-and I do not care whether or not you like the name, if I wanted to get your opinion I would have called you on the phone and invited you over to my house to have a let's name the H's daughter party, notice the lack of invitation?) our daughter, from China because that is where the Lord is leading us. No, I have no desire to have another biological child so that she would really be ours-Koli really will be ours. No, I do not care to "borrow" your daughter to see what I am getting myself into. Yes I am sure that we are supposed to do this even "at our age". No I have not lost my mind-okay maybe I have but I assure you that if I have lost it, it happened somewhere over the Atlantic years ago, but that's a whole different story.
(Sorry, I have the italic's thing stuck right now so the rest of this will be written like this unless I can figure out how to turn it off!)

To all of our family and friends that have been supportive-thank you, thank you, thank you. Your encouragement and support is what keeps us going some days. You all make the disappointment we feel at those that try to steal our joy bearable.

And as I was saying-I love my extended family-the classiest bunch of people I know. :)

I Love You/You Love Me...

I was thinking today of all of the birthday parties and celebrations we have to look forward to with Koli. This got me reminiscing about those types of events that we shared with the boys. One year my mother in law arranged to have Barney appear at D & W's joint birthday party. My boys were never into that crazy purple dinosaur and I tried to convince my mother in law that having Barney appear at a birthday party for a bunch of 7 & 8 year old boys was probably not such a great idea. She thought I was crazy, that everyone loved Barney. I still pity the poor soul that was in the Barney costume that day. Upon the announcement that Barney was in the building, W stopped in the middle of unwrapping a present, got this mischevious look in his eye that I knew meant nothing good was going to happen, let out a war cry that the finest indian chief would have been proud of and immediately ran to Barney, knocked him down and began pummeling him. The whole party erupted into utter chaos after that. L spent a good portion of the next 10 minutes pulling little boys off of the poor dinosaur.
I think about having birthday parties for a little girl and just can't imagine a group of ponytailed lil' sprites beating up on Barney.

The Social Worker Cometh

We had our first homestudy in our home last Friday (the first two were at different locations). I suffered from insomnia on Thursday night, probably from stress. I was stressed about everything-was my house clean enough, what should I serve for lunch, etc. I was so obsessed I went out and bought the little safety plugs you plug into the outlets that are not in use. That caused L and the boys to have a terrific laugh at my expense. They kept thanking me for keeping all of them from certain death by being tempted to put something, like a fork into the sockets that were not safety plugged up to that point. I know, I know, I'm becoming a crazed woman. So anyway, the social worker was here all day, she adopted her daughter from China 9 years ago so we got to watch her video which was quite interesting. I 'fessed up and told her that we had put our house up for sale and would be moving to our house on the water. Not such a great thing to say as I soon found out. She was adamant that I would have to be able to prove to her that we would be able to keep Koli safe from the water. I tried to get her to go take a look at the house while she was up here (she lives an hour away and we have to pay mileage) but she wanted nothing to do with my one stop shopping approach. So, she will have to schedule a visit to our new home once we are all moved in and safety features are firmly put in place. At least it will not hold up our process, we can send in an addendum to the home study after it is logged in to China. So after our day of emotional exhaustion (okay so the emotional exhaustion was only on my part) L didn't even break a sweat-he kept telling me that this was meant to be and the Lord was in control of this visit so I needed to stop worrying. One thing that we did find out which was pretty cool is that our social worker is a Christian. So all things worked together for good. One more visit with the social worker and our fingerprint appointment then it is time for me to relinquish all control. Relinquishing control is not something I do well,oh the lessons I am learning through this process.

Reality Sets In

So I was so very excited thinking I could pull all of these things together in time to be DTC by the end of April...
Enter reality. I have gathered all of the documents I need to gather, have our 3rd of 4 homestudy visits scheduled for tomorrow, have our 4th homestudy appt scheduled for March 25th where we will go over the rough draft of the homestudy, have our fingerprint appointment on March 26th but then I have to relinquish all control and put myself completely at the mercy of other people. Once we approve the homestudy report our social worker said that she will do everything she can to get our completed report back to us by the middle of April. We can't get our 171 government approval until the social worker sends the homestudy in to the approval agency so we are now looking at not being DTC until May. I'm so bummed. I used to laugh at the people in the adoption chat rooms that said that they would become emotional for no apparent reason just like when you are pregnant. Well, the last laugh is on me. I am an emotional wreck. I know that Koli is in China, and I am praying that she is at least getting her basic needs met. But I want to go get her now! I can't wait to hold that sweet baby in my arms and when I think that we have just really started this process it is enough to make me crazy. I am going to beg and plead with our social worker tomorrow to get her to try to finish our homestudy earlier in April but I'm not sure how successful I will be. I can't even bribe her with cookies since she is on a diet-how do I know this? I already broached the subject with her. So my lil' ole controlling self will have to learn to knit or something. I have thought of beginning a 100 wishes quilt but I know that I will need my mom's help to get that completed (the quilt is made by asking people to pick out a piece of fabric that is meaningful to them-either because it is something that they own,like a piece of an apron or a shirt, or a new piece of fabric that represents something that the person loves. Then they would write their wish on the piece of fabric and send it to me. I would combine all of the fabric wishes into a quilt and it would be Koli's 100 wishes quilt. That actually might be just the ticket to keep me occupied. We will see.