Adoption

Oh, it worked. This was like the third try for the pic. This is our son.

Adopting from Haiti is something we always thought we'd do some day. I had always pictured a little boy, like toddler age. But we got older and the girls got older and then I discovered that in adoption, anyone over age 2 is considered an older child and not many people wanted to adopt older children. So, older child it was.

We started thinking about adopting, again, and asking our home Bible study group to pray with us about adopting in July '05. The girls were always okay with it in the past when we had talked about it but when we brought it up to them this time, they looked at us like we were nuts. R finally broke the silence by saying, "Where are you going to put him?" Yikes! Well, we figured out that we could make a room in our attic and then Tim would make a spiral staircase. That all worked out well.

We began searching orphanages in Aug. '05 and were interested in 3 boys at one particular "O" (that's how I refer to the orphanage). I had printed out pics of the three boys and one little guy kept smiling up at me. He had already been at the O for a year. We committed to him in late Sept. but when his birth mother came for her visit she said no to the adoption. We were crushed at first but then had peace. We considered the other boys but had no peace with that. A few days before Christmas '05 the O director called and said the birth mother had changed her mind and wanted us to adopt J. What a Christmas gift!

We had our dossier to Haiti by the end of January '06. It took six weeks to get the file in to Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another 7 weeks to get out. Then they couldn't find the birth mother to sign papers that needed signing to get in to IBESR (Haitian social services). She finally came in early July and signed the papers and our file was in IBESR. R and I got to meet him in July '06. What a character! In Jan. '07 we were notified that there was a mistake on his birth certificate and it had to go to courts to be fixed. We finally got out of IBESR in March '07.

Our file entered Parquet and stayed until late May when we got the email that said congratulations, you are new parents. Since then, our file has been stuck in the Ministry of the Interior. The O had been told that their files would be signed out a few weeks ago and that still hasn't happened. So, here we are. We did get to visit J again in June and take him to his grandparent's. I'll try to get pics and vids up from that visit real soon. That's the story so far!