Fighting Against Hope

I was proctoring the exam for our geriatrics elective a few days ago and given I had to just sit there for about 2 hours for everyone to finish, I had some time to kill. Luckily I had brought my laptop with me and it was fully charged ( a rarity for me) and I started going through more of the guidebook on our agency's website. I ended up reading an article that talked about this concept, fighting against hope. It was like a lightbulb went off and I realized that is the perfect term to describe a lot of the feelings that go along with our situation.

It does sound a bit weird to say it, not quite as inspirational as fighting against cancer or something like that, quite the opposite actually. But for people who are pursuing adoption after infertility I think it describes a lot of how we respond and react to situations/ news. Adoption is a significantly different experience for those who cannot have children of their own versus those who can and have. I've encountered some parents who already have children who think it's completely the same, but no way is that true. I've found most people

DTC!

That is dossier to china for all of you non-adoption lingo experts. Just like every profession has their own jargon so does adoption and infertility. Lots of acronyms! After 5 months of paperwork, anxiety, and high usage of FedEx (we have our own account, we're that important) our dossier paperwork is complete, assembled and on it's way to China today!

It will probably take a few weeks for them to check it in and give us our log-in information. We need the log-in information to be eligible to be

They exist!

Our documents have returned from the US State Department today!

They were there almost 5 weeks and caused us major stress the past couple of weeks. We are just so happy they don't have to be redone....again. We have one document to be walked in to the State Department hopefully tomorrow or Thursday. Hopefully before that freaking government shutdown. Then to their last stop at the Chinese Embassy and hopefully have our dossier ready to send to China next week!

Stuff liked in March

1. An Idiot Abroad
I've developed the habit of searching the DVR guide each week using keywords, "china" or "adoption" to find television shows on either subject to record. Many people laugh when I tell them that, including my husband when he found out I was doing it, but I have discovered a lot of great shows about modern chinese culture and international adoption from doing this. This weekly TV planning routine lead to the discovery of this television show. The first episode was about China and my search picked it up.

The show is on Science Channel, no idea why, kind of like Ice Road Truckers being on History channel. Ricky Gervais produces it and basically sends his friend, Karl, on trips to the seven wonders of the world to experience the culture in depth. Karl is someone who has never really traveled outside of England and has a fairly narrow view of the world. The show is very funny and inevitably you will see other people you know in Karl. I'd watch it for just the scenes of Ricky Gervais laughing hysterically if nothing else.

2. The Moth
I'm a sucker for good oral storytelling. Probably because that was what I would have loved to have done if I had went my original career path of journalism. While This American Life is still my favorite, I've recently subscribed to this podcast and have really enjoyed it.

They hold events across the country and

I started crafting....ahhhhh!

I always think wreaths for doors sold in the stores are so expensive for fake flowers. It is also hard to find anything more modern and different. I had seen a post on another blog about making yarn wreaths. So I decided on my week off I would attempt to make one. It must be all of those years spent watching my mom craft wearing off on me! I must say it turned out pretty darn good!

I bought a foam wreath form, although I would recommend a straw wreath but keeping the plastic wrap on it before wrapping. The foam occasionally made a small mess. Simply wrapped yarn around the form, which did take awhile. I used some sticks from outside

Asian Food Night

I attempted to make some Chinese food last night. I have never made much Asian food in the past even though I cook quite a bit. I have received a few Asian cookbooks over the past couple of months and now that work has calmed down a bit I thought I would try a few recipes. I started out with some pretty basic things. I made potstickers. The recipe ended up making about 40 of them but once I figured out how to assemble them it actually went fairly quickly. I ended up freezing about half of them for later.

They had great flavor and we used plain soy sauce for dipping. To cook the potstickers you brown them in a bit of oil first and then pour chicken broth in the pan and almost steam them until all of the liquid is absorbed. Stand back when

Everybody makes mistakes

Hello, my name is Kristen and I am addicted to painting. I hadn't had my fix in awhile so last weekend I decided on Friday I need to repaint the living room and dining room, oh yeah and bathroom. I have officially painted every wall in the house at least once since moving in, some rooms 3 times. I like to pride myself on doing a fairly good job choosing colors but occasionally mistakes happen. There was the "disco dining room" incident a few years ago where I thought the paint treatment where you mix glitter in with the paint to give a shimmery, elegant look to the room was a good idea. Let me tell you, it never is. It ends up looking like a 5 year old did an art project on your walls.

Well this time I made another color mistake. Since we are getting a new kitchen in late April that will change the feel of the current kitchen, I thought the dining and living rooms all needed to have the same feel since they flow in to each other. Being that I am obsessed with gray I chose out a shade and proceeded to paint the entire living room. When I finally paused to look at it, it was a mysterious shade or purple. Maybe it had something to do with the yellow underneath it?

Waited for the morning and still saw purple! Ended up repainting everything to a lovely cream shade. Looks a lot better than

Buckle your safety belts...

That's all I have to say about the past couple of days on the "adoption rollercoaster." You fill in the words he is mumbling to himself. I would but there would be a lot of asterisks used. More to come later when I get more information hopefully tomorrow. The Vandermemes have sped up. I'm not sure why, but it's kind of scary. They may be taking on a life of their own.

Paperwork Phase I done!

We received approval of our application to adopt a child internationally within days of our fingerprints! It was a good last few days. We also attended the Holt International Gala on Saturday which was great. Another peak on the rollercoaster. We went today to Lincoln and sent off the last piece of paperwork we need for our dossier to go to China!

Us at Nebraska State Capitol

 

I'm at the Capitol!

There wasn't anyone around the outside of the Capitol today so we had to do self portrait. We left a few photos out which were very "senior picture-ish."Now we can just sit back and wait while our agency has all of the documents finish their "rounds" in Washington DC in the next couple of weeks. Then DTC (Dossier to China)! Adoption has its own set of acronyms and lingo too. Which means when DTC we have only a week or so before we are officially eligible for a referral and match!

I got my hands back!

I can now use my hands with reckless abandonment once again! We were fingerprinted this morning at Dept. Homeland Security for our I-800 application. See how excited we were about it.

We once again were going to take these cute action photos outside the building but then Adam mentioned someone recently got in trouble taking pictures of federal buildings, so we opted not to. True story. I think we need to start working some personality into our photos. Suggestions welcome. Our child will look back and think we were nerdy instead of the terribly hip 30 somethings we are. Ester, our camera hog, still made it in this picture. She's a diva.




We did manage this photo of Adam that looks a bit like the photos of Bigfoot in the wild. That is if Bigfoot wore khaki pants and programmed software during the day. We have a new digital SLR camera we are obviously still trying to learn to use. It's on our list "to-do before we go to china" so hopefully our photos will be improving!

Fingerprinting went as well as it can in a non-criminal situation. We had avoided the use of hot objects, yardwork, knives, and papers, for the past few days trying not to damage our pristine fingers. A little dramatic.....yes. I found a little cut on my finger as we were sitting and waiting. I think I was told by Adam to "stop messing with it" about five times while we sat there. He must be practicing scolding for our children. My fingerprints rolled okay on the machine but as she was doing them I asked if the machine was telling her whether they would be rejected......and she said no! They will send me a letter within 30 days if the system rejects them. Oh good, that is comforting to know. She did say she has been doing it for ten years and looking at them they would be just fine. She must have seen the panic flashing

20 Weeks

We've been on our adoption road for 20 weeks now, well in the grand scheme of things over 2 years. I have mixed feelings today. We should be finding out the sex of our child, preparing the room, or thinking seriously about baby names at this point. That is if we were doing this the old fashioned way. Instead the little voice in me that says "you know this might not work out, don't get too invested" is loud today.  The anxiety and frustration regarding the process has been getting to us lately. We have been able to do absolutely nothing for over 6 weeks now and the only things we can do in the near future is walk in and have our fingerprints taken. This part of the process has been slower than we anticipated. It likely will be at least another 6 weeks after our fingerprints that we can even think about having a dossier ready to go over to China. I think everyone has moments in this process where the anxiety can be paralyzing. I write these type of posts for them and for myself. Reading other people's similar experiences has helped me a lot through this, mainly by understanding I'm not a crazy person.

I've been thinking about all of the things that can either cause major delays or make us start all over again or completely shut the door. Things like one of us losing our job, documents

Baby where'd you get those curtains from

I have been redecorating our bedroom since I found this great fabric online. I ordered about 11 yards of it and shipped it off to my expert seamstress (my mom!) who created beautiful curtains for our room. I love graphic patterns and am obsessed with gray right now which fit perfectly into the scheme of our room. I have been searching for a chair to use in our room to sit to put your shoes on, etc. Something simple, small, and inexpensive and I found it!

We found it at a local antique store, not sure what it the name of it is. We call it the 50th and Leavenworth antique store. It was only $40 and was in good shape. Didn't require any recovering and it has really cool nail trim details which I'm not sure you can see in these photos but I love nail trim on furniture. Ester really loves it.

I have next week off for a "staycation" and am pretty excited about all of the home projects, spring cleaning, and cooking I have on my list. I did mean that sincerely, I actually am. We got a head start and cleaned out our closets once and for all. 

Six large trash bags and a trip to Goodwill later our closets are much more open. Sounds like I need to do some shopping....

Stuff liked in February

Another installment for February!
1. Giuliana and Bill Show
I know Adam is cringing at the thought that I actually purchased this reality series off of itunes to watch but he does that with a lot of television I watch. I knew there was an infertility storyline to their show this season and was curious. I was pleasantly surprised!

While they definitely live in a different world than we do, their struggles and openness with the emotional roller coaster infertility causes is very real, honest, and brave. In a lot of story lines on television that deal with infertility, it almost always works out in the end. The way it is portrayed typically does not show the real emotions that go along with it. Grey's Anatomy currently has a small storyline going about infertility and although I typically don't watch the show, I've been checking it out just to see how it is portrayed. Trust me, it's not as cute as Dr.McDreamy

What did you just say??

So this will be my first post regarding racial/ cultural issues, probably one of many over the next few years. A disclaimer, I do not aim to offend or antagonize anyone in any way, unless of course you are racist, and am just here to share my experiences and feelings as well as gain insight from other adoptive parents who have experienced similar issues.

I was leaving my job about a week ago and we have one of those rotating doors, I'm not exactly sure what you call them.....oh yeah revolving doors. Anyway I was waiting at the door to step into it to leave and a lady in front of me was trying to direct someone where to park their car and then come up back to the door for an appointment. At least that is what I gathered from the few snippets of the conversation I caught. What I do distinctly remember hearing was, "She doesn't know what she's doing. It's some stupid Chinese lady." 

I heard her shouting this back to someone inside as she was entering the revolving door in the "compartment" ahead of me. She got outside ahead of me and started walking in the opposite direction I was going. I stood there for a minute when I got outside and then just started walking to my car. 

I sort of did a double take in my head thinking, did she really just say that when I was standing here. Doesn't she know I'm going to have a Chinese child! As I was walking to my car I was so upset with myself for not having done anything about it. I could have chased after her and said........well that was the problem, I really hadn't thought about what to say. It probably would have ended up being obscenities angrily shouted at her given the "gut" reaction I had. Which would not have been the appropriate thing to do.

How is that whole adoption thing going??

Yes, another adoption update. I really do have other things in life I want to blog about but February is not the month I have time to incorporate all of those brilliant other bits of my life I know you've been dying to hear about. Just wait, it's coming, try to contain yourself. There will be more insightful pop culture commentary in the future, mixed in with more pictures of my animals and house.

Anyway... a few things have happened on "Mission: Get My Paperwork Done Right Now So I Can......Wait Some More?" I did have a few other titles I considered but they all included profanity so we'll stick with this one for now. I would hate for our child to look at this some day and realize we once used curse words.

We slipped out of work early on Friday for a romantic rendezvous at...

You better know where that is or you are officially kicked out of the state. Well, sadly that would probably be more true if I showed you a picture of Larry the Cable Guy and you couldn't name him.  Yeah Nebraska. We were going to take our camera and take all of these "super fun" (a.k.a really nerdy-see previous photos of us with FedEx envelopes) shots of us at the State Capitol so we could tell our child more about their journey to us, but we forgot it. We have to go back down in April so we will get another shot anyway. Plus this is more time to plan those candid shots. I truly don't think I've been in the building since

Holt Adoption Stories

Since I can't write much this month I thought I would post a couple links to two blog posts on Holt's blog on adoption from China. We hope these stories help others learn more and understand more about our process and about adoption from China in general. 

Waiting child adoption from Omaha - Great story about adopting an older child from China by a family here in Omaha. 

China Child of Promise Adoption- Short story of a family that adopted through the same program we are

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

That means Happy New Year in Mandarin...I think! Blogger wouldn't allow me to use the Chinese characters but it should be close. For those of you that speak Mandarin please feel free to correct me. The Chinese New Year kicked off last Thursday Feb. 3rd. Happy year of the Rabbit! We didn't end up getting to really celebrate it this year due to some other circumstances but we are hoping next year we will be celebrating it with our son or daughter. We plan to make it a celebration every year with family and friends to help celebrate their Chinese culture, so expect invites next year!

The Chinese New Year is a celebration that lasts 15 days and is similar in importance and some ideas as the Christmas/ New Year's season in the United States.  Each year has an animal associated with it and everyone has a Chinese zodiac animal. It does not exactly correspond to birth years. This is the year of the Rabbit. I am

I'll show you where you can stick your notarizations...

Ahhhhh government agencies handling paperwork, just who you want to have your fate as parents in the hands of. I looked up the definition of "red tape" on wikipedia, the oh so factual encyclopedia, and according to them it is:  a colloquial and derisive term for excessive regulation or rigid conformity to formal rules that is considered redundant or bureaucratic and hinders or prevents action or decision-making. It is usually applied to governments, corporations and other large organizations.  Our agency notified us after sending all of our "completed" documents that some of them were notarized improperly and would be rejected by the government. Turns out by "some" they meant all but two. So this very minute they are on a FedEx plane on their way back from the agency to us to get all of them redone. Anyone sick of the VanDerMemes yet...no...okay.

Although at this point it doesn't matter too much, other than

Stuff liked in January

I decided each month I am going to make a post at the end of the month of a few items that brightened up my month in case you want enjoy them too. It's good to reflect on the small pleasures in life sometimes, as silly as they may be on occasion.

1. The movie "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"-- It's been replaying often this month on....I think TBS or USA or some channel like that, of course it is the edited version. I would recommend the unedited version. But I had forgotten how much I love this movie. One of the funniest, sweetest movies. Plus Jason Segel reminds me of Adam sometimes.

2. cb2--- This is Crate and Barrel's "modern" store. I've ordered a few things from them in the past but this year's new catalog had so many cool things in it and affordable as well. A lot of stuff for our new kid's room is going to be coming from here.

3. Leinenkugel's Sunset Wheat Beer-- Awesome, flavorful beer good

I got me a FedEx account!

We are officially sending off our dossier documents to Holt tomorrow. All of them! After a couple of months of notarizing and running around collecting all of this important info and photographs the FedEx envelope didn't look too impressive. Here we are with them for the last time. Can you guess who the "fun" parent is going to be?

They get sent to Holt who get started state certifying and federally authenticating them. Also our home study was approved today. We can now apply to citizenship and immigration this week which is kind of the key piece we need to get on the waiting list. Satisfied high five....

Checkboxes

Adam and I had to fill out our final medical checklist for our home study this past week. We had looked at it several times and had talked with a local pediatrician who is an expert in reviewing adoption referrals for medical reasons, but it was still one of the most difficult things in the process thus far. So many checkboxes to mark or not mark. This was the real document that would be going in our file and that we would be matched with a child off of. It drove home the reality that our child would be coming home with one of these medical problems. I don't want to sound like we hadn't considered this and thought about it extensively, we had. We had agreed this was the path we wanted to take. However when the process starts to move along there is a heightened reality at every step. This was one of those times. I have a feeling impending parenthood elicits....

Angry Dance

Everyone needs an angry dance, I'm going to start choreographing mine as an outlet for frustration! Any moves you would like to see let me know.

Angry dance to my favorite FedEx dropbox each time....................eventually you might see me on the evening news.

Yikes!

We have entered the phase of our adoption process where we have nothing we can do to move things forward! It's much more frustrating than I would have thought......best expressed by James Van Der Beek. He's the new mode of feeling expression for our adoption blog. I'm sure there might be some of you wondering who the heck is James Van Der Beek, that's unfortunate. Ever heard of a show called Dawson's Creek......

Yesterday we finished up all of the paperwork we could do for the process and now we just wait for documents to come back to us and the government to say we can adopt. As I'm writing that it does irritate me a bit I have to wait for the government (and many others) to say I am fit to be a parent, but players gotta play the game I guess. As some of you may know, I am a slightly independent person and having to rely on others to get something this important done makes me feel a bit like Mr. Van Der Beek above.

Home study visits.........no Doug Wilson

Our first home study visit was on last Friday and our last one Wednesday and much to my surprise Doug Wilson did not show up with our social worker. I was hoping in addition to all of the deeply personal discussion we were going to be having it would be a mini-version of Moving Up (TLC home improvement show circa 2008) where the old owners love all of the changes we made. Despite no dramatic reveals the visits went really well!

It was really a painless process with a few tough questions but overall kind of.....fun? We got to talk about ourselves a lot.....who doesn't love that? Our social worker and her student are both really great and easy to work with. As you may know from reading the previous posts our social worker is actually the person we bought our house from (hence the "Moving Up" reference). I couldn't exactly read her reaction to all of the changes we made to our home, but overall it was quite positive! We had all of our smoke detectors working and a fire extinguisher which.......

You can adopt boys from China?

We have gotten this question/ statement several times.......so you will be adopting a girl right? Turns out there are quite a few boys in our program and really it is probably a 50/50 probability for gender in our specific China program. Being open to a boy may actually help us be matched quicker because a lot of people looking at China are looking for girls. It is true in the traditional China program for healthy children almost all are girls but many boys are abandoned for having any sort of medical problems. Below is a link to a blog post about adopting boys from the China Child or Promise Program!

How Did You Adopt a Boy from China?