Sad News :*(

On Wednesday last week we were informed that we were not eligible to adopt Eileen. This is very frustrating and sad, since we have worked so hard to get out paperwork finished to submit to USCIS and SDA in Ukraine. We literally had one document left to apply for - the USCIS immigration approval. Then we could have submitted our dossier for translation and SDA approval. We had every other piece of paper either in hand or in process (i.e. Indiana State Police clearance and FBI checks that are down in Indianapolis right now). It has torn our hearts out to have to walk away from this little girl. If it weren't for our amazing friends who have checked up on us and coaxed us from our house over the weekend, we'd still be hiding out and crying.

Eileen's room is now "the spare room". Eileen's stuff is now earmarked for various relatives, since we're not really sure what to do with it all. Eileen's sweet little picture is still stuck to the front of my 3" thick binder of adoption paperwork, though. We would sort our documents and pat her picture on the head some nights, pretending she'd know how hard we'd been working. I can't bring myself to put that picture in the trash just yet.

We have parted ways with the adoption ministry we found Eileen through. We hope to find an alternative agency after we take a break and do some more research. We have appreciated everyone's support and look forward to sharing non-adoption family updates until we figure out what the next step will be.

Every Little Bit Helps

We just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has donated to help us bring Eileen home. Reece's Rainbow handles the donations, so we do not know who donated what, but we wanted you to know we noticed and we appreciate it! International adoption is a huge expense, so every little bit helps.

Kiri is working on updating out checklist, so stay tuned to see what's left. :)

Fingerprinted and Posted

Kiri and I made a trip to the Mishawaka Police Station yesterday on my lunch hour and each had two sets of fingerprints done. She then mailed them off to the Indiana State Police and the FBI for our police clearance/child abuse background check. USPS tracking says they should arrive at their destinations tomorrow.

We passed!

Score. We are one step closer to Little Miss Eileen! Our social worker came this morning and talked to us, gave us some more paperwork to fill out and then checked out the house. She also talked to us a little bit more about the international side of the process and the classes we'll take with the home study agency later on this summer. We're really glad to be working with somebody who is understanding and helpful because (as we told her) we'd heard a lot of home study agency horror stories lately. It was also nice to hear some encouragement about adopting from the country Eileen's in... it's notoriously tumultuous and often frustrating because of all the changes they make to the process. But we'll get through it and we'll have support through the agency afterward if we need it.

Ok, I don't know about you all, but I'm ready for a list of what's left to do paperwork-wise. Here goes:

-State police clearance (going Monday for fingerprints)

-FBI child abuse clearance (going Monday for fingerprints)

-Send application to USCIS for fingerprint date and orphan immigration approval (cannot do until home study is complete/printed/in-hand)

-Get cats updated on shots and send those records to the social worker

-Fill out financial background and send to the social worker

-Write individual autobiographies and send to the social worker

-Get a letter/statement of Wylie's general health and his immunization record print out (will call Monday to add to our other medical stuff we're picking up)

-Pick up medical forms from Dr's office (hopefully this week)

And last, but not least:

-Get ALL finished paperwork sent to Indianapolis for apostille.

Once that's all done, we can mail our dossier off! Well, once we do some fundraising too. More on that this coming week. Tomorrow's my 29th birthday and I'll be taking the day off from adoption paperwork and enjoying my two favorite boys, Dan and Wylie. We're due for some stress-free family time!

Happy Friday the 13th!

Luckiest. Day. EVER. We got our apostilled Child Specific Petitions (CSPs)and Power of Attorney (POA) forms back from Indianapolis today. This is especially exciting because they just left my hands on Monday. Now we're just waiting on the rest of the paperwork we sent in separate batches to arrive. Our stateside coordinator approved the CSPs and POAs to be sent overseas as soon as we can shuffle ourselves over to DHL! :)

Our home study visit is in the morning! Wish us luck. We're so nervous. There's probably no reason we'd outright fail it, but ya just never know what to expect when you're new to a crazy process like adoption. We'll update after our visit is over to let you know if we survived. ;) Ha.

On a bad note, our blog host (Blogger) had a system-wide failure on May 11th and was down until today, meaning they lost posts and comments made during May 11th and 12th. If you think you may have commented during this time and are waiting on a reply, please check and see if your original comment is still "alive". If it happened to get swept away in the Blogger crash, feel free to re-post it or email us and we'll get back to ya as soon as possible.

First batch sent for apostilles!

Sent out documents to Indianapolis on Monday for apostille. We'll see if I get an angry phone call/email/letter from the Secretary of State about any of our paperwork, but I really hope everything's OK! The notary signed off on everything and our coordinator double checked us so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Once we get some of the paperwork back from Indy, we'll be sending it overseas for the Eastern European Reece's Rainbow team to hold on to while we work on more documents. At least we're getting a good handle on paperwork we are in control of!

Dan and I hope to be getting our first big giveaway up soon. We got some great suggestions and hopefully after our home study visit on Saturday we can get that under way!

On pestering your local notary...

We took 40+ pages to our bank today to get notarized after Dan got off of work. It felt great to get that chunk of papers taken care of, let me tell you! We have some documents to get apostilled and sent overseas ASAP (our coordinator approved them tonight, so those go out to Indianapolis for apostille the morning), the rest are regular old dossier/home study documents that we're compiling. The notary we had this evening was very understanding about the big stack of papers I dragged out of our 3" binder and flopped on her desk. While they didn't randomly provide cookies for Wylie to gnaw on like the last time we took a trip to the bank to get stuff notarized, he was largely well-behaved and cheerful while Dan and I scrawled our names... a few dozen times. ;) Now we just have our medical docs, home study/social worker docs, immigration approval form, state police background check forms, and Dan's employer letter left to work on for the dossier portion. And we can only get a couple of those things notarized ourselves - the rest have to be sent to us with the notarization/certification on them. Yay for progress! The "paper baby" is growing fast.

Actually, Wylie was a happy camper for somebody who went back to the audiologist and got things poked in his ears again (boy, was that ever fun for mama too :P). He got to go to the park TWICE today in return for being such an awesome Boo Bear. Once in the morning with my friend and her daughter while we all walked (we got sunburned!!!! OUCH.), then he got to go again in the evening with the new playgroup. Hopefully by the time Eileen gets here we'll have exposed him to enough other kids that he's cool with having somebody else his age in the house. Crazy talk? Maybe so. It's worth a shot though.

Paperwork Progress

As Kiri mentioned in her last post, my passport finally showed up. That means that we were able to input my passport number on the umteen million forms we need to fill out before we can have them completed and notarized.

Today Kiri talked to Bev at our bank and was able to get the mortgage records part of our paperwork filled out and notarized. Tomorrow morning we are going to see Dr. Weston to get our physicals done and more forms filled out.

It's very exciting to feel like we are starting to move forward and make progress. There's still a long way to go, but it's nice to have a few boxes checked off on the todo list.

Thank YOU and Fundraiser Ideas

We wanted to say a HUGE HUGE HUGE 'thank you' to our friends and family who wrote our recommendations for our home study agency. You guys/gals rock. I can't even tell you how awesome you are! We love you to pieces. And for the wonderful folks who have donated already, you are equally as amazing and thoughtful. We can't get to Eastern Europe to bring Eileen home without your generosity, for which we are very grateful.

We have a couple new fundraisers posted. Check out our 'Fundraising' tab at the top of the blog. There are 'Come on Eileen' t-shirts, fair trade coffee and hopefully soon some more good stuff. What sorts of giveaways or fundraisers would you be most interested to see or participate in? Some other Reece's Rainbow families have tried iPads, Kindles, digital cameras, gift cards... even some handmade items! We need some help thinking of ideas here, so leave a comment or email me if you have some suggestions.

Also, I have gotten a few emails or comments asking me to get in contact since we put up the blog and replied back to them -- if you are waiting for a reply, please check your spam boxes for musegirl27ATaolDOTcom (replace the words with symbols). I keep my personal emails on this account, so you'd get a reply from that one and not our family Blogger/Gmail account. Please don't think I forgot anybody! I really tried to reply as quickly as possible. Hopefully you'll find me in your inbox someplace :)

IN PAPERWORK NEWS:

Finally got Dan's birth certificate copies this weekend - and they ARE legible. Woo hoo! Now waiting on his passport, which should hopefully be here soon. I emailed our loan officer at the bank to try and see who to talk to about the proof of mortgage paperwork we need from them. Haven't heard back yet. Fingers crossed!

**Edited to add : DAN'S PASSPORT SHOWED UP IN TODAY'S MAIL!!!!

Tornado Tuesday

Crazy day today! And it wasn't just the weather. Wylie had a hearing test and he totally didn't want any part of it. He was so mad at mama for making him hold still for the doctor. Apparently despite the fact I used to muscle around horses, I don't do so hot holding an angry toddler who doesn't want his ears checked. :\ So anyhow, we have to go back in a week and try one more test -- hopefully he'll be able to sleep thru it this time! Fingers crossed.

After his failed audiologist visit, he went to visit Grammy Vicki so I could run to the county court house and get copies of our marriage license. My odyssey to the court house basement (which was leaking because of all the rain) only cost $10! Woo! The county clerk even put everything in an envelope so her ink stamps wouldn't get smudged on the trek back out to the car. Foreign governments don't mess around when it comes to messy stamping and I'd hate to have to come back and re-do everything. But don't worry -- I checked all the clerk's stamps again when I got to the car and there is no smeared/missing/overlapping/double stamped text, so we should be good to go on that! If only getting copies of Dan's birth certificate had been that easy. Note to the state of Wisconsin: for what we paid and the hoops we jumped thru, we'd better not be getting that same xerox of a copy of a mimeograph of a faded papyrus you handed out when he was born... ugh. I expect something legible and much more legal/official looking this time! Ha ha.

The next and final mandatory stop for the day was to the BMV to get dad's Jeep re-titled. My mom signed it over to us last week (which helps us out because we'll have plenty of room for 2 kids and their stuff now). So I met up with Dan and we did that. Yay for online appointment scheduling! After we got our temp plate, we went next door to Tuesday Morning to pick up a couple of girly goodies. Dan got a kick out of the not-so-girly tutus they had on sale. I think those are on his shopping list so that we don't have a house full of pink when Eileen gets here ;) Honestly, my mom made sure I had purple or blue instead of pink growing up, so I can't say I'm really attached to that color and don't blame him for wanting something different.

We ran over to my mom's to pick up Wylie and collected an awesome rocking chair. My mom's friend gave it to her after she had me. It's the same color as Eileen's crib that we got on sale last week, so it'll be perfect in her room! Dan and I are very happy to have it. We managed to get home before the bad storms hit St. Joe county where our parents all live. They had been under a tornado watch since around lunch time. When we got to Elkhart, the sun peeked out and Wylie got to run around the yard. Glad all the hail/wind passed us by!

Ain't no moss on me!

As in the ball/stone is rolling. Our first home study visit will be May 14th and we have physicals set for May 5th. Eep! Any advice for a home study child proofing check sheet? We have gates and cabinet locks and safety devices on the appliances, but you never know what each person's standards are until they actually get to your house. Thankfully we'll have a second visit to correct any issues our social worker sees the first time around.

I have a list of paperwork to go collect. We have our birth certificates. Dan's passport is en route. We really can't go get much of our dossier paperwork notarized until Dan's passport number gets here because that number appears on the top of most of the paperwork. Bummer!

Busy Weekend

Whew! We were busy bees Saturday and Sunday. I rearranged Wylie's room a bit to make it easier to move around in there. We worked on the blog template. We organized our receipts and paperwork that we've done so far into a binder. And our home study social worker got our application documents to us, so we filled all of those out. Several friends and a couple of relatives have graciously agreed to act as our references (THANK YOU!!! xoxo). So first thing Monday morning we'll be sending out the first installment of our home study fees, after which time our social worker will set up our first meeting. We're looking forward to working with her. She seems very reassuring and explains everything well. That's exactly what we need, because I'm sure the going will get tough at some point.

This morning one of our cars sold on eBay. That should help us pay for some of our document fees while we're working on our home study and dossier. We plan to apply for grants and adoption scholarships once our home study is complete, but we still need to come up with other fundraising strategies. I'm thinking maybe we'll try a yard/bake sale in my mom's neighborhood to start. We did two yard sales last year at our place -which went great- but at the time we were just doing them to have some extra cash. Now our goal is a little bigger, so we'll have to think bigger also. We've been haunting the Reece's Rainbow message board and there are some great ideas. Time to get cracking.

In the last post I mentioned that Eileen's "real" name isn't Eileen. One of our friends asked what that meant. It's more of an alias. Each child that goes up for international adoption in Eileen's country is given a different name from what's on their birth certificate to protect their identity while they are listed for potential parents to choose. We probably won't have any idea what her birth name is/was for quite some time. So for our purposes we'll continue to call our little girlie Eileen until we legally adopt her. Once we're officially her parents, we'll start using which ever name we pick out for her. We're totally open to suggestions, by the way! Before we knew Wylie was a boy, we had a HUGE list of girl names and basically zero boy names. Now none of the names we liked before seem to fit Eileen. Funny how that works out, huh?

So stinking excited!

This little cutie pie stole our hearts. Her name is Eileen (well, sort of... we'll talk about that next time). She's about 6 months younger than Wylie. It'll be several months before we'll be able to travel to Eastern Europe to meet her, but we'll wait as long as it takes! Eileen has a cleft palate and some delays and will no doubt need some help when we get her home. But, LOOK at that little face! It's going to get lots of kisses. And maybe a little slobber from our dog, Butters.

We explained to our parents this week what we have been working on. My mom was pretty shocked. Dan's parents were surprisingly not. Dan's grandpa is visiting this month from Washington and we got to tell him too. Grandpa Kime is all about having more great grandchildren. Over all, I think they expected us to have another child somehow and it's not too much of a stretch that we'd want to adopt one. Dan and I are kind of different. In a good way, really, I swear! Ha.

In other news: we're live on the Reece's Rainbow Family Sponsorship page! I'll get a link up on the sidebar this weekend. Dan and I are happy to be getting to know all of the other great families adopting through Reece's Rainbow and appreciate those of you who got in contact with us this morning :) You are all so very sweet. We are very comfortable now that we know we're in the company of great folks.

The Starfish

"Why?" is a question we're expecting will come up quite a lot when we go public with our intentions to adopt a toddler from overseas. And that's okay! We can't expect everybody to understand at first. You care about us, you're trying to look out for us, you're worried we've lost our minds-- and we really do appreciate the concern. ;) Our intention isn't to become the Jolie-Pitt family, start our own reality show or end up with enough kids to have our own sports team. Plainly, we can't imagine our lives without Wylie and we'd love for him to have at least one sibling. We could have another one of our own, but we really want to do something that would make a difference for one small person who deserves a family just as much as any other kid. We have drafted a letter to our family and friends to send out at Easter explaining what we were doing and inviting them to keep up with us on this blog. Dan, Wylie and I are excited to share all of this with you. We know it will be a total roller coaster ride of craziness and we hope you understand how grateful we are that you're coming along with us.

There are many families adopting through an organization known as Reece's Rainbow who have online "homes" (including us). The Abell family posted this great story about starfish on their blog. In the end, we learn that the boy tossing starfish off the beach and into the ocean hasn't set out to save every single one. He knows that would be too large a goal. Instead, he endeavors to save just one starfish's life at a time. Each one he rescues has a second chance that it wouldn't have had otherwise. The boy is but a small part of a larger picture and he is comfortable in that role. So are we.