One step forward, two steps back. Sigh.  So, the child abuse people screwed up and only sent one certified copy of our abuse background check letters instead of the two that were requested.  Took 7 weeks to get the first set.  Hopefully it doesn't take another 7 weeks to get duplicate copies.  Also found out today that the USCIS has an issue with some small part of our homestudy and are asking that we amend our homestudy report to include some little thing.  Will contact our homestudy agency tomorrow and see how quickly they can get this done.  Will likely require another social worker visit which means more time, and more money. Altogether, very frustrated, but trudging onward....  One day, we will look back and laugh.  Well, probably not laugh.  I can't find anything laughable about how inept this whole process is.   Happy New Years blogging world.  Hopefully a new year means progress...

Merry Christmas!  I spent the 24th, calling around and found a notary who was willing to drive to DSHS this week or early next week to notarize our letters. Turns out, that Santa came through afterall!  Our letters were notarized and sent off in the mail on the 23rd!  Whoo hooo!  They are now enroute to our placing agency, who will then mail them back to us and we can finally get the rest of our dossier apostilled!  What an awesome Christmas present!  How wonderful it is to feel the gears of this giant adoption machine churning once again.  Progress is a beautiful thing!

Sigh.  Well, got an update about our letters today.  They still haven't been completed.  The person who is in charge of doing that, still hasn't gotten them notarized.  Her "update" was essentially the same as the one that she sent last month on the 26th stating that she needed to find a notary in her building.  If she had just contacted us, we could have paid a notary to come to her!  Of course, now everybody is closed until next Monday.  I am going to call her on Monday and see if I can arrange a notary to go to her.  I just wish that she had reached out sooner, letting us know that she was having trouble finding a notary,  instead of just letting it go for a whole month!  Really annoying.  This is the one and only thing that is holding up our whole dossier.  I know that I said that I had already given up on getting those letters before January, but to know that they still haven't even been completed, meaning that they are not en route to our placing agency, to be back en route to us, is really annoying.  Sigh.

Let It Go!  Let It Go! Well, here we are, still waiting for our child abuse background letters to be processed and sent to our placing agency.  Sigh.  I am officially letting go any hopes of getting our dossier submitted before the holidays.  Our fingerprint appointment yesterday went smoothly though.  I expected long lines and a big headache, but it was actually very smooth and very streamlined.  So, now I am just trying to relax, finish up Christmas shopping and preparations, and enjoy the season.  We'll get back on track with this adoption in early January, hopefully.  So annoying because we just needed one person to do their job.  One person and we would have had everything submitted weeks ago.  Maybe I should ask Santa for our child abuse letters!  Also, as we're looking ahead to the summer now, it's hard to make concrete plans since we don't know if we'll be in Majuro or not before the summer.  Deep breaths.  I think that all these delays and frustrations are the system's way of preparing us for delays and frustrations while in country.  Happy Holidays, blogging world. 

Got our fingerprint appointments! They are scheduled for next week.  Still waiting on our child abuse clearance letters from the state, which is the very last thing that we need for our dossier.  So frustrating because we already got clearance, for our homestudy, but they needed a hardcopy letter. So we had to fill everything out again and mail it off, which we did the first week of November.  They were in receipt of it on the 26th of November and told us that it would be 5-10 business days before they could generate the needed letter.  Here we are, on business day #8, and still no news.  Looks like it'll get dragged to the bitter end. Sigh.  At least we have our fingerprint appointments.  Slowly, but surely.  Would love to have everything sent off before the holidays so that we can just relax, knowing that everything was submitted. 

So close to finishing our dossier!  Hoping to have the final pieces of it in the mail to us by tomorrow, so that we can send it off to be apostilled.  Our I-600A was received by USCIS on November 24th and is on its way to the National Benefits Center in Missouri.  Hoping to hear about our fingerprint appointments before the holidays.  From everything I've read, the timeline for an appointment can be as quick as a week to as long as a couple months!  While waiting, and waiting some more, I've been reading a lot about the history of the Marshall Islands and trying to learn a little Marshallese.  Have I mentioned that I'm a bit of a nerd?  I'm reading Bravo For The Marshallese which is very informative and very well written, but also very sad and more than a little disheartening.  The U.S. has not been the kindest to the Marshallese and still has not taken responsibility for many of the effects of the nuclear testing program on their health and the environment.  Shame on us!  I'm also reading Don't Ever Whisper, by Darlene Keju which is a little harder to get into as the writing is a bit scattered.  Regardless, both excellent educational pieces about the Marshall Islands and the nuclear program there. I have also been loading up my Kindle with some fiction reads for when we are in Majuro.  With a new baby as well as our two young daughters in tow, I'm not sure how much time we will have to read, but hey, I can dream, right?

The hardest part of this whole process is that so much is out of our hands.  I am very organized and am the planner of the family.  I like to be in charge.  Right now, I am so very dependent on other people doing their jobs and making this adoption a priority in their lives too, which of course, they don't.  I understand that we are just one family out of many that are going through this process, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.  I hurry and get everything done on our end....to just wait and wait some more.  Then stuff gets done incorrectly on the other end and has to be redone.  My initial estimates for getting stuff done didn't take into consideration the Thanksgiving holiday and people taking this whole week off of work!  Sigh.  My new goal is to have everything submitted by mid-December.  Still waiting for our fingerprint appointments too.  So much waiting... 

Slowly, but surely, moving through the dossier process.  With a little luck, we can send all the paperwork to our placing agency by the first of December!  There are a couple things that are still out of our control, namely the finalized copy of our homestudy to arrive, as well as an official child background check letter, make that two, for each of us.  Everything else is moving smoothly though. FBI fingerprint letters arrived today.  Will have to send those off to Washington, D.C. to be apostilled now.  I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!  With any hope, we will be spending some time in Majuro before spring!

We are officially starting on our dossier!  I must admit, it is all a bit overwhelming and just a wee bit confusing.  Why do we need 3 copies of our marriage certificate and 2 copies of each of our birth certificates?  Do we need to get fingerprinted again by the FBI, given that we already did so for our home study?  What about repeating the background checks?  I'm hoping to get some clarity from our placing agency and home study agency next week.  After all that gathering, we need to get it apostilled which apparently means that we mail it all to the state government to be stamped, but first it needs to be notarized?  I'm so confused.  Glad to be moving on to the next step, but boy, the next step is confusing!  Fingers crossed that we do this right the first time and don't have to redo anything!

Well, it's been awhile since I last wrote.  A lot has happened. For starters, we took a step back and reflected on why we went down this adoption road in the first place.  It certainly wasn't to buy a baby!  So, we have bowed out of the domestic arm of the Marshallese adoption world and have gone back to the international one. We had not formally finalized our home study for domestic, but it still cost a pretty penny to switch it to an international home study, which oddly enough, looks almost identical!  We did have to take two additional classes online as well, that were required by our placing agency.  International homestudy finalized yesterday.  Now it is being sent to our placing agency for approval.  After that, we get to start on our dossier.  I expect that to take another 6-8 weeks.  After that, we are looking at 3 months of so for a referral. So, with any luck, we will be spending time in the Marshall Islands this winter! 

Oh boy.  Where to even start.  Well, for starters, we have backed away from this particular referral and heartbroken does not begin to describe how we feel right now.  I do not want to expose details because there is an innocent child involved and that is really sad and they deserve respect and privacy.  Let's just say that lawyers are not all to be trusted.  We had gotten a referral for a beautiful child.  There were a couple inconsistencies in the story as to how they became available for adoption but we fell in love with her instantly and overlooked a couple things.  Those inconsistencies grew and after a couple days, it became blatantly apparent that we were not dealing with a very straightforward adoption case, or a very ethical lawyer.   It was a heartbreaking decision, but we decided to go with our guts and stick to our morals and integrity and back away from this referral.  We are now back to playing the waiting game.  We are toying with the idea of reentering the international waitlist and foregoing the domestic adoption route.  Our personal lawyer is awesome and he supported and encouraged us in our decision to walk away from this referral.  The lawyer for the baby and birth mother, however, exposed the horrible side of domestic adoption, especially from such a vulnerable group of people such as the Marshallese.  I hope that this beautiful child can be united with a loving adoptive family or back with her biological parents soon.  We are now at a crossroads and trying to decide what path to take. Stay with domestic and risk another heartbreak, or go with an established international program with strict guidelines and a known timeline.  I am leaning towards the latter at this time.  Sigh.

Why is it that nothing ever happens on a weekend?  Seriously!  I just want to fly to go get our baby girl, but I won't hear anything until tomorrow at the earliest.  Meanwhile, we are busy getting her room ready for her and deciding on a name.  It's just busy work though and is not really distracting me from the fact that our little girl is just waiting for us to fly and get her.  Sigh.

It's a girl!  Oh my goodness, she is so beautiful!  She is just 2 months old.  I cannot wait to snuggle her up in my arms.  We may get our order to fly within the next 10 days to go meet her.  So excited and so nervous as well. What if the birth mother takes one look at us and changes her mind? 

Where to begin?  Within one month we will be a family of five!  Incredible and unbelievable.  All we know is that our baby has been born.  We are awaiting news about birthdate and gender as well as our marching orders to book our airfare.  While we have been planning this for almost 8 months, this last little part has gone so quickly!  Time to find our baby bottles, crib, baby toys, etc.  So exciting and a little bit scary as well.  I promise we'll update this blog with details about our road to adoption after everything is completed.  We will be flying within 30 days.  Eeeek!  (=

Oh my goodness...we may have just been matched with a baby!  So excited.  No specific details yet.  My heart is in my throat.  Will update when we know more!  Eeeek!

Time is slowly ticking by with no real progress. We are mostly finished with our home study.  Our social worker needs to interview our live-in childcare provider and then finish her background check for the state.  Of course, he's on a 10 day vacation so now we have to wait for that to wrap up.  He was supposed to interview her before he went out of town, but was too busy to do so.  Sigh.  So, we wait some more.  After that interview is completed, he'll work on our actual written report, which we will then review and finalize. New timeline for completion looks to be the end of July, nearly 5 months after getting started!  After that is sent off, we should have more of an actual adoption timeline.

Finally have our first social work visit scheduled.  Hoping to have an update soon with regards to our actual adoption proceedings.  Just trying to get our home study completed.

Still trucking our way through the homestudy process.  Now waiting to schedule our first in-home session.  So frustrating how complicated and long this whole process is.  There are children in the world who need homes, and people who have homes that need children. Seems like there should be a way to do this more efficiently so that children aren't left hanging, awaiting their forever families.  Alas, onward we trek...

So, our home study is going to be delayed a bit.  We use aupairs for our childcare (which I highly recommend!).  Our current aupair is leaving us this summer at the end of our contract so we hired a new one to replace her.  Since it'll be a new adult in the house over the age of 18 years, we have to have them go through the background check and interview process too.  All this means that we can't finalize our home study until she moves in.  I guess it gives us more time to get the few remaining bits of our paperwork together.  Waiting to hear back about my life insurance anyhow.  We need $250,000 for each parent, with our children as the beneficiaries.  I only have $100,000 plus another $150,000 in accidental death, hence the exam to be approved for more $.  All this adoption paperwork really is helping us get our lives more organized, and for that, I'm thankful.

Well, this whole adoption roller coaster just keeps getting bumpier.  Might be back on track for the Marshall Islands.  Updates to come soon.  Better fasten my seatbelt already!  Just when I started switching gears, the train kept on a similar course...

So, after starting on the home study process we got word from LSSMN that the wait to even enter the RMI adoption program is 12-18 months.  This was far different from any other information that we'd read.  Seems like the RMI program has gotten quite popular since 2012!  They recommended that we hold off on our home study until we get closer to the time when we'll be invited to apply to the program.  We decided to continue with our home study and enroll in a different country's program for now.  If we get an update that invites us to enter the RMI program, and we still haven't been matched with a child from another program, we'll make the switch.  I'm disappointed because it looked like the time frame for this country was so much faster in the past.  Patience, I've decided, is the key to adoption.

Welcome to our site.  A little about us.  We are a family of four, but hoping to become a family of five through adoption from The Republic of the Marshall Islands.  My husband and I met in college.  We went on to graduate school and now have two biological daughters.  Why adoption?  We have traveled extensively both before children and after.  I see such poverty in the world.  Young children without stable home lives.  We support international charities but I feel deeply in my heart that we were meant to open our home and hearts to child in need.  So, why RMI? We spent a lot of time considering domestic vs international adoption and felt that international fit quite well with us as a family. We fell in love with the RMI program on so many levels.  It's open adoption, which in the international world is pretty unheard of.  You also have the opportunity to adopt infants, which is also pretty uncommon.  We also love the Marshallese view of adoption whereby you are blending two families.  Adoption builds a larger combined family, it doesn't make one family smaller.   Why blog? Well, in my research about RMI adoption, I came across several blogs, but none of them were recent.  I wanted to help current families who are considering RMI adoption, better understand the current timeframe for when things might happen.