FAQ's

Three questions have been at the forefront of late:

1. Why did you chose international adoption over domestic?

2. Why did you chose Russia?

3. How did you find/pick the agency you applied to?

Ah, my friends, gather round the fire and I'll tell you a story. OK, so maybe it's not so much a story as a paragraph answer to each question!

To start: Why did we chose to go international?

For us, domestic adoption, while offering the chance of receiving a newborn or a very young infant, was far too passive for our tastes. With domestic, you put a book together about yourself (and don't think I wasn't sorely tempted to go this route just for the chance to do a Brian and Holly scrapbook galore...I gleefully imagined trips to the scrapbook store and my fingers were almost itching to have an excuse to jump into my supplies!) and then....wait. You wait for someone to pick you. Then, you have to establish a relationship with the birth mother, generally, and wait for her to really pick you. Then you have to establish a deeper relationship with the birthmother, generally, and wait for her to give birth. Then you wait for her to decide she really wants to adopt the baby to you to parent. You get the picture. A, we didn't really groove on the idea of having a tremendously open relationship with a birth family - we want to KNOW this is our child and not be reminded frequently that there's someone else in the picture and 2, we didn't want to be in an open-ended waiting game. With international, though a long process at times, you know each and every milestone and can actually...get ready...cross things off a list (whoohoo, aren't those beautiful words?!) and know what happens next. You still have to wait sometimes, but the defined waiting to us is far more palatable than undefined waiting.

2. Why did we pick Russia?
This whole big wide world has a lot of countries in it, but not all of them are open to international adoption. When you start making a list, it's not a huge one. China and Russia have shared the top international spot recently. China has placed severe restrictions on international adoption (no single people, only those in excellent health with no weight issues (and while I once again have to work on mine I didn't want to have to be doing it for adoption - talk about another stress on top of an already stressful situation), blah, blah, blah. South Korea requires you be married for at least 3 years, meaning we couldn't start their process until October. Guatemala is essentially closed...and we just kept coming back to the idea of Russia. We loved the idea of traveling there (which is good because we'll need to go twice) and it made its way to the top of the list and remained there. Plus, while Russia has a large number of Caucasian infants, there is also a contingent of racially mixed babies - and by racially mixed I mean partially Asian. With Bri's biological heritage, a baby with Asian features would definitely work for us!

3. The agency?

We picked the agency after lots of research, reference checks, BBB checks and word of mouth. We're still waiting to hear if they've accepted us, so keep your fingers crossed. We liked that it had local representation here in KC, that they had full time employees in Russia, that they had a ton of information on their website, that someone I work with used them and highly recommended them and more.

Have more questions? Find your local couple starting the adoption process (aka Brian and Holly) and ask away!

Giving the piggy bank a workout!

It's funny what preoccupies your mind. Wait, maybe I should rephrase that. It's funny what preoccupies MY unique, quirky, strange little mind.

Sometimes I jump ahead and picture Brian and me getting of a plane in Moscow and being immersed in a foreign culture more than a few miles from home. Other times I imagine us seeing our first baby home (where they keep little ones in Russia who are waiting to be adopted) or even how we're going to decorate the little one's room. I can think of the room as that again - for a time it was the No-Name Room and for the time being it remains the Beer Brewing Room, but eventually it will be the little one's room!

Today's preoccupation? Filling up our piggy banks to fund this little adventure we've decided to take. I saw a pig drawing hanging in a cube at work today (raise your hand if you know this is your cube!) and all afternoon I kept thinking of dropping coins in a little piggy bank to bring home Baby Shriner. OK, in all honesty, it's going to take a...what's the word for a group of pigs? Posse? Gaggle? Herd? 10 points to anyone who can tell me if there's a name for piggies en masse! Anyway, it's going to take a lot of piggy banks for this one.

But, just when I get overwhelmed at the thought, I see a friend smile when she looks at a picture of her chubby little Michelin Man baby (raise your hand if you know this is your child!) or have a friend write in one of those e-mail friendship surveys that I always send around because I think they're quite fun, thank you, and I love talking about me and learning about my friends say that her kids are her favorite smell (which, by the way, I totally get!) and I think: That's why. I want that.

And so we might have to fork over some dough to get there and turn friends down for lunches out during a work week or eat mac and cheese until Kraft runs out of little blue boxes, what we'll get at the end of this all can only be described as priceless.

P.S. If anyone has empty piggy banks at home, feel free to fill them up on our behalf. That was a joke. Wait...maybe not. :)

Step 3 of 974,321!

What, pray tell, was step 3 of 974,321? Turning in our application to the adoption agency!

OK, so I don't know for certain that there are that many steps ahead of us, or that this was exactly step 3. I suppose it depends on where we really started this journey! Was step 1 deciding on adoption? Or was it when we decided on Russia? Or on this particular agency?

Who knows. What I do know is...we're on our way!

The local office of our adoption agency is...get ready...just down the street from my office, only about 5 to 10 minutes away from where I spend my weekdays! Though I knew that the agency had to be on the up-and-up based on all of the personal references I've gotten, I still (just sort of) worried that I'd walk in and see a wooden door laying across two concrete blocks as a desk or a 1985 computer and a dot matrix printer. But, those (smallish) fears were totally unfounded and I handed over my blue folder with our multi-page application (checked over about 17 times), selected photographs of hearth and home (and us) and our application payment.

On Sunday we're headed to the agency (with my Mom!) for a workshop with more information. In the meantime, we're still awaiting Brian's birth certificate from the Great State of Michigan; when we get it we'll start the great Brian passport quest. Once we're (fingers crossed!) accepted by the adoption agency, we'll start on our dossier for Russia - a process that takes 3 to 6 months to complete.

Curious how we portrayed ourselves and our little abode?

That's basically it (plus one from upstairs)...but here's us!

When there's more news to update, I'll do it!

We've made at least some progress!

Today was full of details - and do we know how much I love those?! (Really, I do. I'm not being sarcastic).

First, we hope a little envelope has left Kansas City on its way to Lansing, Michigan - in it is our request for Brian's birth certificate, needed for our dossier to Russia, and also needed for us to get an updated passport for Brian so that, eventually, when needed, we can get on a plane headed for a far away land! Copies of said birth certificate request and the check we wrote are already safely filed in my LARGE adoption binder with beautiful tabs and binder pockets. Organization is a wonderful thing.

We also completed our adoption agency application today; the only thing left to do tomorrow evening is to take 3 pics of interior rooms in our home, which we also need to submit with our application (along with 2 pics of Brian and me together, an exterior shot of the house and pics of any existing children - so we're going to submit pics of Guinness and Killian!). With those final parts done tomorrow evening we can get that important part of the process out of our little house on Larsen Lane and with the adoption agency! Then, generally, they approve your application within 2 weeks and then you begin working on the Russia-specific requirements. Stay tuned...I might need some help from some of you in that effort!

Thanks to all for your excitement and support; we have wonderful friends and family and we love that you're so happy for us!

A teaser - followed by a real post

День Счастливой Матери! Это был замечательный день, и мы добрались, чтобы разделить это, мы планируем принять от.... Россия!

or...using another online translation service:

Счастливое День матери! Было чудесным днем и мы объявили наши планы для принятия от… России!

More later! (3-ish p.m.)

And now it's later! (9-ish p.m.)

The above, in some way, shape or form, is meant to impart a couple of messages. The first: Happy Mother's Day. The second: We're excited to announce that we plan to adopt a baby from Russia!

I've always enjoyed Mother's Day; we spend it with my parents at an annual brunch I started years ago. The last two, especially, though, have been somewhat bittersweet. When would we be able to move me from the list of would-be mom to actual mom? When would there be a baby to turn me into a mother?

But this Mother's Day? While we don't know the exact answer to the question of when, we do know the where! We excitedly told my parents today of our plan to adopt from Russia.

To call the last week exciting and monumental doesn't seem to do it justice - after all we "formally" decided on adoption, then on international, then on Russia, then on an adoption agency - and the cherry on the sundae was being able to tell my parents today.

Like all potential grandparents, they, too, are excited. They're also entirely supportive, and that means the world. Suddenly, for us all, this big, wide world somehow seems a little smaller. We're all now connected to a place, to a people, that now seem so important, so special, so part of our family.

My Mom has shared special presents with me on Mother's Day over the years - things that represent family and my grandparents. Today, she gave me the perfect charm for the perfect bracelet she gave me at Christmas, before the in vitro began. She also gave me a CD with songs that seem to have been written with us in mind.

Right after I shared with her some of my favorite quotes from a book about adoption, quotes that resonate with me to my core, she happened to stumble across, quite by accident, an artist named Catie Curtis who recorded an album called Long Night Moon, with songs on it that speak to her experience with international adoption - one while waiting for her daughter to come to her forever home and one about her delight in watching her two daughters grow.

"Throughout the atmosphere God knows I want you here," she sings. "I've got a place for you Under the long night moon And I'll dream you're looking up too Goodnight, goodnight goodnight long night moon."

So to my Mom on this Mother's Day, your gift today will be with me every single night when I look up to the moon; I will be comforted by the knowledge that our baby waits, under the same moon. Someday Brian and I will see that moon hanging in the Russian sky and I'll feel like we're connected to home. Someday we'll all sit together, with you holding your grandbaby in your arms, and gaze at the moon from our little spot in this universe and know that this was how it was meant to be all along.

I'm BAAACCK...and WE'RE ADOPTING!

Even if these words do nothing but fly into the great void of the Internet, I'm still going to write. And now I have something to write about again!

We're adopting!

It's funny - in some ways, our in vitro journey seems so long ago, when really it was only a few months. But, it feels like a story I read, rather than something real that I lived. In all honesty, it was amazingly easy to leave it behind.

I didn't think I could. I thought after two years of knowing every cycle day, every intimate detail of my own body that I'd never paid attention to before, of shots and focus and determination and immersion in infertility, I didn't think I could heed the advice many gave me: Just relax for a while. Don't think about it.

My first response? Yeah, right.

Reality? Shockingly it was possible!

I've spent the last few months just be-ing. Drinking when I want. taking hot baths when I want. Brian and I have enjoyed the liberation of infertility freedom. No calendars, no scheduled together time, no sonograms...in fact, I've not even been back to my infertility specialist post-IVF. Just didn't see the point.

So right after the IVF, I floated the idea of the idea of adoption. I wasn't ready to MOVE on it yet, and neither was he. I just needed to know that we could talk about it eventually, whenever the time was right. I read some books and then parked the idea. Just knowing we could talk was fine.

And then my husband surprised me, casually leaning to me during a volunteer event and saying, "I think I'm ready to research more about adoption. It seems like this is what we're supposed to do."

Um...OK!

Fast forward a few weeks of reading, research and talking and I'm thrilled to announce that it's official - we're adopting! We've settled on international adoption for a variety of reasons (I'm happy to talk if anyone is curious) and have focused on a country. I'm not revealing said country until after Mother's Day when we can talk to the future Grandparents Neuman and reveal our decision to them.

So, for the first time in a long time, my heart is doing a little pitter-patter beat with excitement. That in itself is REALLY refreshing.

You know what we love about international adoption? We're GUARANTEED to bring home a baby. It might not be a newborn, but We. Will. Have. A. Baby. We. Will. Be. Parents.

I promise I'll post more after Mother's Day, and I'll shamelessly admit I'm going to blog away during our journey to our baby. Another great thing about international adoption is that there are milestones along the way. Our first, now that we've decided on a country, is to pick an agency. We hope to do that within the next week; then we can begin the paperwork and really be moving! It likely will still be at least a year before we're a family five instead of a family of four (I count the dogs in the five, of course!), but we also have two trips to a foreign land to start to get excited about! We're going to a land we've never thought of traveling to before - but now I can't wait to get there!

Until later, this really long-writing blogger is signing off!