Opening It Up to Questions (and some prayer requests)

Here's a few questions and answers on children adopted from Bulgaria. Most of the information is taken from Creating a Family's Website - "25 Factors to Consider When Adopting From Bulgaria". Have to give credit where credit is due. If you click on the link you can see other questions and answers, but keep in mind that most the information is from May 2009 so some may not be current. For example it states wait times to be 18 months, but we now know that they are between 24-36 months.

What descent/race are the children being adopted?
"Most children are of Roma (Gypsy) ethnicity or Turkish decent, with dark skin tones.  Prospective parents are not allowed to request ethnicity or skin tone, and must be open to all children of any ethnicity." - Creating A Family

How are the children cared for?
Most of the children reside in orphanages although the country is trying to move toward a foster care system.

Why are the children given up for adoption?
"Unwed motherhood, poverty, cultural acceptance of abandonment.  Most of the children available for international adoption from Bulgaria were relinquished or abandoned at birth and have not been removed from the home due to abuse and neglect." - Creating a Family

What is the youngest age a child can be adopted?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend everyone.

18 months - According to some recent information, there may be a move to allow even younger children to be adopted.

If you have any questions at all regarding adoption, why we adopted, or anything else about us in general please feel free to leave the question in the comments, email me, or facebook me. If I think the question is too personal or off limits, I'll let you know, but feel free to ask away. I'll try to answer them as best as I can in an upcoming post. If no one asks, then I'll assume I've done a pretty good job of keeping ya'll informed.

I also have a couple prayer requests. First, the FBI clearance still hasn't made it into our mailbox. Please pray that it gets here. Our mail has been known to get "lost" on occassion. Second, pray that we get everything completed by the time I go back to work on August 9. That gives us a two month window, which is doable, but it doesn't leave any room for error. And we have a deadline of September so we need to get this done. Also, pray that I'll have favor at work both now and when it comes time to travel. I'm pretty sure I'm covered by FMLA, but I really don't want to have a confrontation with anyone. Sometimes I feel like certain people in positions of power don't understand that this is just as important as having a baby biologically. I'm not going to go into detail. I'm just asking for your prayers.

Beginning

So yeah, we're adopting. But it is very clear that we can have children. . . I mean we didn't pick Andrew up at Sam's now did we? So why choose to adopt?

As some of you already know, Andrew was born 5 weeks early. On the day of my baby shower . . . not that I'm still thinking about that. He was born via emergency C-section because I was having some major problems. If you want to look it up, it's called placental abruption. I'm not going into the gory details. On a side note, the Mayo Clinic is a great place to look things up, but be careful, you may diagnose yourself with 15 other diseases while you're there. I'm not kidding! Needless to say, he made his entrance into this world 5 weeks early weighing 4 lbs 13 oz and measuring 17 inches long. He was healthy, thank God, but he was still tiny. Now, one statistic I will give you about p.a. is that it happens in less than 1% of healthy pregnancies. Once it has happened to you the chances of it happening again are at least 15%. Which means subsequent pregnancies are high risk (mostly in the third trimester). I was told by my doctor I would most likely be on bed rest after 30 weeks. Ummmm, I couldn't stay in bed when I had the flu and was running 104 temp. When Patrick would leave I would get up and wash dishes (while holding my breath of course). I'm pretty sure I couldn't survive 5+ weeks of bed rest. Plus p.a. is very risky for the baby and the mother. It just wasn't a risk we were willing to take, so we decided that we weren't going to have anymore on our own. Now time for a disclaimer - if you've decided to have a high-risk pregnancy, I in no way think that you are wrong for doing it. It just isn't for us.

That alone wasn't the only reason that we decided to adopt. The truth is I had been thinking about adoption long before Andrew was born. I always knew (because I'm smart like that) that even if we had kids biologically, we would also adopt at least one. It was more a matter of the right timing for our family, and Patrick (wisely) wasn't ready quite as quickly as I was. We waited until we both felt ready to plough ahead with adding another child to our family.

So that kind of brings you up to speed. One thing I do want to address are reasons that are not good reasons to adopt. We are not adopting because we are "good" people. We are not adopting because we want to save an orphan from an orphanage. We are not adopting because we want this child to grow up in a Christian home. Now I'm not saying that those things aren't true - I mean we're not evil and malicious people and this child will be saved from life in an orphanage and he or she will be raised in a Christian home. It's just that none of those are good reasons to adopt. We are adopting simply because we feel that for us it is the right way to add to our family.  This is the way we want to bring another son or daughter into our home.

Now I have to go and check on a little boy that spends 90% of his time in a spiderman costume. He's the real reason I want more kids. I never imagined how great it would be to be a mother . . .

Have a good afternoon.

Questions

Why start this blog?
I debated whether or not I should start a blog when we first started the adoption process. I couldn't decide if it was worth it. Would anyone really care? I decided to go ahead with it for a few reasons: (1) Even if no one ever reads it, it will be a great way to document this whole process. (2) People have started asking questions and facebook isn't the best place to give long detailed answers. It will also provide a means of keeping friends and family who aren't right next door updated. (3) Finally, I hope that it may possibly connect us to others who are also adopting internationally.

Why Bulgaria?
We've I've been talking about adopting for years. If you know me well you know that I talk a lot so it's not unusual for me to ramble on while others sort of listen. It's been that way all my life; it doesn't bother me. So anyway (got off track there for a minute), I've been talking about adoption since Andrew was about a year old, but we both knew that we weren't ready to start the process yet. Andrew was still too young.

Over the past couple years, I've researched various adoption agencies and different programs. Recently, as in February 13, Patrick and I started talking about adopting again, and we knew that we were finally ready to start the process. We submitted our application with All God's Children International the very next day. We originally expressed interest in Taiwan, mostly due to the fact that it only requires one short trip to pick up your child and the wait time is relatively short. Taiwan is a pilot program with our adoption agency, so we knew there was a chance that it wouldn't work out. While we waited, I looked at other countries. I went back to Bulgaria over and over. The main thing that was stopping us from pursuing Bulgarian adoption was that fact that you must travel to the country twice. The first time you spend 5 days bonding with your child. The second time (2-4 months later) you spend 7-10 days in Bulgaria and you come home with your child. In addition to all the adoption fees, traveling back and forth to Bulgaria is very costly. The other thing that concerned us was the long wait times (20-36 months). However, it ended up that Taiwan was not accepting any new applications and our contact at the agency suggested that we look at Bulgaria. We talked and prayed about it for a couple weeks and decided that Bulgaria was the way to go.

Information overload! If you actually read through all of that, you deserve an award. If you have any questions leave them in the comments or facebook me, and I'll try to answer them. I'll be explaining more about the process in the near future.

A few prayer requests: We are working on paperwork, so pray that we get everything done and done quickly. Pray that our doctors and employers (mine in particular) are cooperative and help us get everything we need finished in a timely manner. Also, pray that our FBI fingerprints come back quickly. Finally, pray that Bulgaria begins processing adoptions more quickly.

Have a great day!