Contest

I have been doing a lot of research about babywearing to help with attachment. I will blog more about that later. In the meantime if you would like the opportunity to try and win a moby wrap check out Adventures in babywearing.

Officially Waiting

I emailed our agency this week and I got a response back today. Our Vietnam coordinator said that they have not heard of any problems with our dossier, so it seems that it has gone through with no issue. She said that so far they have been notified within a few days if there were any issues. So it looks like we are officially waiting, time to start putting the nursery together.

Last Day

Today was the last day of school before summer vacation. I have to go back Monday and Tuesday for meetings but the students are done. Since I loop from first to second grade I will have the same group of students next year which is great. They are a wonderful group of kids.

I am looking forward this summer to researching and buying some of the bigger things like the crib. I also want to pick out the fabric and sew the bedding.

I will probably be teaching summer school in August so my vacation will be a little shorter than usual, but the extra money will go straight to our adoption expenses. Hopefully I will be taking my maternity leave next school year so that will make up for the short summer.

Translation Complete

I emailed our agency yesterday about the status of our dossier. I think I have some funny esp with our agency. I always seem to contact them when something progresses. The last time I called to see if our dossier had been mailed to Vietnam, and she had just put it in the mail. The message today was that their facilitator in Vietnam had just this morning contacted her to let her know that the notary office in Vietnam had finished translating our dossier. The facilitator delivered it to the DIA today. It took a little longer for them to translate our dossier than it did the first two they sent.

I had also asked if we would know when our dossier was accepted by the DIA or if they would only notify us if there were problems. She said that with the first couple they were notified of any problems and then were told when they were done reviewing them but no official log in date. I pretty much new there wouldn't be a log in date, but it sounds like we will have some indication of when they are done with our dossier.

So for the next couple of weeks I don't want to hear anything from our agency. No news is good news because if they contact us it will probably be because there is problems with our dossier. Which will mean we have to add or redo something. That means more time and money.

She also said she would notify us of any pertinent dates that would help determine an approximate wait time. I was a little surprised by this but also very excited. Since they haven't done any placements from Vietnam I didn't think they would have any way of calculating anything. But who knows, they may not know anything more until they get their first referral.

Answering Questions

I love getting comments. Hint, hint :) and when I announced our dirty little secret I got a couple of questions in our comments section. I was going to email them privately but I decided that maybe other's were interested also. So in a bold attempt to get more comments I decided to post the answers.

The first question was about our old agency and our new agency. I don't know why I was so cautious about identifying either agency. I have been reading several blogs and many identify the agency so I have decided that it is probably ok. Our first agency was FTIA. Our personal experience with them was first rate. They were the perfect agency to have for the paper chase portion of our adoption. They were excellent with communication and had very detailed packets that helped with filling out the paperwork. Since we were only at the application phase of our adoption we were only out our application fee, which was worth it for the help we received. We were just too far down the list to expect a referral in the years time they originally quoted us. Our new agency is WACAP. They have just been licensed in Vietnam and have what they call a pioneer program. The initial process was not as smooth as I had hoped. It took almost a month and several phone calls on my part to get us accepted into the program. Part of the problem was I completed our dossier just days after I sent in the application so I was ready for it to be sent to Vietnam. They had to review our home study and parenting plan, and other agency requirements. I did live through it and in the long run it won't change our wait time.

The second question was about the age of children we are requesting. From the beginning we hoped to adopt twins. When I first talked to the intake person at FTIA, she said it was harder but possible. She told me that we needed to have our home study and i-600 approved for 2 which we did. I believed if we requested twins, and if we were willing to wait we would eventually get twins. After being in the program for awhile I talked to the Vietnam coordinator at FTIA and found out that it did not work that way. They do not maintain a separate list for twins, if twins are available they go down their list and they are offered to the first family approved for 2. So if we were at the top of the list we couldn't choose to wait until twins were available. I then started to ask about other options. Could we pursue a domestic adoption or an adoption from another country while waiting for our Vietnam referral? NO. Since the wait times for a Vietnam referral were getting so long, could we complete our dossier for a second adoption when we got the referral for the first child? No, we had to wait until we had our 6 month post visit. While I understand their intentions behind these rules it just made things seem hopeless to me. We are approaching 40 and I didn't want to be adopting a second child approaching 45. So when I started researching other agencies these were questions I asked. When I asked WACAP about starting our dossier before we had the referral of our first child, that was when I was told that they allow adoptions of unrelated children. We had to be approved by the director and I had to agree to take at least 6 months maternity leave. It is also not guaranteed. If two children are not available than we accept the referral of the first the second request is terminated. We are not allowed to turn down a referral to wait for 2 children. Our home study is written for 2 children 0-24 months. So the answer is we are trying to adopt twins or 2 unrelated infants.

So there you have it 2 very long answers to 2 very short questions.

DTV!!!! DTV!!!!

I just got off the phone with our agency. I had to call and ask a question about a form I got in the mail today. She then told me she put our dossier in the mail about 5 minutes ago and she was just about to call me. They have sent 2 dossiers already and there hasn't been any major problems. They don't have a log in date but she wasn't sure if Vietnam does log in dates.

So now I wait and hope everything goes ok. We chose not to send one of the forms that may be needed. Our old agency didn't require it so we are going to wait and see if it goes through. Hopefully it doesn't cause us too much trouble.

Contract

We received our contract from our new agency yesterday. They have approved us into the Vietnam program and as soon as they receive our payment they will be sending our dossier to Vietnam. We overnighted the money today so they will have it first thing Monday morning. We are so excited to be completing such a major step.

Our new agency has sent in 2 dossiers and it took about a week for them to be translated before being sent to the DIA.

We are getting very close to be officially waiting. I can't wait to start decorating the nursery.