13 December 2007

A surprise!

I've been meeting a lot of new people because of our adoption. Everyone has a friend who's adopted or thinking about adopting. More interesting still has been the friends of friends that are Ethiopian.

I've recently met two wonderful Ethiopian women. Both were so incredibly friendly and gracious. One treated me like a saint! The other told me a most marvelous piece of information. I ask her if she by chance knew the meaning of our son's name Denekew. And she told me it means a kind of surprise.

03 December 2007

Confidential Information

I just wanted to write a post to answer a lot of questions we are getting.

Information about our son's birth, relinquishment and birth parents is confidential. I know these questions are just stemming out of curiosity. (I too found myself curious and biting my tongue when recently talking with someone who is adopting locally.)

I think adoption "etiquette" has changed in the last 20 years. Now it is highly recommended to tell your child of their adoption from a very young age and never stop telling them. It is not a one time talk. Children should not remember a time they were first told they were adopted (however, they may have a memory of first understanding what that means).

Also important information about their birth, relinquishment, and birth parents needs to be information that is kept confidential and told to them first. They should not be learning that information from other people: friends, family or neighbors. They don't need to feel as though "everyone was told about me, except me." This information will be given at age appropriate times, so it can be understood and dealt with. Then that information is theirs to share or not share with whom they feel appropriate.

I thank you for your respect in this subject.

Adoption Vocabulary

I would like to educate on some adoption vocabulary. Caleb and I didn't know most of these terms and their purpose before this adoption journey and thought many of you might not either. These terms are used to keep adopted children from feeling like second class members of a family. When we are asked awkward questions our first purpose in answering is not to inform the questioner but to answer what our child needs to hear. I hope you find this informative and helpful.

Q. Is he your real son?
A. Yes, he is our REAL son and we are our adopted child's REAL parents.
Our son's birth parents are called BIRTH PARENTS or BIOLOGICAL PARENTS, also some people refer to a birth mother as a TUMMY MOMMY.

Q. Are they real siblings?
A. Although Ocean & Jaguar won't be biological siblings to Denekew they will be REAL SIBLINGS.

Q. Are you going to have any more kids of your own?
A. All our kids are OUR OWN. We may adopt again, but we don't plan to have any more BIOLOGICAL children.

13 November 2007

Accepting referral!

Truthfully we already knew in our hearts that Denekew is meant for our family, but now we are making it official! I can't believe it's more paper work! At least it doesn't look too long and tedious.

In the mean time I've sorted through all the tubs of saved baby clothes. And set up and scrubbed the high chair. And started working on getting Jag's clothes into the other dresser so that Denekew's clothes can be in the changing table dresser. And getting the last of our moving boxes unpacked and getting rid of stuff we don't need or use. Basically, you could say I'm "nesting". This is great; I never had this much energy when I was "nesting" during either of my pregnancies!
I'm still trying to talk Caleb into letting me set up the crib, though!

06 November 2007

We received a referral!

Today we received a referral of a baby boy, Denekew, he will be 2 months old later this week. Legally I can't put up any pictures. But he is adorable! Ocean says "He's soooo cute!" From here we will be making a formal acceptance of the referral and then waiting for a court date in Ethiopia as well as a US Embassy appointment. We will travel to Ethiopia for the US Embassy appointment. We can't believe this came so quick. We haven't even been on the waiting list a whole month!

12 October 2007

Officially on waiting list!

Our approval letter came from USCIS and we were officially placed on the waiting list for a child! Also our Dossier was sent to Washington DC for US authentication and just came back authenticated! It is now en route for Ethiopia for translation!

Everything is moving right along! Praise the Lord!

29 September 2007

Yekemeum Shai: Ethiopian Soap

While we wait the remaining months for our new baby we are taking the time to learn about Ethiopian culture and some basics of the Amharic language. We would like to share some of this with you through a fundraiser we are conducting to off set our adoption costs.

If you know us well, you know that we make soap. You have probably received soap from us as a gift or possibly have purchased soap from us. We decided to make a special Ethiopian soap as our fundraiser. We crafted this soap after Ethiopian spiced tea, Yekemeum Shai. Yekemeum Shai is a black tea with cardamom, cinnamon, and clove spices in it. Yekemeum Shai literally means “spiced tea.” Our Yekemeum Shai soap contains Palm, Coconut, and Caster oils for a smooth moisturizing lather; and essential oils from black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, and clove as well as ground dried cardamom for an amazing fragrance resembling the drink.

If you would like to support us through the purchase of Yekemeum Shai soap, we have priced it at $5 a bar. Even if you are not interested in our Ethiopian soap we encourage you to consider some of our other soaps. All sales help us fund our adoption. All of our other soaps are priced at $4 a bar or $12 for 4 bars.

Current soaps available:
Apple-Cinnamon
Cucumber-Melon
Lavender
Mango
Nag Champa
Strawberry
Unscented
Vanilla
Yekemeum Shai: Ethiopian

You can place an order by blog post, phone, mail or email!

Thank you for your continued support of our growing family!

God Bless you,
Caleb & Jen Oglesby

28 September 2007

Dossier Complete and en route.

Wonderful news this week! We got our Dossier totally completed! I had found one more error that I had to take care of. We redid the one page I found an error on and got photocopies made and put the whole packet together and sent it to AGCI on Wednesday. Thursday we got a call that it was received and today I got the call that it was reviewed and looks awesome and is being sent in for Authentication! Nothing else was found to need correcting. Whew!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Finally all of our end is complete and we just have to wait. and wait. and wait!

24 September 2007

A step forward!

Our Home Study finally got through all the hoops and arrived in our mailbox! We took it this past Wednesday to Yakima to submit to join our waiting I-600A form. We also got our fingers printed on these cool machines that looked right out of the CSI tv show! Our fingers were scanned by a machine and showed up on a computer screen and the computer would tell the technician if the prints were good or if they needed to print them again. They didn't even ink our fingers, so we didn't get dirty!

Now we are waiting for our USCIS approval letter (also known as Favorable Determination Letter or FDL) before we will be placed on the waiting list for a child. This should take 6-8 weeks.

We are also now (since we are waiting for the FDL) able to send in our completed Dossier to our adoption agency for review. Then it will be sent on to Washington DC for US Authentication and on to Ethiopia for translation. Unfortunately, while making the 4 complete photocopies of the Dossier I need to send in I discovered an error in another one of our papers and am working to get that redone this week.

In Ethiopia the courts are still closed until the 1st of October for their millennium celebration. Hopefully when they reopen everything runs smoothly. Y2K was a scare for us, I wonder if it is for them?

08 August 2007

USCIS received!

It's not anything fully accomplished... but we received a receipt for our I-600A form from US Customs and Immigration Services. So it was received before the fee change date and our forms have been filed. We have 1 year to submit our Home Study but I am hoping it will only be a couple of weeks. We are still waiting to receive the final copy of our Home Study. Then we can take it with us on a Wednesday for a walk-in fingerprinting appointment to the USCIS office in Yakima. (Sounds like a fun trip, huh?!)

Getting closer.

01 August 2007

What would you like me to bring you from Africa?

This post isn't related to our adoption process; but our family adoption process. In case you haven't seen our two children recently or they didn't make clear how excited they are about our new baby, here's a funny story for you.

My good friend, Becky, is going on a three week mission trip to Rwanda and leaves in about a week. We spent the day together at the zoo recently and Ocean pointed out Africa on a map in the African Savanna exhibit. He announced that our baby is in Ethiopia which is in Africa. (He's quite smart). Becky showed him Rwanda, where she is going and ask him if he would like her to bring back a present for him from Africa. He jumped up and down and said "Yes! Yes!" She ask him what he thought he would like for her to bring back for him and he (still jumping up and down) answered "My baby!"

UGH!

Well, I was preparing to send our Dossier in to AGCI (All God's Children, International) to be checked over and then sent on to DC for US authentication and then off to Ethiopia for translation.....

Then I discovered that there are some papers that need to be fixed. Both of the notaries that signed off with our doctors on Caleb and my medical forms have commissions that expire soon, as well as the one at Caleb's work that stamped on his proof of employment document. And we can't have any of our documents expiring before our adoption is complete. So now I have to go back to both of our doctors offices, probably with my own notary and have the papers signed again. To make matters worse, just yesterday (prior to realization of the notary expiration fiasco) I took Caleb's medical form back to his doctor along with a new copy to be redone because the doctor had used white out on a mistake! Now I have to go back and bug them yet again! I'm not looking forward to it!

25 July 2007

USCIS I-600A form sent in for approval

Today I just sent in our I-600A Application for Advance Processing of Orphan Petition to US Customs and Immigartion Services (USCIS) in Yakima. I believe I wrote about this a little in a previous post titled "update". In that post I stated that I needed to send in a completed copy of our home study document. Which is true that document is needed in order to approve us for international adoption however I do not have that quite yet. Apparently in Washington State you can send in your I-600A form prior to home study completion and submit the home study when it is completed. We will actually travel to Yakima when we have our completed home study and get a walk-in fingerprinting appointment. We choose this way to get our USCIS approval (rather than waiting the week or two and sending our home study along with the form) because we just found out that the I-600A form fees are increasing July 30th!

So I hurried up and sent in our stuff before July runs out so we can still fall in the old (cheaper!) fee schedule!

Home Study Complete!

We've completed all our home study visits with our social worker, Diane. It's been really great working with her. We've learned so much and feel really prepared for our new baby. Or two! Through out the last month or so we've decided that we will be open to wherever God is leading our family and are having our paperwork approve us for a sibling pair. Not that we definitely will get a sibling pair but we want to be open and our paperwork needs to reflect that.

We just got to look over the 1st draft of the home study document. It's 15 pages long! And the whole thing talks about us! I felt like it was a great compliment to our parents in how they raised us in faith, had consistent and appropriate discipline and encouraged us in our talents. And now we can build off that foundation for our family!

20 June 2007

First Home Study Meeting

We just had our first home study meeting with our social worker, Diane. She was really nice and we had great conversations. She seemed impressed by how much paperwork we had completed. But needs the rest of it before our third meeting. Some interesting things she told us: We are by far the youngest couple she's done a home study for (and she's been doing it 18 years). Also she told us a couple times that we were really "bright" and "smart" and had thought through a lot of the adoption issues well. What a complement especially since we are the youngest adoptive parents she's interviewed! Also at the very end of our meeting when she was getting up to go, she told us that some couples she meets with she can tell right away that they will be great adoptive parents and she really feels that with us! She said she's honored to work with us.

Wow!

So we set up our second meeting with her for next week and I can't wait!

Update

So much for keeping this blog updated! We've been so busy in paperwork I haven't shared so much great info.

We received our Home Study paperwork and Dossier paper work a couple weeks ago and have been fervently working on them.

The home study is a combination of paperwork and interview meetings with a social worker so that she can learn about us, our parenting style, etc. In the end a "home study" document is written up about us and we (hopefully) are aproved to adopt by the social worker!

The Dossier (pronounced with a silent "r") is a packet of documents that are required by Ethiopia to adopt in the proper layout and order. One of the main items of the dossier is the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) aproval. This consists of getting an appointment for fingerprinting and submitting a completed copy of our home study and can take a few months before the approval is received. While we wait for the USCIS approval we can fininsh the rest of the paperwork for the dossier. Once we receive the USCIS approval and have completed the dossier then we get placed on the waiting list for a child.

The home study needs to be completed before the Dossier so that is our first priority although some of the paper work overlaps. There were medical forms for both home study and dossier and so I wisely made one doctor appointment and had both filled out at the same time.... and also got a tetnis shot to my surprise!

12 May 2007

Frequently Asked Question

Many of you are asking us about how we came to decide to adopt and I'd love to tell you all, so here it is once and for all!

As many of you know our old house was pretty small. Too small to even hold the conversation of having more kids! So Caleb and I started up the conversation here at our new house. But we keep getting stuck about what to do because of my varicose veins. My legs got so bad my first pregnancy and then so much worse my second it only stands to reason (and family and medical history backs this up) that more pregnancies would continue to deteriorate the veins in my legs. So we came to a stand still in our conversation. Then our church did a week long fast in the beginning of March. Usually when Caleb and I fast we are seeking God on some topic, like when our house architect plans were a mess and we didn't know what to do we fasted for a week and were seeking God about it and we both felt like we were supposed to move. But here we were just fasting with the church with no particular "subject" in our prayer. The last day of the fast was a Sunday and at Church I just overwhelmingly felt like we were supposed to adopt. Now at first I thought China, but we don't meet qualifications (we both would need to be at least 30 years old). But I don't think the country was what God was trying to relate to me just that we were to adopt. So I told God to tell Caleb too. And I gave Caleb a heads up: "God's gonna be talking to you, so listen up!" Then Caleb started researching adoption online while at work. And here we are!

30 April 2007

Some more tid-bits of information...

To answer a few questions: We are planning on adopting an infant under 12 months. We are kind of thinking about adopting a boy but are open to God's will for our family. Also, the whole adoption process from Ethiopia takes about 10-13 months but because All God's children's program with Ethiopia is new as of Dec 2006 the time line has been going much quicker. So we will just have to wait and see how long it takes!

We'd love for you to keep us and our new baby in your prayers.
Thank you!

27 April 2007

The Begining

Caleb and I have just begun the long, tedious, and exciting process of an international adoption. We've spent months researching adoption agencies, countries to adopt from and home studies. We've recently chosen to go ahead with an organization called All God's Children Int. As well as adopt from Ethiopia. As we've just begun the paper work process we don't have lots to share yet. But keep checking back with this blog to follow our new baby from Ethiopia to home!

We welcome your comments and questions as you join us in this adventure!