the news we’ve all been waiting for…

Well, it seems as though I still haven’t gotten around to posting anything at all about the kids’ birthdays, but I have several good excuses, none of which I’ll bore you with… I’ll get to those soon…

In other news, though, we have been matched with two perfectly precious children at Ibanda babies’ home!  They are a baby girl, age 4.5 months, and a toddler boy, age (almost) 2.5 years.  They have the sweetest little faces, which I can’t share here yet, unfortunately, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.  I can share some photos we found of the orphanage on the flickr account of a very special couple who honeymooned in Uganda, and if any of these kids are ours (we think we see them, but we’re not sure yet) we will have such a great gift in having these photos of our childrens’ time in the orphanage.   Thank you Portnoys!

So what’s next?  We are waiting on our USCIS approval, meaning, we are waiting for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service to approve us as an adoptive home for two children, and send us our I-171H in the mail.  That could come in the next few days, in which case we would probably be able to get a November court date and have them home in early December, or it could take a few weeks, or even a couple of months if they need more information from us or if our fingerprints aren’t readable or what-have-you.   So, while we’re hopeful for having them home for Christmas, we really aren’t necessarily expecting that to happen.   There is also the matter of getting through Ugandan court and US immigration in Kampala (not to mention securing visitor’s visas for them to enter New Zealand) before we can come home, but we’ll worry about that when the time comes…

So that’s the big news around here, and we’re all very excited.  I do wish I could share their little photos, but we’re not allowed to, since they aren’t our kids yet.  We feel incredibly blessed to finally be at this point in our journey, and while there are a million things to take care of, I feel very calm about it all, and can see the path to our children clearly… finally!

Uganda it is!!

I am thrilled to announce that we will eventually become parents to two Ugandan children.  That much I know for certain.  We have found a wonderful lawyer who charges half of what our other wonderful lawyer charges, and THIS lawyer has the added bonus of being the type of lawyer who will also find your children for you.  I love him.

The orphanage we were going to work with, Sanyu babies home, is right in Kampala, has an attached guest house, and makes the whole adoption process very easy on families.  The director, Barbara, is wonderful, and for all of these reasons, lots of people are wanting to adopt from Sanyu right now.  We were apparently ‘expected’ at the end of september, but when I was told there were no available children there, I assumed that meant none for us either, but I suspect we were being considered when she made her announcement to the adoption world, unbeknownst to us.  I think Barbara keeps her kids very close to her heart, and doesn’t want to promise them to anyone before she meets the prospective parents.  Fair enough.  Not knowing of any other orphanages in Uganda that we wanted to work with, we felt we had to find a new course to our children.  Waiting for kids at Sanyu felt somewhat reminiscient of our days waiting for a referral from Zambia (that we all know never came) and we were not eager for a repeat of that experience.   We weren’t aware that there was any kind of waiting list, and we felt we would have to just show up and hope for the best.  I don’t think that’s exactly how it works with Sanyu, I do think Barbara is keeping track of who would like to adopt from there, and hopefully other families will find it easier to find their children there.  But we were scared the waiting would drag on forever, so…

We mentally switched to Rwanda, and learned so much about that beautiful country and it’s adoption program (thanks Jaya!).  I am actually quite thankful for our foray into the Rwandan adoption world, because we learned so much about the genocide there, and their subsequent efforts at rebuilding.  Rwanda is an amazing country, and while the adoption program is still small, it’s shaping up to be an incredibly reliable, predictable way for people who are interested in adopting from Africa to build their families.  If you’re considering adoption, check out Rwanda!!

The one drawback (for us) to the Rwandan program, is that we were a good 6-12 months away from bringing home children, and we were quite sad about that.  For one thing, we can’t leave New Zealand until we have these little ones home, and we would love to head back before the next North American summer is too far gone… Mostly, though, we just couldn’t imagine NOT having them home sooner than later — we’re quite ready thank you very much!!  So in checking in with a friend (hi Salem!) who is adopting from Uganda, she mentioned her lawyer Isaac, and she mentioned his fees, and she mentioned how great he was, and I thought it was at least worth sending him off an email… A few days later I learned, via the newly created facebook ‘Ugandan adoption’ group (thanks Salem!) about an orphanage that not many people know about, in the little town of Ibanda in Western Uganda.   My new friend Amy told me a bit about her experience in bringing her son home from Ibanda, and we were hooked (thanks Amy!), mentioned to Isaac that we’d love to adopt from there, and NOW….

…we’re expecting our referral for two children at the end of the week!   I know, so exciting, hey???

Our paperwork is making mad dashes between Pennsylvania, New Zealand, and Bangkok (don’t ask how Bangkok got involved here…), and as soon as it’s all settled, I’ll be heading over to Uganda to meet our children, go through the Ugandan court process, the US immigration process, the New Zealand visitor’s visa process, and bring them safely home to Wellington, where we’ll spend the most gloriously complete summer EVER!!  Well, aside from the giardia, parasites, trauma of taking them from everything they’ve ever known and thrusting them into the world of muzungus… aside from all of THAT it will be glorious!!

I am sincerely hoping to have them home by mid-December, when two of my four parents will be visiting us for Christmas.  What a Christmas present THAT will be!!!  Even hoping that they’ll be healthy and secure enough to start off on pullyblank family road trips fairly soon after arrival, but I’m not counting on that entirely…

Stay tuned for my next post about Lucy and Dexter’s birthdays (because we can’t forget about them, now can we?) and then the post after THAT should be full of excitement and anticipation, and answers about who these next little pullyblanks will be!!

scratch that…

While the Rwanda program is wonderful, and I think it will become a popular country to adopt from in the near future (so if you’re considering adoption, have a look at the Rwandan adoption blogs over on the right…) we’re back in communication with Sanyu in Uganda to see if there may be children there for us… we shall see, but we are certainly hoping so, as we could potentially have them home by Christmas!  If there are no children there for us, we will continue on with our dossier preparation for Rwanda…

stay tuned…

change of plans…

We’re quite excited to announce that we’re changing countries, and will now be adopting from Rwanda!  If you’re getting frustrated with our twisty turny path to our children, imagine how we feel!!!   I think, though, that we’ve finally found our way, and this feels like a good match.    I’ve edited our adoption timeline page to reflect our new process, and we’ll certainly keep you posted as we go!!  Wish us luck!

I’ve also added a new category to the blogroll over there on the right, so you can see the progress of all the other families I know of who are blogging about their Rwandan adoption.

June and July in photos…

just thought I’d post a few photos of all the things we’ve been doing over the last couple of months…and quite sadly, we took NO PHOTOS of the Ricciardis’ visit, which was awesome, and filled with good times and ukulele.  Jennie, if you have photos, email them to me so I can add you to the collection!

reading on the couch…

playing with lego… oh my how the collection has grown since then!  this table is usually covered in lego these days…

losing teeth (though this photo should really come later in the series…)

standing on our hands…

pretty much all the time…

appearing as “evil red dragon” in a play for theatre class… (yes, I made the costume, and yes, the wings are supposed to be bent)

Nick Fredin visited, and we took him to Cape Palliser…

The very quaint Martinborough for dinner…

Karori wildlife sanctuary to see the giant wetas, which we did not see…

nope, no giant wetas here…

the boat ride with the 4 year old driver was fun…

We also went up on top of a beautiful lookout over the ocean to share some hot chocolate and our thoughts and feelings about Esther and her passing.  While we did manage to bring the camera, the battery wasn’t charged, so I went back by myself another day and hiked all around the area that now holds a special memory of her for us…

hike up a little further from Esther’s spot, look the other direction, and this is the view to the right…

and to the left…

you can hike all the way out to the end of the peninsula, and along the way you can spy on the little community of Seatoun, which I think is my favorite in all of Wellington… luckily it’s only about a 10 minute walk from our house…

I hiked out to the end of that peninsula and looked back at Esther’s spot, and it was glowing, so of course I had to take a photo of THAT… there is another photo coming up taken from this same spot in different light, where you can see how turquoise the water looks most of the time…

It was such a nice hike I brought the family out again the next day…

No glow this time, but when it’s sunny the water is a beautiful color…

it’s a lovely place, and it will always remind me of Esther.  It’s interesting to see how her little life touched so many people and places…

the last set of photos are from a recent trip to Kaitoke regional park…

silver fern grove…

swing bridge…

gardens in the sky…

ok, so this one didn’t get rotated for some reason, but check out the palms growing all along this tree, which is definitely among the tallest I’ve seen in New Zealand…

I just thought these were cute…

and these too!

For those of you who are following along, I updated our Adoption Timeline Page, with our latest plan of attack… wish us luck, and if you have a little extra pocket change, consider donating it to Sanyu Babies Home, where the very excellent care is dependent solely on donations.  We hope to find our kids there, so it holds a very special place in our hearts already.

just thought I’d share…

since losing a child you were hoping to adopt is such an unexplored topic (online anyway — I couldn’t find anything when I looked) and because it helps me to write about it, I’m going to share here a little more, and then get on with life, love, and the pursuit of babies… I can only speak for myself, for my own experience with this particular brand of grief, but I hope it might be helpful to someone at some point…

It’s amazing how now that this has happened, now that the little girl we thought of as ours, who we were planning for, and talking about excitedly, buying things for… now that she is gone, she doesn’t feel like “ours” anymore. I think this is the biggest difference between losing a child you were about to adopt (and only ever saw one photo of, had virtually no information about, let’s also make that distinction — there are people who are much more connected with the kids they’re waiting to bring home, but that’s not how it worked in our case) and one you had more of an *actual* connection with, as opposed to a very heartfelt, but mostly imagined connection.  I really thought she would always feel like our daughter, but she has evolved into something else — I can’t compare it to anything else, but our whole family will always love her, but for me, she isn’t *mine* anymore…

I’ve had several people say that she could feel our love from across the world, and I don’t doubt that at all. At the same time, so much of the love we had for her was her as a person, yes, but also her as *our daughter*, currently, and in the future. I wanted to know everything about her and her family and her heritage, largely because I wanted to be able to pass that on to her, to *our daughter*, as she grew. When I heard that she had died, it felt like our baby died (though I’ve never been through that) and I physically couldn’t stand the shock and the sadness of it. The difference, though, between a child you love, but from far away, and a child you’ve held and loved in person, is that it didn’t take long for her to sort of morph back into a poor sweet little girl in Africa — not our child, but a child we loved dearly, without having met her. I feel such grief for her family, and maybe this is my brain/heart’s way of protecting me, but over the following days, we weren’t her family anymore, she had a very real, living, breathing, suffering family, and the pain we were feeling didn’t even compare to what they live each day. I will always carry her around in my heart, but not so much as my daughter (she did honestly feel like my daughter before she passed away) but as the daughter we almost had.

We will very likely (PLEASE! SOMEDAY!) have another daughter, and I feel odd about our future daughter someday feeling like a replacement, or  drawing the obvious conclusion that she wouldn’t have been a part of our family if esther hadn’t passed away. I don’t believe in “things happen for a reason” or any of that “meant to be” stuff, but I find myself almost emotionally pushing esther aside to protect our future daughter already, if that makes sense . Her death has really driven home to me the fragility of children’s lives in parts of Africa, and we, as a family, will always do as much as we can to promote a healthier existence for Ugandan children, but over the last few days, this beautiful child who we really did love with all our hearts, has become more of a concept than a real person, while becoming even more painfully real, in her own right, at the same time. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but essentially, all my hopes and dreams for her are gone, and almost never existed anymore, they were so far from her sad little reality… but at the same time, there is nothing more concrete and real than a malnourished child dying of malaria, and that smacks me in the face when I’m least expecting it. poor sweet baby, we’d do anything to change what happened if we could. since we can’t, we move on with life, and I’m quite amazed at the path my heart and brain have taken already, to protect me from eternal hurt, and to help us move forward with our plans for our children, including the ones who are not yet with us. I don’t know how I expected to feel, but now that I’m feeling it, it makes perfect sense to me. I still feel really sad sometimes (tearing up right now, in fact) and the whole thing is just so sad and awful and injust, but there is a little mama tiger voice inside me already protecting the next (two!) children we’re hoping to bring home…

the second worst day of my life.

I don’t know what else to say, other than, we received all the depressing evidence we needed to confirm both esther’s family’s squalid poverty, and how close we came to getting her home.  she died of malaria, and if I were more on the ball right now, I’d look up a statistic to show how many children in africa die of malaria each second of each day, but I’m not on the ball, and it’s way too fucking many, essentially.   sorry if you have sensitive ears, but it’s my blog and I’ll swear if I want to.

If I believed in heaven, I’d reassure myself that she is up there right now with her mama alice, and grandma dodie, all getting to know each other.  Grandma Dodie could drive Alice crazy buying Esther too many commercialized toys (do they have those in Heaven?  I’ll ask Dexter, he’s the heaven expert in our family) when they just don’t have space for them, giving her smarties and root beer for lunch, and just generally spoiling her like crazy.  It’s a nice thought, and… well, yeah, we’ll just stick with that for tonight.

worst day of my life.

I don’t really know how to say this, it still doesn’t really seem real.  We were told today (via email, with the world’s worst subject line) that the little girl we had been hoping to adopt, that we have been getting closer and closer to bringing home, has died.  She fell ill on friday night, was taken to a clinic where she was admitted, then sent to the hospital when she did not improve, and died around 1:40 pm on Monday, Uganda time.  That would have been 4:40 am tuesday morning our time, while we were all cozy in bed, enjoying the comforts of the ‘western’ lifestyle that Esther came so close to living herself.   I have heard about people losing children they were waiting to adopt, but I never thought that would be us, and I certainly never knew it was this devastating.   We’re still trying to ascertain exactly what happened (and in the back of our minds we’re wondering if this little girl and our progress toward adopting her ever even existed, but that’s another can of worms we’re working on…) and will update as we know more.

We’re not sure what this means for us.  We will still adopt, and try to prevent two children from becoming another African statistic.  That was never why we were adopting before, but it sure is now.

Rest in Peace, my sweet baby Esther Alice Nakimuli Pullyblank

Homestudy complete!

…well, aside from a few documents and government probes we have to submit to — the part you have to vacuum for is over anyway…  Our fabulous homestudy social worker Karen came all the way from Okinawa, Japan to our humble abode here in Wellington, to check us over and ask us probing questions for hours on end.  She made it all quite painless, and dare I say it: fun.  We still have to figure out how to get our fingerprints done here in Wellington — it would make a lot of sense to just go to the police station to do it, but no, the US rules state that the prints can only be done at “your nearest US embassy or consulate” — but the only one in NZ that does prints is Auckland, and it’s more than a little far away.    I have been told by a fellow American adoptive parent living here in Wellington, that she managed to get the embassy in Auckland to mail the fingerprint junk here to Wellington so she and her husband could do their fingerprints here… but so far my emails to the contacts she gave me have gone unanswered.   I’m really hoping to hear something tomorrow (and will try to locate the actual US consulate building somewhere on Taranaki St. if I have to resort to “marching right in there”) otherwise we get to fly to Auckland for a day, just to go to the US embassy to be fingerprinted.  Maybe a side trip to the zoo, just to make it interesting.

I wish I had something pretty to show you, like a colorful photo of something nice, but it’s been cold and miserable here (though I’ll take a Wellington winter over a Vancouver winter any day!) and we’ve all been sick (except Mark) and lethargic and generally overcome with homestudy preparations.   Maybe this weekend we’ll get out and see a new sight… let’s just hope it’s the inside of the Wellington US consulate, and not the one in Auckland!!!

New Page added!

While the wind was howling and the rain pounded our metal roof, I took a moment to do a general timeline of our adoption process.  I couldn’t help but add the fact that we’ve actually been at this for a few years, lest anyone think it ever goes quickly once you decide to adopt… I’m sure it must for some people, but I’ve never heard of them… We wouldn’t be on this particular journey as newbies to the adoption world, but it is clearly the right path for us, and has just been sitting there waiting for us to find it all this time!!!

So, if you glance up there at the top of our photo (of a lovely beach in southern oregon, by the way) you’ll see a page dedicated to our adoption timeline, mostly because when I was first researching adoption, I loved reading people’s timelines… as if they have any bearing on one’s own adoption timeline (they don’t — adoptions, like children, are all unique!)!!!

I’ll update it as things happen, but to give you a general idea, we’re hoping that last step happens sometime around september…