LOA and other musings

I apologize again for the 2 months of no updates. Life gets busy and it’s hard to put my thoughts on paper and have them make sense. There has been alot happening over the last two months so I’ll go in chronological order.

LID: 3/7 (our dossier was logged into the system in China)
OOT: 3/18 (out of translation)
Reviewed: 4/22
Match reviewed: 4/24
Hard copy LOA: 4/29

Here are the boys with the FedEx of our LOA. They can’t wait to have their new brother home!!

53 days from LID to hard copy LOA is amazing! Pretty much everything went as fast as it could have without being expedited. All the small victories in between we’re celebrated by our family and we would like to thank everyone who prayed for us during that time. Prayers really work!!

The wait really didn’t seem that long to us because of several distractions. First distraction was Andy’s birthday in the beginning of March. He turned 5! We sent a birthday party for him. It came with a cake, fruit, snacks and drinks for 10 friends and also 5 pictures and 1 video! We also sent a photo album with 10 pictures of our family. While we waited for pictures and video, we read several posts on adoption Facebook groups about how families had sent photo albums and birthday party’s and their children were never given the photos and not told the party was from their family. This made us very anxious to see if they had given him the album. Then we received this:

Not only did we get this picture, we received a video of one of the nannies showing him all the pictures and reading him the captions we had put on them! He was very interested. At the end of the video she quizzes him on all our pictures and he shouts (in mandarin) big sister, big sister, little brother, little brother, mama, baba! Boy, did that make our hearts leap! He knows we are coming and he knows he has a family. Here he is cutting his cake with his friends, two (that we know of) will have their families traveling for them this summer as well.

Next up was scarlets birthday at the end of March.

While we celebrated her 6th birthday I couldn’t help but think about Andy’s 6th birthday next year which will be his first with a family. I always make a cake for the kids and they get to choose what it will be? I wonder what he will pick? It also made me think of all the past cakes I had made for Scarlet and how we’ve missed all those years with Andy. Certain things that we take for granted here in our everyday lives really take a whole new meaning when an orphan grabs your heart. It’s a hard thing to explain and even harder to understand unless that has happened to you. I’m sure most of you think we are doing such a great thing for Andy. The truth is he is doing so much more for us than we could ever do for him. We are so blessed!

Ok, enough with that now. You might be wondering what are the next steps now that we have our LOA?
Simplest answer is we’re not 100% sure. We know the next step is to get clearance from US immigration which usually takes 3 weeks. After that theres a bunch of other stuff that our SW will walk us through. All total we should be traveling in 10-12 weeks!

The other big hurdle we still have to overcome is funding. We still have the puzzle fundraiser going which will net us $10,000 with the matching grant if we can finish it. The deadline for the puzzle fundraiser is May 25th, the last Sunday in May. This is the deadline the matching grant has given us. On top of the 10k from the puzzle fundraiser we will still be almost 10k short of what we need by travel time. Here’s a break down of what we’ve paid so far and what still need to be paid.

$12,300 already paid
Funds needed:
2088.75 last agency payment
10,500 in country wire transfer. This includes hotel, guide fees, in country travel and orphanage donation.
5-7k airfare

Considering we started this process with $500 I’d say we are doing pretty good so far. The amount paid does not include any of the donations in the puzzle fundraiser right now. $900 is from the fudge fundraiser and the rest we have managed to save from tax returns, bonuses, weekly paychecks and even when I totaled my car via a deer this past winter. We are now down to our last $400 in our account. We have sent out a few grant applications but have not heard anything back yet. Please pray for those grants since they would be a big help to us. We know, in the end, God will provide. We are doing what He has called us to do and there is no better place to be!

Here is a picture of where we are with the puzzle. Only 175 pieces left to have sponsored! Thank you to everyone who has donated!
https://www.adopttogether.org/curry

DTC and so much more

It’s been a while since we’ve given an update and a lot has happened since the last post. The biggest thing was that we received our I-800A approval on 2/3 which was a full 3 weeks ahead of what we had been told to plan on. Luckily we had sent the checks to lifeline early that they needed to have to authenticate our dossier. They actually showed up the same day as the approval so our SW was able to send our dossier out for authentication that same day!

The dossier then had to go through the authentication process which goes to the county, then state, then to the Chinese consulate in Houston Texas. This process takes about three weeks but we got ours back two days early and were DTC(dossier to China) on Monday 2/24. This was earlier than we had hoped to get our I-800A approval back so this was a huge blessing. The more days we can knock off of how long Andy has to be an orphan the better. We just want him home so bad!

The next step is getting our LID, which stands for log in date. That is when our dossier is officially logged into the system in china and officially starts our LOA(letter of acceptance) wait. There are a few more steps we will share before we get LOA and I will share them soon. For now I’ll leave you with a picture of Andy surrounded by beauty pageant contestants.

Wo ai ni!

A special email

A week or so before Christmas, I saw on one of my Yahoo groups that a family was traveling to China to pick up their son. He lived in the same orphanage as Andy. I emailed her and asked if she would be visiting the orphanage and if so would she mind asking about him and possibly snapping a quick picture for us. She was happy to do this for us. They were traveling the first week of January. I was following her blog in China and figured we had about 2 weeks until we heard back from her thinking she would wait until they arrived back home. On January 7th I woke up at 2:30am when John leaves for work and couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and decided to check to see if there were any China blog updates since they’re 14 hours ahead of us and updates usually happen while we sleep. I was so surprised to see that I had emails from her that she had not only met Andy just a couple hours prior but had taken over 30 pictures for us! This family went above and beyond for us and we are so grateful! They also took 2 precious videos. He sang us a couple songs and in one video he says “Baba, Mama Wo ai ni!” (Daddy, Mommy, I love you!) At the end of the 2nd video he says in chinese “Daddy, Mommy, come and pick me up!” As much as it melts our hearts to hear him say this and to see how excited he is for us to come and get him, its heartbreaking at the same time. We’re looking at 6 months before travel and for an almost 5 year old it will seem like forever. We treasure these pictures and videos. He looks healthy and well loved by the nannies. Here are a couple of my favorites!

Progress report on our puzzle fundraiser.

Sorry it took me so long to get this on here. John ordered a custom puzzle of a picture of the Changsha Skyline taken by a family this past summer while they were there getting their daughter (a friend of Andy). We had to wait for it to ship and then we put it all together (which was not easy!) to make sure it was all there and now we finally have it ready! Here is a picture of the box. It turned out really good!

So far we have raised $1200 for 120 pieces sponsored! There is still a matching donation up to $5000 so if we finish the puzzle we will get that too! Here is a picture of the sponsored pieces.

And here is what is left besides the 13 pieces in the middle 🙂 513 piece puzzle

If you would like to sponsor a puzzle piece donations are accepted through our Adopt Together account. For every $10 donated a piece will be sponsored. Here is the link https://www.adopttogether.org/00622
Asking for donations is a very hard thing to do. Because we are having to do fundraisers I feel we should fill you in on the cost of our adoption and also what we’ve already paid so far and I’ll be updating as we go along.

$250.00- agency application fee

$2088.75 agency fee

$250.00 homestudy application fee

$25.40 passport photos for LOI

$2500.00 homestudy payment

$202.00 Marriage and birth certificates and driving records and water testing

$140.00 Letter of Intent (LOI)

$150.00 required online evaluations

$100.00 registration for required classes

$150.00 online classes

$36.00 criminal records

$890.00 preliminary immigration approval I-800A (FUDGE FUNDRAISER PAID FOR THIS!)

$45.00 passport photos for dossier

$2088.75 2nd agency payment

$604 fees associated with dossier for translation and court fees

So this is where we’re at so far and we have a long way to go. What we’ve paid is about 1/4 of the total amount. Thank you to those who have been so generous and supportive of us. We ask for your continued prayers for short wait times and that God will provide our financial needs so that there won’t be any delays. We know He will!

Progress!

I’ve been meaning to write a post for a long time but have just not been able to put into words what I want to say. I’m not quite sure what direction I’m wanting this blog to go. I’ve started a few posts and thought they were too personal about the family and not so much about the adoption. This post will be about the adoption.

The biggest news is that our home study finally reached our adoption agency on 12/23 and our I-800A was sent off the same day. Normally you receive a letter stating that they received your application about a week after you submit. We were getting worried when we hadn’t gotten it 2 weeks later and then our fingerprint appointment letter showed up on 1/8. I took a half day from work on 1/9 to try and walk in to have our fingerprints taken early to try and speed up the process and they turned us away. There wasn’t a single person being fingerprinted at that time, only workers in the building and they still told us no. They were quite rude about it saying “what’s one more week if he’s been waiting this long.” One week is one more week our son is not in our arms, one week is a big deal to a 4 year old. It’s so true that unless you have been called to adopt you can’t truly feel what we feel. It’s hard to put it into words. Thankfully our scheduled appointment was only 8 days later on 1/17 and it only took 15 minutes including wait time. Approvals have been taking around 60 days from when they received our application, so we will be looking for our approval the last week of February. Once we receive the I-800A (immigration approval) we can send our dossier off to get authenticated in Houston which takes 3 weeks and then we will finally be DTC, or dossier to China which is a BIG step. We hope to be DTC by the middle of March. Then we are waiting on LOA (letter of a acceptance). LOA wait times have been anywhere from 30-150 days with no rhyme or reason as to why they vary so much. Obviously we will be praying for a quick LOA and we’d really appreciate your prayers for this as well.

Tomorrow Crystal will be posting an update on our puzzle fundraiser and about an exciting email she received.

Fudge roundup!

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who bought fudge from us. This was our first fundraiser and it was a big success! We would like to give a special thanks to those who took a sheet and sold on our behalf. We know its not an easy thing to do and we appreciate it more than you know. We’d also like to thank Geneva Gifts in Lake Geneva, WI for letting us run this fundraiser through them. They make all the fudge themselves and worked to get us our order on time.

The total amount sold was $2292 and we received $841! The next step in the process for us is preliminary immigration approval which it referred to as the I-800A. It costs a total of $890 so this fundraiser almost paid for it! We also had several people “round up” their purchase to give us a few more dollars. We had one amazing person write their check for $100 dollars over their total! We are so grateful for the kindness we’ve been shown in this process so far.

The puzzle fundraiser is going well with 52 pieces sponsored so far. Only 448 left to go!

https://www.adopttogether.org/00622

Amazing news!!

First off, we are still waiting to receive our official copy of our home study. It has been finished since last Monday but our SW has not yet sent it out for some reason. Hopefully that gets sent soon. Our I-800a is at our adoption agency and ready to go as soon as the home study gets there. For those who aren’t familiar with the process, the I-800a is the request to immigration to adopt a child from China. Once we have that approval we can send our dossier to China.

Now on to the exciting news, we have been contacted by an anonymous person who has graciously offered to give us a matching donation of up to $5000 in our adopt together account!!! God is great! We would like to thank everyone who bought fudge from us and supported that fundraiser. We hate to start another fundraiser so soon after the last one but when a blessing like this presents itself we cannot say no. While this is an amazing opportunity, it also means we need a lot of help from others. Our hope is to get this out on social media and let it reach as many people as possible. A lot of small donations can add up to a big amount.

As a visual for this we will be running a puzzle fundraiser. We have selected a 500 piece puzzle and will be asking for people to sponsor a puzzle piece for $10. We will write your name on the back of the puzzle piece. When the puzzle is complete we will glue it together and hang it in a doubled sided frame in the boys room so Andy can see all the people who helped bring him home. You can sponsor 1 piece or more if you’d like. We will be posting regular updates on the progress with pictures of the puzzle as it comes together. If you can’t donate please continue to pray for us and Andy and consider sharing our story and this post with your friends and family.

Please donate using our Adopt Together account. It is tax deductible. Please leave your name so we can put it on a puzzle piece. If you’d like something specific on the piece let us know in your comment otherwise we will just put your name 🙂
https://www.adopttogether.org/00622
When you donate the Adopt together site adds 10% to your donation to go to the site for other families. If you want to do this that is great, if not, you can easily select not to at the right of your donation amount.

Thank you for any support you choose to give!

Lots of news

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve updated the blog, Crystal has been wanting me to do it for a few weeks now and I keep putting it off. There are several new things that have happened recently.

First off we have decided on our sons name. We still cannot say his middle name since China does not like families to reveal the adopted child’s Chinese name until things are official, but his name will be Andrew Curry and will be called Andy. So from here forward I will refer to him as Andy. We fought for months about what to name him and tossed back and forth several names that we could not agree on, so we are glad to have him named.

We had our home visit which was the last meeting we needed to have with our social worker to have our home study finished. We still did not have our FBI background checks but our SW agreed to meet with us so that when they came in the home study could be finished quickly.

After all the cleaning, worrying, and more cleaning, the visit came and went without a hitch. It was a very easy meeting and nothing to get worked up over. She talked to Crystal and I for a while and then with the kids. After the talking she asked the kids to show her around the house and that was that.

We were still expecting to have to wait a few more weeks for our background checks to come back but to our surprise they came in on Friday!! So our home study is done and we have reviewed it and it is now being reviewed by our adoption agency. Once they review and ok it, our HS SW will sign off on it and send it to us. The next step in the process will be so submit our I-800a paperwork to USCIS for approval to adopt a child. The wait is averaging 64 days right now. It will probably be a little longer for us due to the holiday but we’ll be praying it takes less.

We also received a new picture of Andy taken last month when a fellow adoptive mom visited his orphanage. She was there during lunch so she didn’t get to talk to him at all but they did call him out for a picture for us. 🙂

Crystal also happened to find another picture of him while scanning through some photos of a Facebook group of people that have adopted from his SWI.

Today is the last day of our fudge fundraiser and I’ll have an update on that tomorrow. So for now thanks for the thoughts and prayers and fudge orders.

Fudge Fundraiser

Before the fundraiser talk I’ll give a little update on where we are in the home study process. Right now we are done with everything except our home visit. We can’t schedule that until our federal background check comes back. I checked on them the other day and they haven’t even been logged in yet. I was told to not even check back until the second week in November. We’re very disappointed in this and wish our social worker would have told us that this would be our longest wait. Every day it takes to get here is another day longer that our son will have to be in the orphanage.

Ok, so you’re probably not very excited about all our fundraisers that we will be starting up soon, honestly neither are we. It’s hard for me to humble myself and ask other people for help, especially when I feel like its something I should do by myself, but the fact is we are going to need help to bring him home. We are taking a leap of faith and we know that God will provide.

International adoption is not cheap but so worth it when you think about it. Leo is already my son, he has been since the day he was born even though I didn’t know it for a long time. God knew and knew it would take this long to soften my heart. If you would like to know exactly where the money is going and how much the total amount is you can email me and I can send you the fee sheet that our adoption agency gave us.

We are excited to be selling fudge from Geneva Gifts! Victoria had this as a fundraiser for dance last year and everyone who bought some loved it. We will are selling it now and delivery will be the week before Christmas. If you would like to buy some or have any questions, please let us know.
Prices are $6 for 1/2lb., $12 for 1lb., and $15 for 1lb. in a Christmas tin. Chocolate, peanut butter, cookies and cream, maple, vanilla nut to name a few.
40% of all sales will go directly to our adoption account.

We also have a tax deductible way to donate through our Adopt Together page if you feel that you would rather bless us with a donation. You can follow the link here Adopt Together.

All that being said, if you don’t feel that you are able to support us with this fundraiser please support us with prayer. Prayer is one of the greatest gifts you can give us, please pray for our little boy. Pray that his transition will be smooth and his heart will be open to us and that the process will be swift.

Home study

So I promised a post on the home study process and I’ve been struggling with what to write about it. I think for right now that I’m going to stick to mainly factual info on the process and my feeling a about the process in general, not my feelings on our personal experience. Now that I write that out it sounds confusing, hopefully it will become clearer later in the post. For those of you that already know how the adoption process works, this post may be pretty boring.

The home study is the very first step in the adoption process. This involves several (5 in wisconsin) meetings with a social worker. The first two are together as a couple, the second two are individual interviews, and the 5th is the home visit. There are also 5 post-placement visits at 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years. This is a requirement of China, other countries vary on the amount of post placement visits.

In wisconsin there are not that many home study agencies to choose from and we ended up going with lifelink which was recommended by Brooke, plus it was the cheaper of the two that were closer. They were also cheaper on the post placement visits.

First thing to do was fill out the application and do our self study. The self study had us freaking out for a while. They ask for so much information. Starting with your childhood, through your teen years, and then up to the present. What your parents were like, their parenting style, your relationship with your siblings, everything about your marriage. We were stressing about it but just ended up following the outline that they gave us to a T. Once we actually say down to write it it really didn’t take that long.

Once we were accepted by lifelink, our social worker called us to set up
The first appointment which we did as soon as we could. The first appointment was basically giving us a bunch of paperwork, going over all the documents that we had to gather and asking us a few general questions about why we wanted to adopt. Quick and painless.

Crystal started the next day gathering the documents. Luckily we have only lived in wisconsin or there would be a bunch of paperwork that the would need from each state we have lived in. I’m sure I’ll forget some but here’s a list of some of the documents we needed.

Birth certificates for everyone in the family
Physicals for all of us
Well water tested
Local police report
Vet report for Sulley
Financial statements
W2
Fingerprinted for FBI check

My minds drawing a blank right now but I know there is more. Our SW was kinda stern in the beginning of the meeting and softened towards the end. I think she just wanted to make sure that we had thought this over.

The second meeting was more questions for us but they were basically the questions that we answered in the home study. I think she was more trying to get a feel for our personalities in the meetings rather than our specific answers. Maybe I’m wrong but there are pretty cut and dry answers to the questions, I think it’s more of a trust thing than anything. We have nothing to hide but she doesn’t know that and she wants to get a feel for us.

The 3&4 meetings were individual and they were more personal questions about ourselves and each other. Nothing outrageous but tough questions.

We still have our home visit coming up and have everything finished that we need to on our end. The only thing we are waiting on are our FBI checks and they could take a while due to the government shutdown.

PA!!

Well after what seemed like forever, even though it was just over two weeks, we received PA (pre-approval) from China to adopt our little Leo!! We have not decided on a name for him yet, I am very picky with names so it may take a while. I’ve already introduced him so I won’t go over all that but I will share a few more pictures now that we’re allowed to. Enjoy the photos of our sweet little boy. I will be putting a post together about the home study process so far really soon.