Worthy and Reposted from Babble.com
By Diana Stone | July 6th, 2012 at 11:09 am
Photo credit Babble.com
I’ve been told many times by parents who have adopted domestically or internationally, “Expect a lot of emotional ups and downs, waiting, and changes.”
Since starting our adoption from Korea almost 2 months ago, I’m just now starting to see what they mean.
Tuesday we got an email from our agency saying they’d received all our paperwork and were sending out background checks for us to sign and send on to Colorado, and attaching ones for California. That was the problem; they requires us to type all the info, then have the agency sign and send it back to California to run the check.
Our agency is 14 hours away. (Texas is so freaking huge.) It takes 2-3 days for the mail to get there unless we pay a crazy amount to speed it up. I decided to get it done and sent that same day.
The real holdup will be on California’s end though. Apparently they take a very long time to run background checks – so we’ll probably end up extending our homestudy time. This would be the same no matter domestic or international – everyone has to do a homestudy.
I was sad to hear this. Already a new law put into effect next month in Korea has slowed things down, and then on top of that Korea would like to end international adoption at some point, so each year less and less children are available. The same number are given up, but because of their desire to end it, the children are older once they come home. I don’t know what will happen to these kids once the program shuts down, but from reading other bloggers who have adopted from Korea recently, the children are left in (well cared for) orphanages until (and if) they are assigned a foster parent.
We are choosing to be open to siblings (twins), special needs, and “regular” special needs. All children from Korea have some kind of special need, just some are more moderate to severe than others that are considered normal neonatal conditions. Because of this, we may indeed get a child quicker, or we may be waiting for a while. It all depends on what child they think is a suitable match for us.
I know there is a plan in all this, but it certainly can be frustrating in an already long process to be told you’re going to be waiting longer. Many adoptive families deal with this, so we can probably expect a lot more of this to come. I can’t imagine how tough these kinds of things will be once you have a child waiting for you. And after reading some of the stories online, this is a small delay in comparison to what happens to some.
So we do our best, the quickest we can, and stay on the path set for us.
Hoping it’s more like the moving floor at the airport where you can walk and pass everyone twice as fast.
Visit with Diana! Diana blogs on raising a toddler daughter, the loss of her twin boys, and their families’ Korean adoption in progress on the aptly named Hormonal Imbalances.
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