A new child for the Walden Family

Lilypie Waiting to adopt Ticker

Monday, January 22, 2007

Moving on up

We got a status update on our number on the waiting list. We are now number 92. Woohoo we moved up 16 spots in 2 months. At that rate, we should have a referral in about a year. But we won't count on it. Hopefully it takes less than the quoted 18-24 months though.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Another month of waiting behind us 1/14

Well we've been on the list 2 months now. Not much has changed. We can't feel 'antsy' yet because it really hasn't been that long. We've been thinking we'd do Vietnamese food on our anniversary day of waiting so we tried Vietnam Cafe across the street from KU Med center, although there is another location which I've heard is better. It was tasty.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Parent Education meeting 1/8/07

Well this Monday was the parent education meeting for the month. It's in a new location at a church in south KC so we decided to grab dinner out and then go to the meeting to make sure we had enough time since it's about half an hour from home now instead of 10-15 minutes.
The education part was on what to expect after you get home and how the post adoption meetings work. They talked about things like food, sleep, sibling rivalries, and culture. It was interesting. Then they had the break out sessions by country.
There were a ton of families today, I think 8 or 9 which is a lot. Two brought their newly adopted children with them. One had a 16 month old boy(he had malnutrition), another a 10 month old girl (who tested positive for Hep C but by the time they picked her up she had tested negative). Both were waiting children. They were adorable. A few people had chosen referrals of waiting children as well. One had a problem where her ankle didn't work and she needs a brace (3 years old). This adopting family is Vietnamese themselves and I spoke with them about possibly learning some Vietnamese from them. Another family chose a little boy who is 2 who has HBV. There had been no 'regular' referrals to our Kansas City group.

One of the things Dave and I don't like about attending the support group meetings is that a few people and one of the ladies there in particular seems to want to tell us if we want it to go faster we should chose a waiting child. I understand there are wonderful children that are waiting, but we have some very basic criteria that most of the waiting children don't meet. We want a girl (most waiting children are boys) and we want a child that is atleast 11 months younger than Shawn so they will not be in the same grade once they enter school (many are aged 2 and up). And we really don't care about the wait. I mean we do care and wish it was shorter, but we want a sort of destiny of this is the child that we were meant to have matched to us by the Vietnamese government. If we see a child that shows up on the waiting list and fall in love we will pursue that, but we don't want to think, well we are running out of options lets just chose one. We don't want to 'settle' for a child and it's not like we're at the pound picking out a pet. If we have to wait 2 years, 2 and a half years, even 3 years, we'll do it. We want an infant girl and don't want people telling us how to go forward with our adoption.
We know that the parents (or soon to be parents) that do have referrals are excited and want to show off their children but please don't tell us how we should do our adoption and how we should get our child. If we decide to chose a waiting child it definitely won't be because another adoptive parent told us to do it because it would make it faster.