Fundraising, The Apparent Project

 

First let me say that fundraising for adoption is hard and humbling.  We are are trying to put together the money to bring Caitlyn home through babysitting (call me if you are local and need help this holiday season), saving, garage sales, etc.  We are SO thankful to those who have helped us, prayed for us and loved us to this point and who will continue to support us over the next few months.


Now we are asking our friends, church and community to help us with the mandatory donation of $5500 to help the children left behind at Caitlyn's orphanage in China.  This is a state run orphanage of ten floors in a heavily polluted, very poor area of China. They, quite literally, do not have heat, enough food to eat, enough clothing to share, enough cribs for the babies, etc. Yet this is where our Caitlyn, for the first two months of her life, was syringe fed by a willing angel, because she would not eat from a bottle due to her large cleft lip and palate.  They could have left her to perish, as many orphans with cleft lip and palate do, but they chose to save her.  We are so thankful.  


So even if we didn't have to (this is a mandatory donation, as part of the adoption process) we would want to donate to this orphanage that saved our daughter and so many more.  They know her.  We do not yet.  We love her, but do not know her.  We want to help them care for all those orphans that do not yet know a mother's love. 


Soooo, for this gift giving season, we are partnering with another great organization, The Apparent Project.  The Apparent Project is a not for profit organization in Haiti, that my friend Valerie introduced me to.  They are wonderful.  They hire local people and teach them a craft and pay them double minimum wage, so that they can break the cycle of poverty. (The minimum wage in Haiti, like so many other countries, is just enough to survive.  It is not enough to ever break the cycle of needing help.)  


We are selling bracelets as a holiday fundraiser that The Apparent Project artisans have made.  Part of the money from each sale will go to our adoption and part will go to the Apparent Project.  To learn more about the Apparent Project, go to http://apparentproject.org/mission.html.  


The picture above and below are examples of the beautiful bracelets we are selling.

I will have these available throughout the holiday season.  They are $8 a piece and each one comes with a tag that tells a little about the Haitian artisan that made the bracelet.  Colors vary.  You can see what I have or tell me some basic colors you are looking for.  These will make great teacher gifts, stocking stuffers, etc.  If you are local, I can get them to you.  If you are long distance, just add the actual shipping price. 


Thanks so much for considering helping us and this great ministry at the same time!!  

Pre-approval

We got pre-approval today!!! 

Announcing our little girl, Caitlyn Noel. 

 

Caitlyn is a name we have had for about 12 years now.  We were just waiting for a girl and we had to negotiate a bit on the spelling, but this goes with our current "C" theme.  Noel is special because it is David's gradfather's name, Leon, backwards.  Leon never seemed to fit anywhere, but Noel fits perfectly and it will always mean something special to us.

 

We will also be working part of her current Chinese name into her name but are not supposed to post her Chinese name and are waiting to see what part of it she is called by. Unlike a lot of names assigned by orphanages, hers actually has a sweet meaning and we are excited to figure out how to honor where she is coming from in some way. 

 

So without further delay, Meet our Caitlyn!

Letter of Intent

We have received a referral and submitted our letter of intent (LOI).   I wish I could post some pictures, but we have to wait for PA, pre-approval.  Sometimes it arrives in a few days, sometimes a few weeks. I can tell you about her though!!!

 

So on Monday, I was at swim team practice with Connor. As we were driving home, I realized I had somehow missed a call. When I realized it was from CO., where our agency is located, I wondered if it really could be a referral.  I called back and spoke with the waiting child department and they told me I had a referral.  I was so excited.  My normal reaction to anything emotional is to cry, but I was driving and so I just screamed and got really giddy.  Connor was really excited.  He learned his new little sister's Chinese name right away during the call and he can say it better than any of us!  Our sweet little girl is 14 months old. She was born on July 28, 2011.  She would be the age of my baby class this year, so every Tuesday and Thursday until we get her, I can watch the babies and have some idea of what she should be doing developmentally.  

 

Her special need is that she has an unrepaired bilateral cleft lip and palate. It is incomplete on the left (meaning she has a little gum line and even a couple little teeth) and complete on the right (meaning it is completely open in to her sinus cavity.) The surprising and good news is that she still looks like a really healthy little peanut despite this. She almost has a little chub to her cheeks and she has bring pink healthy lips and clear eyes.  This thrills us to no end. It was sobering to talk to our local cleft team at Childrens' Hopsital in Atlanta and hear that a lot of cleft children in China orphanages do not make it to their first birthday.  So we know she is a strong little fighter. She only weighed 14 pounds at a year, so she is still small, but hopefully very healthy.  It is very possible that her lip will be fixed before we get her, but it hasn't been done yet.  In the states, this is a correction that is done at about 3 months, so it is long overdue.  Her palate will not be done before we bring her home.  This will be our first surgery for her, happening as soon as 2 months after she comes home.  She will have several surgeries ahead of her to close her lip, soft palate, hard palate, create a gum line and fix her nose.  She will also have a lot of speech therapy and dental procedures in her future, but it is a completely fixable special need. What would cause her to be an outcast in China will be unnoticeable in several years. 

 

Unfortunately her file did not tell us a lot more, so we talked to our doctors and put together the best care plan we could with the information we have and we submitted our letter of intent to make her a part of our family!!!!  Our information shows that our little girl lives in the main part of the ophanage, but we are hoping that we will find out she is actually in foster care.  Given her healthy look, this would not be surprising and would be a much better scenario.

 

Everyone's next question is when do we get her?  Well, surprisingly probably another 6 months.  This may be the hardest part.  We will wait for our PA and then we can feel more secure that this really will happen.  But we still have to wait for a lot to happen after that.  The next big step after PA is LOA.  This is China's letter of acceptance, approving us to adopt this exact and special little child.  This will probably happen about 60-100 days after we receive our PA.  Once we get that we spend the next approximate 12 weeks organizing all the China details with the US details, getting visas and then finally, at the very end, making travel arrangements.  We won't know exact dates and therefore be able to plan travel until days to a couple weeks before travel.  Very scary for this control freak mommy!!  :)

 

Pictures coming as soon as possible!!

 

 

Update 1/26/12, It does not appear that our little girl is in the main foster care center connected with her orphanage, Eagles' Wings.

LID

We received an update today that our file was logged in to the Chinese system on Wednesday.  So we have "officially" been waiting for a referral for 3 days! :)

DTC

We are DTC!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (yes, that's me shouting!!)

As a reminder, DTC means that our dossier was sent to China today. I also had a great talk with the director of our waiting child department this week and found out that as far as they are concerned, we are eligible for a referral now, since generally the time between DTC and log in-LID (the official date you are eligible) is generally such a short period of time.

Time to celebrate :)

Dossier critical review

People ask us all the time where we are in the adoption process and what all these terms and abbreviations mean. This picture diagrams the process. 

We are between step 6 and 7 of 15, just waiting for our agency to approve the dossier we submitted and send it to China. (The dossier is composed of all the documents we spent months putting together, then notarizing, then county certifying, then state certifying and finally certified by the Chinese Consulate.) Now that the Atlanta office of CCAI (our agency) has done a critical review of our dossier and found everything to be complete, they will send it to Colorado, where they are headquartered.  Finally, hopefully in a few days, but more likely next week, it will be sent to China.  This very important step is known as DTC--Dossier to China.  Once the dossier is received in China and they log it in to the system, we are given a LID--Log in Date.  This date is what makes us eligible to be matched to our little girl, which is what happens between steps 7 and 8, so it's a pretty important step.

It has been a long two weeks waiting for our dossier to progress through the stages at our agency, but it has finally finished critical review and will be sent from the Atlanta office to the head office in Colorado today.  When I say it has been a long two weeks, I will admit that I have been doing a bit of obsessing.  Like all the moms in the Chinese adoptive process, I want to get to the next step as soon as possible because each step gets me closer to getting my little girl home to her family where she belongs.  But this step is a really big step and there is an unavoidable hurdle in my progress.  The Chinese Childrens Welfare (CCCWA) closes from September 29-October 7 for a holiday.  That means nothing is done that week.  I really hoped that our dossier would be in China when they were closed for the holiday.  At the beginning of September dossiers that went to the Atlanta office were sent within a couple days to the Colorado office and were DTC a few days after that.  So when I submitted our dossier on September 12, it seemed a real possibility, but I guess it was not meant to be.  

That may sound very dismissive, "it was not meant to be".  Despite the fact that I admit to obsessing a bit, stressing a bit, getting a little sad with this delay and a little frustrated, I truly believe that we will be exactly at the point we need to be at when our daughter's file is ready.  From the time of our LID, it could be days, weeks or months before we get a referral.  I am hoping for days, but the reality is that it will probably be months.  I hoped to know who our little girl was by this Christmas, eventhough I knew we wouldn't be approved to go get her until next Spring, at the earliest.  Now from all the indications, we might not know who she is by Christmas.  That makes me sad, I have to admit.  But I truly believe that must just mean her file won't be ready yet.  Her file will be ready, or we will somehow be directed to her, when the time is right.  So beside the fact that my human nature says that time is passing and we are getting older and our boys are getting older and we are ready and waiting for her, we will continue to wait until it is time.  

Feel free to kindly remind me I said that if I start obsessing again in the near future. 

(9/28/12 update: Due to the holiday, we have confirmed that our dossier will sit in the Colorado CCAI office and will not be mailed to China until 10/5/12.)

On Wednesday, September 12, we relinquished our complete dossier to our agency.  We hope we are DTC (dossier to China) within the next week, but that is probably pretty wishful thinking. Two weeks maybe?