News!!!

Finally, after a couple of weeks that seemed like forever, we have news!! Today I opened yesterday’s mail (I have to get better about that) and we had a letter from the National Visa Center. The letter was dated August 26th and said that our case was forwarded to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea.

If I have my timelines down, this means we could be getting a call as soon as Tuesday – and most likely by the second week of September. If the call comes Tuesday I’m not sure we’ll be able to catch a plane by next weekend… It depends on flight schedules…. and human schedules… but we will sure try!!  

Of course, as we expected, this is timed perfectly with the baby shower that so many of you are joining us for next Saturday. Assuming we get the travel call on Tuesday, and assuming we are able to get flights out and hotels reserved next week (that’s a lot of assumptions), then we will try to fly out on Saturday evening so we can go ahead with the shower as planned. I’m really looking forward to seeing you all at the shower, so we’ll definitely do our best to work around it!

We are super, crazy excited!!! We’ll be running around this weekend trying to prepare as much as we can for Jaden’s arrival… it is highly likely that we won’t have the crib in time, but the company that we ordered it from (USA Baby) was kind enough to offer us a loaner crib until ours comes in. We’ll call them this weekend to see about picking it up sometime next week so that we can at least have the nursery set up. 

The rest of our weekend we will spend baby-proofing the house (lots and lots of window shade cords to take care of), and I’ll be preparing as many of my lectures that I can in advance so that I don’t have to worry about that while we are on our trip. We’re also hoping to go to the state fair in our town tomorrow. I have never been to a state fair before. It’s hard for me to believe there really is such a thing; I’ve only seen them in the movies so I keep wondering if we’ll get there and hear “SOOooiee!” I’ll keep all yooz New Yawka’s posted. LOL

Hopefully I’ll have more to report on Tuesday  — Have a wonderful Labor Day weekend!

A bit of recent history

Around February of this year the Department of State announced that the U.S. and Vietnam had not been able to come to an agreement in renewing the international adoption memorandum of understanding (MOU). This was a tremendous blow to all of the families with dossiers in Vietnam who were waiting to be matched with their children through referrals from the orphanages that their agency works with. The buzz was that dossiers would not be accepted after July 1st, and if the MOU was not renewed prior to Sept 1st, then Vietnam would return the dossiers of any family without a referral. This news came only one month after we had sent our dossier to Vietnam, yet some of the families from our agency, especially those waiting for baby girls, had been waiting nearly a year already when this news was released. 

In spite of this news we were still hopeful because our agency had only twelve dossiers in Vietnam waiting for referrals. We all prayed that in the seven months between the announcement and the deadline that one of three things would happen: 1) We would all receive our referrals 2) the MOU would be renewed or 3) those with the power to do so would ‘grandfather’ the dossiers already in Vietnam by July 1st, allowing referrals after September 1st. We wrote our Senators and Congress(wo)men. We asked our friends and family to write letters to their Senators and Congress(wo)men. We supported A Child’s Right Campaign for Vietnam. We celebrated each time a referral was received. We looked for any news on all of the adoption support groups. We continued to pray. 

I have come to know many of the families with dossiers in Vietnam, especially those I met through the yahoo groups, so it was very difficult to hear this week that there will only be two more referrals from our agency before adoptions in Vietnam are discontinued.  I am ecstatic for the two families that will receive their referrals in time. Yet, this news carried with it the harsh realization that approximately 8 dossiers will be returned to families who have been in this process for over a year, expecting all the while to travel to Vietnam to find their child. My heart goes out to each and every waiting family, all of which are probably wondering what they will do should the MOU not be renewed. I am continuing to pray that by some miracle there will be a way for all of these families to complete their adoptions in Vietnam as originally planned. 

There is a reason for everything. We are very blessed that we were chosen to be Jaden’s parents. We anxiously look forward to the day we receive the call saying we can travel to Korea to pick him up. In the meantime I continue to look at his pictures every chance I get. I cannot wait to hold him for the first time. I hope that all the waiting families will have the chance to feel the same way very soon.