Pictures!

No, we can't show pictures of the children yet. We do have pictures of their rooms, though. Here is the two boys' room.

If one wants to share with Alex, instead, he has a bunk bed in his room. But we expect the two new boys to want to be together at first. The two twin bed frames were the ones Chrissy's mother and aunt used when they were little girls in the Lithgow household. They are a nice walnut, and we had them refinished several years ago, after removing layers of paint.

This is the little girl's room. Some decorations were given to us by a friend from church who was on our Peru trip in 2009. The bed frame is the one used by Chrissy's dad when he was a boy. We bought the bedspread new and just have to add things to the walls.

The house is ready. We're excited.

The National Benefits Center (NBC) for Hague Adoption has cleared our i-800 application. It is on its way (electronically) to the US embassy in Lima. They will review and confirm the application, then notify the State Dept. to issue an official notice that will allow us to travel. We're currently looking at Oct. 8 or 15 as possible dates to head to Peru. We would then leave very early on a Monday morning to fly to Andahuaylas, up in the mountains, bringing along our attorney and a social worker from SNA in Lima, because there is no permanent adoption office in the city. We will stay there for about a week, then return to Lima to complete the adoption and await clearance to return home.

Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, girl

That will be our family, by age, in another couple of months! We received a new referral for another sibling group of three children at the July consejo in Peru. It took a few weeks to get all their information translated, and birth certificates and passport photos sent to our agency in the US, but we can finally share that we are close to adopting!

There's no such thing as the final paperwork in an adoption. There is the last application you have to make before being allowed to travel to the other country and meet the children. That is now complete. Our packet for the I-800 application went in to the US immigration office last week. Now, the US officials review the materials and determine that the children are legally available for adoption, and that the parents were previously approved for children with these characteristics. After all the prior checks and reviews, this step is almost a formality, but it still takes 4 to 8 weeks.

The new timeline will probably be for travel sometime between the last week of September and the second week of November, for about a month within that window. Even though we are all "in school" now, we do plan to take Alex with us for the full trip. He really wants to go, and dropped out of a park district theater camp so he wouldn't leave them to recast a part. The later we leave, the more of the cross-country season he can get in, but it is likely he'll miss sectionals (and state, if his team were able to qualify). We will get his schoolwork to bring with us. He might also have some catching up to do over Thanksgiving break.

Andrew is living at home this semester, attending Parkland Community College. He is still pursuing the possibility of an internship with the Walt Disney company during an upcoming semester. He and Aaron will stay home and keep attending classes while we're in Peru. My department is willing to let me ask faculty colleagues to sub for me while I'm gone. Chrissy will take parental leave, and use up some saved sick days.

We don't know much about where we will be staying yet. The attorney in Lima is making those arrangements now. We will order airline tickets once we hear from USCIS, and hope to not have to pay last-minute prices. (We are looking into adoption fares, missionary fares, and other special deals.)

We will arrive in Lima, then leave quickly by plane to Andahuaylas, where the children are living in an orphanage run by a private foundation. The attorney and a social worker from the SNA (national adoption bureau) will come with us, as there is no permanent SNA office in this small city. We will meet the children and stay with them in a hotel for about a week. Then, the social worker will determine whether we have adequately bonded with the children, or if there is a need for more time, or if the children have some objection to the adoption. Likewise, officially we could pull out at that point if there were some information revealed that we did not know about the children. Obviously, we expect things to go just fine.

We will all go back to Lima and a judge there will complete the adoption. Ordinarily, the local judge would conduct the hearing, but again there is no full-time family court judge in Andahuaylas. At that point, the children will be legally ours. The next few weeks before we can return to the US will be spent getting them various medical exams, immunizations, and filling out documents to get their US passports issued. With the I-800 in place, the request is "pre-approved" but you still have to jump through some hoops. Once we have passports and visas in hand, we can book a return flight. We will have round-trip tickets for going there and back, but we will have to get one-way tickets for the children, and probably change our schedule so we can all be on the same flight. Thus, even once we are legally ready to come back, it may take a couple of days to get onto a flight.

While in Lima, we plan to visit with some missionary friends from our church. We've only met them once, because they left Champaign before we moved here, but they are doing great work among street teens and children in Lima. They have four young children and can give us a break from trying to speak Spanish or use translators all the time!

Our next post will probably happen when we get the I-800 approval. Thank you for your prayers, concern, and support through this process. It's been over two years, but there are still joyous moments ahead.

Now what?

As of our last post on this blog, you might have expected that we would write again when we left for Peru to get our three new children. Or maybe when the adoption was finalized in Trujillo. Or when we brought them home.

That's what we were expecting, anyway.

Then something happened that was a first in the 20 years our agency has been processing adoptions from Peru. Our referral was retracted. After we and the children had seen pictures of each other, learned that we would become a family, and started telling friends and family, it all came to a halt. The local judge decided that the children should stay at the orphanage where their birth mother could visit them, although she had lost custody some time ago. We are mindful of the difficulties faced by women in poverty, especially when the men in their life create problems. We will never know exactly what happened in this family, or what new information caused the judge to go back on an earlier decision.

We were heartbroken. We grieved for weeks. We tried every contact we knew in Peru and tried to find out what had actually happened, and if there was a chance this would all be reversed again. We stopped talking to people around us about the adoption, hoping to eventually have better news.

To be clear, the agency's attorney and the government officials in Peru did everything they could to confirm that this was indeed the judge's final decision. We were given opportunities to communicate with appropriate people. Since these events, we have been given updates that the children are OK. Some friends from church will see them later this week when they arrive on their volunteer trip and we hope they will be able to help the children understand.

Our agency finally convinced us that if we wanted to complete an adoption in Peru, we needed to move ahead and write another letter of intent for different children. Without going into all the details about how we chose, we ended up requesting the sibling group in Peru that was most like the children we had just lost. This wasn't to replace those children, but partly because we had been preparing ourselves for three. We also felt the Peruvian authorities would be willing to make that referral, whereas they might ask new questions about our dossier if we switched to a very different profile. The children are two boys and a girl, between ages 6 and 11.

At this point, we have provided all requested information and are awaiting a new referral. Consejos (the national council to grant referrals) have been happening about once a month. Our hope is to complete an adoption this Fall. It will have taken over two years. We might actually have to update our home study and some other forms that will expire in another couple of months. Back to paperwork!

This hasn't been a very upbeat blog post. We are still somewhat numb emotionally, and holding back our enthusiasm until we get some good news. One positive (from the standpoint of the adoption) is that Drew has decided to live at home this year and attend the local community college. He wasn't far away last year at Illinois State U., but is changing his major, and already thinking about a one-year master's degree, so it makes sense for him to take some time to reevaluate where he should go next. Assuming we actually do get another referral, it will be great to have him at home so the new children can bond with him as well as with Aaron and Alex.

Thank you for your thoughts, prayers, and support.

REFERRAL!

Finally, we have official word from Peru that the match has been made! The adoption "department" SNA meets every month or so to process applications. This month, they announced the meeting would be either the 25th, 26th, or both. They did not meet on the 25th, so it took until this afternoon to see the results on their website. If you go here, and scroll to the very bottom of the pdf file, that's our kids!

Of course, the most common question now is, "When do you leave?" Well, how about two months from now? Seriously, some documents have to be sent from Peru to our agency and then we have to apply for the final immigration approval. This used to take about a month, but lately has been taking up to two months. You're not allowed to go to Peru until that approval is done. We knew this next wait was coming. In the meantime, the personnel at the orphanage will be preparing the children for adoption: explaining how families are supposed to work, helping them learn a little more English, and talking to them about the separation and loss they will feel along with the happy emotions of joining their new parents.

Let's take the median: six weeks from now would be early June. We would fly down, complete the adoption in Peru in a couple of weeks, and then wait a couple more weeks (depending on holidays, availability of doctors, etc.) to get all the medical checks, forms filed, and other stuff to get the children's US passports.

Could we be there by the youngest's birthday in early June?

Could we be back before the middle one's birthday in early July, or Andrew's birthday in mid-July?

Will we still be in Peru when our church team arrives in Lima on their way to work at the orphanage again this summer? That's in late July.

Or will it take until the oldest's birthday, in early August, for us to be all together back home?

In any case, it will be a memorable summer.

Unprecedented Delays

We had been putting off a vacation for over a year as we expected to travel to Peru last Summer, then last Fall, then last Winter. Finally, we scheduleda vacation this Spring Break to get away for a week.

Good thing we did, because we ended up having to deal once again with frustrating and unexpected bad news while we were gone. We heard by email on Tuesday that we would not be getting a referral at Thursday's consejo. The reason given? The new psychologist at SNA in Lima had decided there was a need for a full psychological report on the children we were hoping to adopt.

This was something not encountered in the 24 years of our adoption agency's involvement with Peru. Just like the requirement for psych reports on our natural-born children (in January), this is apparently a new part of the system, not something specific to our case.

What made it so surprising to us was that we understood the children had already been shown our pictures to begin preparing them for the adoption. But apparently whatever report was prepared by the psychologist at the orphanage was not sufficient for the federales. We had even received word by email that "The Millers were declared suitable to adopt two to three siblings, one of them a girl, from 5 to 13 years old" just a few days before. Huh?

Waiting is hard on us. Now we think that waiting must be extra tough for the kids, too, because they already know someone is ready and willing to adopt them. We understand being adopted is no piece of cake, either. We will be introducing a huge disruption into these childrens' lives; but we believe it is all for the best. We want them to be prepared, but we also don't want to be guinea pigs for a whole new process.

Remember, in Peru they eat guinea pigs...or worse.

The Latest

So, no posts for a few months there. Here's what happened in the interim.

In December, we waited through two consejos and didn't hear anything.

In January, we were notified that we needed to submit new information. For families with children already, Peru decided to require a psychological report on those children. The previous psych report was on the parents, with a paragraph about the other children's attitude toward the adoption and a report on the family dynamics. Now, you have to provide a personality profile and detailed information on each child. That took us a while to put together, so we were not able to get a referral in January or February.

Also in January, we were notified that there was a sibling group of three that had been cleared for adoption at the orphanage where we had volunteered. After much soul-searching, we decided to change our letter of intent and name these children. The main reasons were that this group is two boys and a girl, with a boy the oldest, and we thought that was a better fit with our other boys. Also, we thought it would help these children to be adopted by someone they had already met.

In March, we were asked to sign another letter indicating our intent to adopt this sibling group, and then were asked to send photos to be shown to the children. In Peru, children can request to only be adopted with their siblings, or even reject adoptive parents once they meet them, if the children are not comfortable with the adults. This is mainly protection against unfit parents, and we haven't heard of it ever happening. But in our case, apparently they thought it would help the children feel better about agreeing to be adopted if they could prepare them ahead of time that their new family were people they had met and also let them know they would be moving to the US. We will also be bringing Alex with us so the children can see how we interact with him and they can start bonding with him. Needless to say, Alex was very popular when we were in Peru--the children all liked having someone their own age to play with.

Given these latest developments, we expect a referral next week at the March 24 consejo. If so, we will apply to USCIS right away, and hope for better than the normal 6-8 week turnaround time for the I-800 application. We are ready to travel any time. However, the trip will likely start in mid-May.

Andrew will be home from college in May, and already has a paid day job and a volunteer evening job in his field of youth theater. He and Bear (our dog) can have some bonding time. Aaron would stay with a friend from high school until finals, then move back home. We would regret missing Aaron's 16th birthday in May, but will just have to celebrate before we leave. Neighbors and friends will help them out while we're gone. They may have a regular "tour de Champaign" for meals. Otherwise, there'll be a lot of frozen pizzas and pop-tarts.

We hope to be able to share good news in another 10 days or so.

No news is good news?

That phrase came up at dinner today, and we had a discussion about it. When you're waiting to adopt, no news is NOT good news. Then again, maybe it's not bad news, either.

The November consejo came and went with no news from Peru. We have not received confirmation that the documents we submitted last month were satisfactory. We hope the lack of further questions means the committees were satisfied. On the other hand, it's hard to understand why, if the documents were acceptable, they didn't go ahead and assign the children.

Maybe the next consejo (assignment day) will be in just a couple of weeks, since they probably won't want it to be too close to Christmas. Villa Hope has a few families just waiting at this point.

I was able to rearrange my teaching schedule a bit to create some room on either side of Spring Break. So long as we get the referral in December or January, we should be able to travel in mid-March. I appreciate the cooperation of my department and students. The March date would also be after Chrissy's class has finished their standardized testing for the year.