When we last left our famed duo (Susan and I), we were off to Ethiopia to pick up Meron and Estifanos. Their referral information said that they had a younger sister who wasn’t available for adoption. We got to Ethiopia after a very long trip (14 hour layover in London) and got picked up from our hotel by the orphanage director. He took us to the guesthouse (a block away from the big kid orphanage), we met some of the families staying there, he offered us some coffee. I replied in my most sincere tone, “Umm, no, We’d really like to meet MY kids.” So he took us to the older kid orphanage. We met the kids and hung out with them all day. The two of us went back to our hotel and crashed (it’s now been about 48 hours since we left our house and have only had minimal sleep in airplane seats).
The next day we were at the guesthouse filling out paperwork for the embassy and the orphanage director comes up and says, “You know they have a younger sister.”
“Yeah, we’ve read all their paperwork” (3 or 4 times, but who’s counting)
“Well she is probably available for adoption are you interested?”
“Probably!?!?” …OK, so I don’t really remember what I said because I was in a little state of shock.
We saw Yordanos (the baby sister) twice while we were there. Once at the place she was staying, and then again when she was moved to the orphanage. They needed to do more paperwork to confirm she was adoptable, so we left it with “we will see” when we left the orphanage at the end of the week.
<One month goes by while we’re learning to be parents and busy with the new kids, but always in the back of our minds is that we’re eventually going to have to make a decision about her.>
This is a rather anticlimactic story since you know the end, so I’ll get to the point. Our adoption agency finally e-mails us and says that Yordie is adoptable. After praying and budgeting we decided that we could handle a 3rd so quickly (we had already been talking about adopting a 3rd after we got the referral since we kind of wanted the whole baby experience). Sacrifices were (are being) made, but we couldn’t be happier. Bigger-insta-family.
Obviously I’m being intentionally vague about some aspects of Yordie’s story since it’s hers to tell. Thanks in advance for not asking for more information about why her status changed.
October 26, 2006 at 9:37 am
Brian,
Sure appreciated hearing your story. Our little girls have older sibs that apparently are not adoptable, but I wondered if anything like your situation ever happened.
Thanks for sharing & we are reading…
~Sonya
October 26, 2006 at 10:11 am
Yes and no. Siblings become adoptable later all the time (Susan traveled with a couple picking up a sibling the second time she traveled) and there’s one traveling in Nov. WHFC will ask you if you would like to adopt them and, if not, will try to place them as close as possible to you.
Our case was weird in that we found out while we were in Ethiopia. Finding out quickly turned out to be a great advantage because we didn’t have to redo our dossier (the Ethiopian courts will accept it for 6 months) and we didn’t have to redo our I-600A (the embassy was nice and kept our file open and treated the 3 kids as one adoption) although we did have to file an I-824 once our homestudy was updated for 3 kids to get a new cable (I-171H) sent to Ethiopia that says that we were approved for 3 kids.
We probably could have picked her up a month earlier if we hadn’t had to wait for the homestudy update. Our social worker advised us to get approved for one more than we were requesting (just in case), but we used that up when we changed from 1 to 2.
November 28, 2006 at 11:41 am
[...] Going from 2 to 3 was not as easy a decision. I guess if I could have seen into the future and seen that everything would be fine (knock on wood, we’re only 3 months into this), we would have just made the decision quickly. Instead, we hemmed and hawed until our placement agency said Yordie really was available for adoption. Part of the indecision was probably us protecting ourselves from the chances of her not really being adoptable but a bigger part was us not being sure that we wanted to sacrifice (mostly financial, but also the older kids getting less attention) for a baby we had only briefly met. Ironically, the doubt we had about whether could handle it (like we had going from 0 to 2) was completely absent. At that point, we knew that we wanted at least 3, but money would be (still is) extremely tight for a while if we went to 3 so quickly. In the end, we basically decided that (even with all the sacrifices) there was no way we would regret the decision to take Yordie. And honestly, that was the way we were leaning all along, we just kind of needed our family to tell us that we weren’t crazy (which they did). Yordie has brought so much joy to all of our lives in the little time she has been with us, I really can’t believe we even considered not accepting her referral. [...]