Family Nopal

This is our inaugural Family Nopal blog entry.  The crowd roars!  Oh wait, that’s just our dog barking at the mailman.  Well anyway, we’re excited to start blogging about this adventure into international adoption and our road to becoming parents, which is now just a glimmer in our adoption agency’s eyes. Until our future children come home (we’re looking to adopt a sibling set) we are happy to continue to give our dog Angel the life she deserves and to watch our Nopales grow in our back yard.  We planted our Nopales Memorial Day weekend and so far they are already starting to grow pencas, which are additional paddle-like branches,  see the little pink sprout on the top left.

 
So let’s get into it, what is international adoption all about?  Mostly it’s just a lot of paperwork.  A ton of paperwork.  When people have a child the old fashioned way (and we mean gestation and birth, not the stork…) they have markers to look forward to including ultrasounds, baby showers, finding out the gender, etc.  In adoption, there are markers to look forward to as well, some are the same – at some point we will find out the gender and ages of our children – but most of the milestones we will reach will involve paperwork.  Paperwork completed.  Paperwork signed.  Paperwork haunting us in our dreams like a scene out of Fantasia… you get the idea.

As we write this, we are wrapping up the details of our home study, which is both a compilation of paperwork, online classes and visits with a social worker. We’re going to do a quick catch up here to explain how we got to where we are now and the steps involved.  If you are easily bored by details, just peruse the pretty photos of paperwork below.  

 
Steps to International Adoption from Mexico or How We’re Going to Spend our Summer Vacation

• Find an Adoption Agency: We have chosen International Child Foundation because they are nice and also because they are currently the only agency processing adoptions for Mexico. – Done!

• Submit application to Adoption Agency: this is some general info about ourselves, why we want to adopt and confirms we have income, which we do, whew.  – This is done, check!

• Find a Home Study Agency (sometimes these are the same agency, but since our adoption agency is in Arizona and we are in California, we have to do our home study with an agency in CA) – we found one in California called Adoption Options, they are great! – Check and done!

• Submit Home Study Agency Application: This is an application where we provided photos of ourselves (see our pics below, these are the same ones we used for our home study application, keeping it real here) more financial info, biographies of ourselves, copies of passports etc. etc.  – We are also done with this, check!

• Home study visits: The home study agency will assign a social worker to conduct the home study visits and interviews. Usually you have one visit with both adoptive parents, then individual interviews and then a final interview together.  On the first visit our social worker came to our house and just toured around noting how many bedrooms we have and other house-type details.  We overdid it and cleaned every nook and cranny of the house, the social worker didn’t really inspect anything, but at least we got our spring cleaning done! – Just completed our last interview last night, check!

• Home study paperwork: this includes a lot of documents that we will not list in detail because it’s exhaustive, but to name a few includes certified copies of birth certificates, marriage certificate, fingerprinting, letters from 4 references, verification of employment, medical sign off from doctor, bank statements, and a bunch of other documents. – This is all done, check and double check!

• Home study classes: we were required to take 5 classes online to learn about things like attachment, helping children cope with grief and loss, medical conditions, etc.  We did these over two weekends online and now we are experts. Well actually we’re just experts at logging on to that website, but we’ve got the certificates to prove we took the classes. – Check and done!

This all took us about two months and now we’re just waiting for a few forms to come in and we’re done!  And by done, we mean that we get to move on to the next phase which is the dossier process that is submitted internationally.

 
More to come on how we learn to complete paperwork blindfolded, the progress of our growing Nopales and more tips on navigating international adoption. Thanks for reading!