Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Maddux's room is almost done (except for the scotch tape holding up the pictures). We ordered white frames but looks like we got the wrong size. Have to get mats to go inside or figure something else out after Christmas. Just need a white shelf to go above the dresser and we should be ready.

Cabled!!

We received confirmation from NVC that our paperwork was cabled today! That means that Maddux's visa application has been approved.

This is the one part of the process that has timing that is supposed to be spot on - no questions. From the time the paperwork is dropped off at the US Consulate (on either Monday or Thursday), it is ready for pick-up exactly two weeks later.

Of course our paperwork will be dropped off next Monday (12/20) and ready for pickup on Monday (1/3), but there are holidays in between there for the Consulate, so not sure how that will affect our timelines.

Good news is we are are cabled and one step closer to bringing Maddux home!

Package Received at NVC

Good news: NVC has received our 800 application from USCIS and we have been issued a GUZ#. This means that we should have our information cabled to China by tomorrow. Which means we can meet the Monday drop off for our Article 5.

This would have been done earlier, but our 800 approval from our US Gov't had a receipt date of 11/24/2011 instead of 11/24/2010, so a correction had to be issued yesterday.

Two weeks to process Article 5 = January 3rd (may be Thursday instead due to holiday)
Estimate 3-4 weeks for Travel Approval = January 31st

Which means by the end of January we could have travel approval and be able to book flights.
We know the consulate is closed for the first 2 weeks in February and not taking appointments, so we still would not be able to travel until end of February, but it seems like it is finally getting closer!

Approved!

Our 800 application (US approval specifically for Maddux) was approved on 12/8. It was sent on to NVC on 12/10 - hopefully they will receive it tomorrow, can process and get us cabled to China by the end of the week. Hoping to make the Monday drop off for our Article 5 (only can drop off on Monday or Thursday), if not then definitely Thursday of next week.

We finished Maddux's room and will post pictures soon. We finished up his care package and photo album last night, just have to label some pictures for him and off to China it goes.

We Love Skype!!!

Tonight we were able to use Skype and talk to and see Maddux in China through video. We got introduced as his mom and dad. He waved to us and sang us a song (in Chinese) and told us that he likes cars. He also got to see a close up of Mickey on the video and that got a smile out of him. He was a little bit shy, but we expected that from some of the other information we had. He knows the words mom and dad in English, but that's it for English.

Only had about 10 minutes to spend on Skype, but it was awesome!!!

Now if we could just hop on a plane and go get him!!!

Our 800 application should have been approved on Friday, but we did not hear back from USCIS. Will be calling first thing Monday morning.....everyone keep fingers crossed!

The Rest of the Process

From what we understand, the rest of the process is:

1. Mail I800 application to National Benefits Center (NBC) for approval. Takes 10-14 days.
2. NBC will mail approval via regular mail to National Visa Center (NVC). Takes 2-7 days to arrive at NVC.
3. NVC will upload approval into computer system and cable approval to American Consulate in Guangzhou, China.
4. NVC will issue a letter stating approval has been cabled. We receive a copy via email (if everyone is feeling nice) and email the copy to adoption agency. Adoption agency couriers it to Guangzhou to drop off at US Consulate.
5. US Consulate will issue Article 5 letter. Agency courier can only drop off and pick up documents from the Consulate on Mondays and Thursdays. Takes 2 weeks.
6. Agency courier picks up Article 5 and forwards it to CCAA. Travel Approval (TA) is issued a few weeks later.
7. After TA, receive official Consulate Appointment and plan China travel. Hopefully 2-3 days after TA. Travel 4-6 weeks later.

We are still hoping to travel by end of February!

Maddux is Coming Home!

Okay, not immediately, but last night we received approval from China. Maddux is officially ours!!!!! Jen got the call from our adoption agency at 7:02PM last night. Only 34 days waiting for Letter of Approval (LOA)!

Our agency has to mail us the LOA form and we have to sign and send it back to them. After that happens they will submit paperwork to the USCIS office to get us official approval specifically for Maddux (verify his orphan status, etc.). They will then send this to another US gov't office where the information will be cabled to China. This process should take 4-6 weeks. Then China will issue an Article 5 and after that is taken to the Chinese authorities, they will issue a travel date for us. We also have to apply for visas for China. We are estimating we will travel sometime in mid to late February!

We also are going to find out if we can send a care package with some goodies and some pictures of us to Maddux.

Great timing! Sunday afternoon we stopped at Ikea and bought a dresser for Maddux's room and a comforter cover.

Red Thread Charities

Love Red Thread Charities....they are the charity group that has been in the orphanage that Maddux is at and have been able to send us updates and pictures from October updates below. This weekend we received some new pictures, including ones with his foster mom and one with Maddux actually smiling!!

Their website is: http://redthreadcharities.org/ if anyone is interested in more information.

And now for the new pictures:




























A smile:













This picture is of the bracelet that he wears. This was with him when he was found and was given to him by his birthparents. We are told the bracelet is for good luck. The walnut is a chinese medicine that promotes wellbeing.

Our little boy is waiting for us in the Zhejiang Province, in Hangzhou City.

Blog Settings

We have taken our blog private as we are not able to publicly post pictures yet until we have official approval from China. We received notice yesterday that our Log In Date (LID) was 10/12/2010. This is the date that China has received our dossier and logged it into their system. The next step will be official approval (Letter of Approval - LOA). We are hoping for this by Thanksgiving, but the average wait time is 58 days currently.

The Big Update

So finally the big update that everyone has been waiting for..... we have decided to switch from Bulgaria to China (for a variety of reasons) and have a boy waiting for us. He is from the China Special Needs program - he has already had surgery to correct his special need. We saw him listed on an agency waiting children's list and requested his information and received it on his 3rd birthday!

His name is Sun Zhong Qiu and he was born on 5/25/2007. Sun would be the equivalent of our last names. His first and middle names (Zhong Qiu) were given to him as he was found during the autumn festival. His American name will be Maddux Samuel Bush.

Multiple pictures below for our cutie.

The first picture we ever saw (taken in March 2010)













New Pictures Taken in October 2010:

Where's the News...

So you are asking where the update is. We have been silent for awhile but should have some news by the end of August. It may not be the news you are expecting from Bulgaria....we are researching some other countries and children, will have more definite information coming shortly.

But....we have not been bored. We have had 2 sick cats in the last couple months - Monster with pancreatitis (yes, we managed a feeding tube for a few days) and Mickey had to have 3 inches of his intestines and his entire appendix removed!! Everyone back to healthy for now, hoping it stays that way!

Stay tuned....more to come!

Introducing Mickey....

We brought home our new kitten on Friday night. He is doing really well (except for slight eye problem - going to vet today). He was terrified of the greyhounds the first night, but is doing much better as you can see from the second picture.

He is very very tiny - can fit into the palm of one hand. Even the adult cats that were at the cattery when we picked him up were much smaller than we thought. He'll probably grow to 7-9 pounds and will be very long and very very skinny!

1 Year

It seems hard to believe, but today we have been registered and officially waiting for a referral from Bulgaria for one year!

Good News: We did speak with our adoption agency last week and they are still saying 18 months for a referral. The MOJ has been meeting weekly and referring approximately 10 children per session. The children that were identified in January should be on the international adoption registry shortly - approximately 4500 children.
Bad News: We know of at least one other person who has been registered for 24 months and does not have a referral yet. She also requested a child up to 24 months old at the time of referral.

We continue to wait and still hope that we will have a referral by 18 months. 18 months of waiting (going by week numbers) will be exactly our wedding anniversary date of September 20th, so maybe 18 months is what is meant to be.

Wait Times for Referral (Bulgaria)

This week we had some good news, or at least progress news from our agency. We emailed to ask if they still thought 18 months was reasonable time for us to receive a referral, based on how others waiting in line were progressing. We can see that the MOJ is meeting weekly, but it is hard to tell where they are at in the line of referrals - some are for paperwork in 2005, some in 2009, so very confusing!
Our agency received a referral for another set of parents that had been waiting 17 months at the time they received their referral. We think they also only requested a girl. They were registered only 6-7 months ahead of us.
The other good news is that between 4000-5000 children were recently added to the registry of children available for adoption, based on the work the MOJ did late last year with adding children if they had been in orphanages and parents had not requested to pick them up by December 31, 2009.
So based on this, we were told that 18 months or possibly shorter is still realistic. We are hoping this is the case. It is hard to believe, but in 2 weeks we will already have been waiting for 12 months.

Questions & Answers

Some answers to questions we have received from our blog readers:

Why are there no girls names to vote on?
Two reasons:
1) We have requested either a boy or a girl, but have been told that 90% of the people who adopt only request a girl, so we should expect a boy. There are always more boys available for adoption.
2) We have a girl's name picked out already. The captial of Bulgaria is Sofia, so that is what we would use for a girl's name.

What will use you for a middle name?
We most likely will use Jacob's middle name of Samuel.

Why is it taking so long?
Wish we knew the answer to this one! There are alot of reasons - as Bulgaria has started to move forward with adoptions again with their new MOJ representatives, they are prioritizing certain children first. These are primarily children over the age of 7 and children with special needs.
Before the new MOJ was in place last year, very few adoptions were processed through Bulgaria each year. There are a number of dossiers that were registered before ours that need referrals. Some countries have a policy of lifetime dossiers so people do not have to keep updating paperwork. Some of these families have moved on to other countries or no longer want to adopt, but their paperwork is still on file. The last referral meeting we saw from the MOJ in January, people who had their dossiers registered in the middle of 2006 were receiving referrals. We have been told there are very few (less than 30 dossiers) registered in 2007. Don't know the numbers for 2008, but have heard anything from 100 to 800. We are #78 for 2009 (we believe, based on our registration number).

No News

We have been quiet for a few days because there has not been any real news to share - other than update pictures of our new kitty (if anyone's interested). Last Friday, there was a meeting of the MOJ in Bulgaria for 10 hours, but this was primarily to discuss how children identified as special needs were being referred. The MOJ website has not been updated since December, so we do not know if they are continuing to meet to refer non-special needs children and if they are possibly what month/year of potential parents being registered they are up to. I think we will be asking our agency for any updates they have this week since it has been awhile since we have heard anything.
Hanging in there!!

Why We Can No Longer Watch Animal Planet

We will be having a new addition to our family....an Oriental ShortHair kitten. We were watching Animal Planet and a show came on about different cat breeds. Saw the Oriental ShortHair and loved them. They are similar to Siamese, but come in many different colors. There is a cattery in Myrtle Beach that raises these types of cats and just had two litters.

We will most likely be getting one of the gray kittens in the first picture. We were hoping for the brown one, but think he is already taken. Kittens were born in middle of January. We can visit in middle of March and bring one home in April.

3 Dogs, 3 Cats and hopefully soon, 3 People!

No more Animal Planet allowed!

Whirlwind Ride

Last night and today have been a huge whirlwind ride for us!!!
We received some videos from our adoption agency of children that had been identified as special needs (all clients from our agency get them). We opened the videos just to see the kids not expecting to find one that we would be interested in pursuing. Wrong...one adorable little girl caught our eye, can't say too much to protect her identity, but she had very minor (if any real) special needs.
This morning we reviewed her medical and were even more surprised, some minor issues, but no major red flags. Got a little excited, but a little scared too. This was not exactly the type of child we had set out to adopt, but we were both seriously considering moving forward and put a call in to our agency to get a couple final questions answered. Of course our new I800A has not been translated and sent to Bulgaria, so we are not officially "paperwork ready" as required for these special needs referrals. Didn't know what we would have to do for that, plus needing to update paperwork to accept a child with these needs.

We found out this afternoon from our agency that another family (from a different agency and possibly different country) had seen this child's information earlier on the MOJ website, and had already requested her and their request was accepted, so she is no longer available to us. The family only had basic information published on the MOJ website - which is about 3 lines of information, no pictures, or video so there is a chance they would not move forward. But the video and pictures are what convinced us, so we are sure they will continue. We are sad for us, but happy that she has found a home.

So, we go back to waiting for our referral....and maybe paying a little closer attention to the "special needs" list of available children!

What We Got In the Mail Today

Our I800A extended approval came today! We are now approved to adopt by the US government through March 28, 2011. 15 more months...we are praying we are done well before that. The first extension request is free, but the second one is not.

We asked our agency today on the status of the referral meetings was (these are the official meetings where representatives from the Ministry of Justice in Bulgaria meet to referral available children to waiting adoptive parents). Nothing official but it looks like the last meeting was December 18, 2009. Under the new laws the committee is supposed to be meeting weekly (at least 3 times a month), but it looks like they may not be fully back to that schedule from the holidays. Also no news on the official number of children that are on the registry available for adoption, our Bulgarian team was meeting with the MOJ before the holidays to find out this exact number.

So we are approved again, and waiting!

The Perfect Outfit

Yes, we are way ahead of ourselves, but found this adorable shirt for the kiddo on eBay that would be perfect for flying home to the USA in - it even has airplanes. Of course we bought it!

Welcome to Our Adoption Blog

This is our first post to our adoption blog, even though we have been in the adoption process for 23 (yes 23) months now! To recap, we are adopting a child under age 2 at the time of referral, from Bulgaria. Our dossier was officially accepted by the Bulgarian government on March 13, 2009. At the time we were told to expect 18 months until we receive a referral of a child. Currently we have been waiting 9 months.

Once we receive a referral (we will get one picture and one page of medical information), we will travel to Bulgaria for approximately 7-10 days to meet our child and officially accept him or her. We will then come back to the US for 2-4 months. The court proceedings will happen in Bulgarian during this time. Once everything is finished, we will take our 2nd trip to Bulgaria to pick up our child and bring him/her home. The second trip should be about a week - time to get a passport, visit the US Embassy and a couple other official things.

We will try hard to update as we have any news!!!