Mile 13

In the beginning I made the mistake of looking at the adoption process as a whole. Each document to collect, every form to fill out and so on and so on. The list seems to never end and the number of hoops to jump through is yet to be determined. I made myself so overwhelmed and wasn't even sure where to begin. It all became this mess of a do-to list that I was more afraid of than I was motivated by.

I am a Marathon runner. Running is my therapy and my vise. My motivator and my mental organizer. Running, I can do.

So Dustin sat me down on one particularly overwhelming day and explained it me in one of the best ways he could. This is what he said....

"When you are gearing up for a Marathon you don't think about all 26.2 miles at once. You go into it knowing that you did your training, you put in the work to earn each mile and each mile is an accomplishment. If you went over your route and allowed yourself to feel the exhaustion you may experience in those miles, you might not start the race to begin with. You think about mile one... and then mile 5... then 8.... until finally, you hit mile 13. The half way point. From there you celebrate a little knowing that you have come this far and remind yourself that you can, and will, make it to that finish line. You just need to continue focusing on one step at a time and celebrating each mile passed knowing you are one step closer. You need to look at the adoption process the same way. Don't overwhelm yourself with mile 20 when you are only on mile 2."

From there, I actually took the time and broke down the adoption process and figured out each "mile" stone. Well, I am happy to announce that we are at Mile 13! Our halfway point! We have our Completed Homestudy in hand and have sent out our I-600a form (which is basically asking permission to take a citizen of another country and make her a citizen of the U.S. as our child.) We are now working on compiling our dossier. Once this step is complete, we will get a travel date from Vika's Country and we will finally meet our sweet girl.

I love running, but Mile 13 has never been more beautiful.

The Waiting Place...

• The Waiting Place…

• for people just waiting.
  Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
  Or a plane to go or the mail to come
  Or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
  Or the snow to snow, or waiting around for a Yes or No
  Or waiting for their hair to grow.
  

• Everyone is just waiting.

• No! That’s not for you!

Well, I believe Dr. Seuss is right that the waiting place is not for us. We have been here for quite some time and I know that even when we escape to that place where banners are flying, we will find ourselves in the waiting place again and again.

We thought and were told that our Homestudy would be complete and in hand over a month ago. Our social worker is fantastic. He has been a social worker for many years but is new to international adoptions. Our homestudy has been reviewed and sent back to be reformatted or have items added 3 times now. Each time adds a week. We waiting on our completed homestudy to file our I-600a form and compile our registration dossier and our court dossier.

I spoke to our placing social worker yesterday and received some good news. We do NOT have to wait for our "Golden Ticket" from USCIS or have our court dossier completed in order to receive our first travel date :) :)

We do need our homestudy... *sigh*... and we need to compile our registration dossier. Once that is translated, we get to take our first trip and, for the first time, see the sweet face of our daughter across the globe.

It may not seem like a huge milestone but it was a glimmer of good news and progress that we so needed. With any luck we will not be waiting on our homestudy for to much longer and we will not be waiting too much longer to meet our Vika.

Hopefully our next update will be within the next week telling you that we have our homestudy in hand :)