Three Years Later

It's been three years now since we first began the adoption process in the Dominican Republic.  At this point, we don't really know if it is a viable option for us.  The last update we got from Madeline, our attorney in the Dominican Republic was back in the Spring where we were told there are 50 families ahead of us on the waitlist.  Last year we were told to expect a match maybe in August of this year.  We still hold out hope, but we are beginning to look for other options as well specifically, domestic adoption.  Our daughter will need to have a major surgery in a couple of years, so we feel the time is now, so we will give it all one more year and if nothing has come to fruition by then, it may be time to forget about our dreams of adopting a second child.  Who new it would be so hard?
We had to update our UCSIS and homestudy in April and that amounted to close to $2000 which will take us through until August of 2020.  We also changed our age range to 3-7 years old.  We were told too that they have loosened the requirements of Haitian children available for adoption to make the process quicker, so we will see.  It's hard to keep up hope.  Domestic adoption through the foster system doesn't necessarily seem like it will be that much quicker, but it is a lot more economically viable and may cause the least amount of disruptions for Adam's work and Anjali's schooling.

Some positive notes...my brother moved to Puerto Rico in April so I will have family close by should we get matched.  I have really felt that this extra time has given us the time needed to be ready as a family and to give Anjali the attention she needs to catch up.  There is another family from Montana who have been trying to adopt and they found a sibling set to adopt that are older.  They are getting ready to go travel soon.  That gives me some hope.  They have a wonderful blog to follow their progress here.

If we haven't heard anything from our adoption agency by September, we are going to contact them for another update from CONANI.  At this point, there is not much we can do.  We just have to keep the faith and know when to walk away if it just doesn't seem like it's going to happen.

Meeting with CONANI

It's been 7 months since my last blog post.  Not much has happened.  We decided in June to change the requested age of the child we hope to adopt from 0-4 years of age to 3-5 years of age.  This required an updated homestudy and request to make changes to our I-800 approval through USCIS which cost around $500.  It was a fairly quick change that took less than a month.  Inna, our adoption counselor in the US spoke to representatives from CONANI and they felt this should help to make our wait shorter.  In August we reached out to Inna to get any news and since she had none for us, we asked if there was any way we could set up a meeting with someone at CONANI.  She arranged this for us which was really great.

So on August 10th, we met with them promptly at 10:30 via Facetime.  On the call was our attorney representing us in the DR and a member of the legal team from CONANI.  We were very impressed by both of them.  They were attentive, seemed to care and did their best to answer our questions.  They told us that the wait was usually 3 years, but since our updated age, it was likely that we would be matched a few months before that.  So, they told us that it would probably be another year.  Our heart sunk at this.  They said there were around 3,000 children up for adoption, and CONANI was responsible for the adoptions of about 300 of them while NGOs in the Dominican Republic handled the rest of them.  They asked about the timeline for our adoption in India.  We explained that our daughter would need another surgery soon and that the times of being matched and her surgery might coincide.  Sometimes, it is hard to keep faith that the adoption will happen.  We have almost no sense of how the adoption matching process works over there or the experience of other families.   We feel anxious about all of this.  But we still feel very good about the program in the Dominican Republic.

So, we will continue to plug along and wait.  We considered looking into other programs, but then we would have to start from scratch again.  So in the meantime, we can only dream about our child and traveling to the Dominican Republic.  I have found a Dominican teacher who lives in Santo Domingo who is helping me learn Spanish as well as educate me on Dominican culture.  We meet via video chat once a week.  I explained to him that the bad news is that it will be another year before we are matched, but the good news is that I will have plenty more time to work on my Spanish.  He thought that was very funny.  And so it goes...I spoke with Inna today and she told me that she asked the representative from CONANI what is the longest an adoption has taken and he said 3 years. So maybe this latest news of "one more year", might actually be close to right.  The most important part of adopting is keeping faith that the adoption will actually happen and that the exact perfect child for your family will come into your lives at exactly the right time for your family.  That's definitely what happened with our first adoption and we truly hope for a second child.

Update:  Upon communicating further with the attorney at CONANI, we found out there are 190 national and international families in front of us.  It seems like a lot, but this includes people with different requests than us.  So far now, we are letting things rest and going back to our lives until we check in again in February.

One Year Later = One Year More

February marked the one year point from when our adoption dossier was submitted to CONANI to adopt a child from the Dominican Republic.  At that time, we expected the wait to be a year to a year and a half.  In February, we called our adoption counselor, Inna to get an update.  Unfortunately, the only news she had for us was that she expected the wait to probably be another year, so now we are looking at maybe Spring of 2019.  In a way, it is better for us as we will have a bit more time to save money, but it is also frustrating.  We have no idea of how many other families there are waiting ahead of us or what the hold up is.  Inna informed us that most of the children available for intercountry adoption are actually from Haiti and two things must occur in order for those children to be eligible for adoption.  First, Dominican citizenship must be established and then all efforts to adopt the child to a Dominican family must be tried, which usually involves rejection from 3 Dominican families before a child is eligible for intercountry adoption.    We are happy to adopt a child of either Dominican or Haitian decent.  We would really just love to have a second child and a sibling for our daughter.  We feel we have the resources and the desire to raise another child in our home.  We had to get our homestudy updated and our USCIS approval extended, so we have until April 2019 before we will need to get matched without any further updates or expenses.  So we wait, but life goes on and we keep ourselves busy.  I have been studying Spanish and enjoying it a lot.  Even before this adoption, I've always wanted to learn Spanish, so it is fun for me.

For this adoption, I have been much more patient.  Maybe it's because the promise of motherhood has already been fulfilled with our daughter Anjali, or the second time around, you just understand that things always take longer than expected.  Ultimately, I feel that a child will come into our lives when the time is right and as they say in espanol, vale todo- it's  all worth it!  You are worth the wait, my child!

An Update from Inna

We had a phone conference with our agency's director, Inna and spent about an hour discussing our adoption.  I really appreciate how communicative staff at Kids First have been.  They are a smaller adoption agency, but Inna has been at this for close to twenty years and it's clear that she cares very much about the success of every adoption she handles.  It had been almost 7 months since our dossier was accepted when we spoke to her on September 8th.  She was very upfront about the fact that we would probably not hear anything about our adoption until the one year mark which will be February 2018, but it was refreshing to hear that she had spoken with our attorney in the Dominican Republic to have the most up to date information available for us.  She describes the Dominican adoption process as one with a lot of heart and that they really care about the kids there which was wonderful to hear.  She also let us know that there are approximately 8 adoptions processed every month and she expected things to happen in the timeline that was given to us.  We discussed next steps and really tried to hammer out the details of cost and time.  At the earliest, it sounds like we could be matched in the Spring of 2018. We will need to come up with approximately $20,000 to cover all expenses and fees.  We will need to update our homestudy and USCIS approval by February 1st which will be added expense and paperwork. The harder part is the planning for the time we will need to spend in the Dominican Republic.  Once we get matched, we will need to submit another I-800 form to get Article 5 which is permission from the U.S. government to adopt the specific child we are matched with.  From there we need to head over to the Dominican Republic within 6 weeks of being matched for the cohabitation period with our child.  Both Adam and I will need to be there for 5 weeks with the child.  We will need to find a place to live in Santo Domingo.  Staff from CONANI will visit us regularly during this time to observe how things are going.  After the cohabitation period, our adoption case will go to court and one of us will need to stay there through the court process which is expected to be an additional 6 weeks and then another week or two to finalize all documents needed to travel back to the U.S.  We aren't sure how this will all play out with our daughter Anjali's schooling and Adam's work.  But we have it in our hearts and minds to all be there for the entire time if at all possible.  We still have plenty of time to work out those details once we are matched with our child.  For the time being, we will work at getting the house and finances in order so that when our time comes, we will be in a good place.

Anjali has been talking more and more about her brother.  She pretends all the time that he is with us and is making big plans for what to do with him once he is here.  She buckles him in the back seat and most recently has taken to setting a place for him at the dinner table.  We are all so excited and getting ready for you little one.

Continued Progress

Our dossier was quickly sent to Madalaine, the attorney representing us in the Dominican Republic. She took only about a week to translate the documents and submit them to CONANI.  All adoptions go through CONANI which stands for Consejo Nacional para la Niñez y la Adolescencia or National Council for Children and Adolescents.  At this point, CONANI has looked over our documents and determined they are complete, given us a case number and placed us on the waiting list.  From here according to the U.S. State Department Website, the following happens:

• When the PAPs (Prospective Adoptive Parents) turn comes, the Appropriations Committee makes the allocation of future adoptive family to the child.

• CONANI presents the medical and psychological records of the child to the PAPs for evaluation and then sends a copy of the file to the U.S. accredited agency for scrutiny and approval. This approval must be sent in writing to CONANI before starting the stage of socialization. [This is the process in which the PAPs spend time with the child].

• The PAPs must answer in writing to CONANI's Adoption Department Management either accepting or rejecting the child placement.

While it seems pretty straightforward, we are told it will probably be about a year to a year and a half until we are matched with a child.  Why so long?  Hague Convention Countries must do fairly extensive documentation that a child is indeed eligible for adoption. Additionally, in the Dominican Republic, many of the children eligible for adoption are children who were brought over from Haiti and it can be difficult to establish them as Dominicans so they can be adopted through CONANI.Talking with Inna, the director of our adoption agency, I got the sense that we won't really get many updates regarding our place on the waitlist or when we will be matched.  She, however, let us know that she felt really good about the people at CONANI saying they were honest and really seemed to care about the children.  She was able to visit the DR and meet everyone involved with adoption at CONANI.The State Department has some statistics regarding adoption in the Dominican Republic. The charts below are taken from the site to give you an idea of how many adoptions take place each year.

So for now we wait... which is fine.  We feel good about where we are in the process.   We wait excitedly and patiently for that first photo of our child and while it could be sooner than the time frame suggested, we know our child will come when the time is right.  

The Dominican Dossier

We mailed off our Dominican dossier to KidsFirst adoption last week!  Whoo hoo!  This is a huge step in moving things forward.  Applying for an international adoption requires about 6 months of document collection and the dossier is the compilation of all those documents that will get sent to the country you are adopting from which for us is the Dominican Republic. Although, having done this once before, we knew what we were in for, we had hoped that we could use some of our documents from the first adoption, but this was generally not the case.  Since both India and the Dominican Republic are Hague convention countries, meaning they following the international guidelines for adoption and are accredited for doing so, the dossiers for both are quite similar.  Here is a list of all the required documents that we had to submit.

The biggest piece that takes about 4 months is the home study.  For this we had to do 10 hours of online adoption education training, get child abuse clearances in every state we had lived in since the age of 18, get background checks from local and state authorities, get 4 letters of reference, and provide documentation on our finances and family.  Additionally, our social worker had to come visit and interview us 4 times and write up an approximately 20 page narrative about our family and home.

Once the home study is completed and approved, then you must submit it to the US government and complete an I-800 application to get approval to adopt.  This takes about 6 weeks and includes having to get additional biometric tests done through the U.S. immigration office.  While we were waiting, for this approval, each week I collected one or two things for the dossier.  The three things that were different from the Indian dossier were that we had to get a psychological evaluation done be a clinical psychologist attesting to the fact that we were fit to be parents, community service letters from an organization in the community that we were involved in, and additional FBI background checks.

Finally, before everything can be sent off it must be notarized and apostilled.  The notary checks that you or whoever is signing the various documents is who they say they are.  The apostille is performed by the department of state in your state and basically checks all the notaries to make sure they are who they say they are and their notary status is valid.

Phew!  I cannot say enough about how relieved I am to have completed all this and to get it sent off.  Anjali was very excited to know that we were sending off a big package for her little brother.  Like us, she can't wait to welcome him into our family.

The next step will be to get the dossier translated and then submitted to the Dominican authorities who handle adoption known as CONANI.  From there we will be eligible for a referral for a child to adopt.  Although, in my opinion this marks about only the halfway point in the adoption process, it is definitely a reason to pause and celebrate.  One huge step closer to bringing our child home!

Here We Go Again!

In the spring of 2016, my husband Adam and I decided to adopt again.  Our first adoption started in July of 2013 and we brought our beautiful daughter Anjali who was 3 years old at the time home in October 2015 from India (You can read about her adoption here).  Given the 2 year time frame of our first adoption, we decided that if we wanted a second child, we should get started.  The adoption process is timely and costly, but we felt in our hearts that a second adoption was something we wanted to take on.  When deciding to adopt there are a lot of considerations.  We feel especially pulled towards international adoption, because we love the travel and adventure that it entails.  We also decided we were most interested in adopting a boy that was about the same age as Anjali when we adopted her.  Although, we chose India the first time, because I was born in India and have family there, we didn't necessarily feel that it was the right fit for our second child.  Conditions for adopting are in a constant flux from country to country with changes in policy happening all the time.  Although India continues to be a stable place for Americans to adopt from, we were drawn to the program in the Dominican Republic for a number of reasons.  Adam was born in the Dominican Republic and lived their until he was 5 years old.     In fact, Adam still has his Dominican passport with a baby picture of him in it!

Adam's family moved to the Dominican Republic in the Fall of 1970 for his father to serve as a priest for the Church of Epiphany in Santo Domingo.

  According an old newspaper clipping saved by Adam's mother:

The Church of the Epiphany has a bi-lingual and bi-cultural ministry in the heart of the capital city of Santo Domingo.  The church ministers to the foreign colony living there from all over the world, to a Dominican congregation and has recently started a ministry to university students, a number of whom live at a center recently built on the church property.  The church also has a bilingual nursery as part of its program. 


Adam was born in the the Dominican Republic in April of 1972 and enjoyed his first years of life there.  Although Adam has not been back since he was a teenager, he still has family friends there and feels a connection to the country. 

Adam with sister and mom 20 hours after his birth

family photo

Adam and sister Alexandra with pet turkey Ana Maria

Adam's 4th birthday party in Santo Domingo

The adoption program in the Dominican Republic met all of our criteria and we liked the fact that you get to spend a significant time in country with the child within weeks after being matched.  The political climate in the DR seems stable and although I am sure it will seem a world apart from where we live now, it is relatively close, so travel there will be reasonable.

Once we decided to adopt from the Dominican Republic, we had to choose an international adoption agency to work with.  Our first adoption was through EAC and although they were wonderful, the Dominican Republic, is not a country that they deal with so instead we chose a small agency out of Indiana called KidsFirst Adoption Services.  When choosing an international agency, it is important to shop around.  You should feel the agency representatives are knowledgeable, responsive, and most of all care about the families and children that they serve.  After speaking with Inna Pecar, the director of KidsFirst, I had no doubt that this was the agency I would like to work with.  You also need to work with an agency within your state and we were lucky to be able to continue to work with Family Services here in North Carolina and our wonderful social worker, Amy who helped us with our first adoption.

I am starting this blog now for our son to document and share the journey and adventure that we will take, so that he knows where he is from and all that happened to bring us together as a family.  Within the next week or so we should be submitting our dossier to KidsFirst.  We are excited and humbled to begin this process again!