Who Will it Be?

As you know, I’m keeping a just-for-fun pool with friends and families (and readers too! Go to this post to participate!).

So far, 19 have voted on our child’s gender, age at referral and year of referral.

On average, we’ll get a referral in 2013 for an 8 months old boy. It’s funny because that was Pablo’s exact prediction J

I have to say that I believe wishful thinking is playing its role here… 2013 is very optimistic. And I’m the only one so far who is predicting a referral past 2013! I guess I should thank everybody for wishing us a quick process! I sure hope it happens this way!

My own personal guess? I say we’ll get a referral for a 4 months old boy in 2014.

And for the record, 4 of our friends and family members think we’ll get twins J

The Advantages of Cloth Diapering

Picture from http://aprilmackinnon.wordpress.com/

Pablo and I have decided to use cloth diapers on our Cinnamon Bun. It’s not to say we’ll never use a disposable, especially when we’re living in a hotel room in Sri Lanka, but we’d like to use cloth as much as we can.

We’ve already got 3 cloth diapers: 2 used that I bought at a sale back in May, and 1 brand new that little T. brought as a gift for her cousin.

There are 2 good arguments for cloth diapers:

1-      Money: Cloth diapers cost ~$300-$500 to start, plus the cost of washing (energy, soap and water). That’s probably less than $1000 in total. Disposable diapers cost ~$2000-$3000 over the time a baby uses diapers.

2-      Environment: This is not as cut-and-dry as you’d think… If cloth diapers are bought brand new, used only for one child before being discarded, and machine dried, the environmental cost of manufacturing, energy and water pollution may very well equate that of manufacturing plastic diapers. If your electricity company produces from a coal plant, machine drying diapers is an important air pollutant. But if you’re going to buy used diapers, reuse your cloth diapers for your second child (or a cousin or friend) and/or line dry your diapers, then you’ll be keeping a few tons of waste from the landfills!

I found this article on the Canadian Government website.

And while we’re at it, I think I’d like to get some reusable wipes and liners... We’ll just try to make it a habit to hang all that stuff to dry! Is there anything cuter than a line full of colourful diapers? And our dry Mountain climate will help anyway!

Pretty Curves!

Isn't written Sinhala beautiful?
Tamil too (the second line).
So much prettier than our straight, square letters!

This is the header from the letter we received on Tuesday, acknowledging reception of our application :-)

Sponsorship Application

OK... So the Immigration Process is slowly starting to appear clearer in my mind... As you know, we chose to obtain Canadian Citizenship for our child through the Sponsorship process.

The concept of Sponsorship is that you become accountable and responsible for the person who is immigrating to Canada. You have to provide food, shelter, money, etc. For a set period of time (10 years for an adopted child), this person cannot benefit from Employment Insurance or Social Wellfare. Any money they could need has to come from you.
Obviously, adopting a baby involves way more accountability and responsibility anyway, so that doesn't scare us.

Once Immigration and Citizenship Canada has approved you as a potential sponsor, you can apply for your child to obtain a Permanent Residency visa in the Canadian Visa Office of their country of origin. To do this, you will need some documents specific to the child. This means that this step cannot be completed before the referral.

Our Sponsorship Application is ready to be sent out!

We have just finished puting together our Sponsorship Application. We'll send it out this weekend. Adoption related applications are treated as priority cases by the office in Mississauga, so we hope to hear from them really soon! That's why I've printed ADOPTION in gigantic letters on the envelope :-)

To compete our application, we used Guide IMM 5196.

If you're getting ready to fill out an application too, it would be wise to search for "Sponsorship of adopted children and other relatives — The sponsor’s guide" on the CIC Website. I'm guessing these get updated every now and then!

And if you have questions, brew yourself a pot of coffee (or two), call CIC (1-888-242-2100) and keep trying until you get someone!

I'll let  you know when our application gets approved :-)

On Hope

I find that Hope is a very tricky element of the adoption journey.

Anyone who has ever heard the word patience in regard to their family building effort knows that Hope can be a very dangerous thing. It’s a simple equation: the more hopeful you are, the more painful the fall. And anyone who talks about optimism and how it’s supposed to attract good luck has clearly never been there.

So there are good reasons for trying to keep your Hope levels under control, however difficult that sometimes is.

On the other hand, the balance has to flip sides at one point. How do you prepare for the child that’s coming when you keep thinking it won’t happen? How do you even start preparing the people around you, your family, your friends, even your work team? How do you plan financially for diapers and ballet classes if you’re sure you’ll never have to worry about these?

So managing our levels of Hope seems like a very delicate, yet critical task to me. It’s something I struggled with in a lot of different ways, those past few months. And it’s still a struggle.

I am willing to believe that we’ll be parents one day and that we can start preparing. But anything more concrete seems too dangerous.

Our agency gave us a range of 8 to 24 months to referral.

I think buying baby clothes is fine. But moving our bedroom to free up the baby’s room? Telling my boss that I may very well go on parental leave in a few months? I’m not quite ready. And please don’t tell me to let myself be hopeful, I’m the one who’s risking the fall.

I can’t help but notice that today, we’ve waited for 1 month, that this leaves 23 months to the longest waiting time our agency has seen and that, if those numbers are right, 4.2% of our pregnancy has passed. That’s not even 2 weeks of a biological pregnancy. For now, this is about as far as I’ll go in hoping that our timeline isn’t too far off…

Take a Guess!

When our file made it to Sri Lanka, I sent an email to our family and close friends. Along with our pregnancy (on paper) announcement, I started an unofficial pool.

Just like some couples get their families to try and guess if they’re expecting a boy or a girl, I asked everyone to pick a gender, age at referral and year of referral.

It’s just for fun, there’s no money involved or anything else than the satisfaction of winning... And it makes waiting and dreaming about our kid so much more fun for us!

Take a guess too! Here’s what you need to know:

-          We requested a child under 12 months old. Babies are usually not available before they’re 3 months old.

-          We didn’t specify a gender, but we said that twins were ok.

-          There’s approximately as many boys as girls available in Sri Lankan orphanages, but our agency has received a few more requests for girls than for boys.

-          We started waiting on June 18, 2012. The average wait is about 18 months. The shortest wait our agency has had is 8 months, the longest, 24 months.

You don't have to know us personally to participate. Just leave a comment telling us:

-          Girl, boy (or twins)?

-          How many months old will our baby be when we receive the referral?

-          In what year will we receive our referral?

Whoever is the closest wins!

365 Days

One year ago to the day, Pablo and I took the decision to adopt.
We had talked about it before.

Several years before, when we were still unsure we even wanted kids, I had told Pablo adoption made so much sense to me. He had to agree (it does make more sense than making new babies in an overpopulated world filled with kids in need of a family). But he was not as enthused as I was. It was more of a "yeah... maybe one day... we'll see." reaction.

Then, in the year leading to our decision, we talked about it more seriously. We had even researched the process. But what we had found had slowed us down. The process turned out to be heavy (that's an understatement), long (another understatement) and expensive. And we discovered it carried risks and challenges we had not thought about.
We looked at adopting from Ecuador, where Pablo grew up and we still have family. But the process is very difficult there, and the children available where older than we would consider. We put the project aside again.

All we needed was a little nudge from life.
On July 9, 2011, after a very difficult day, we came to the conclusion that this was what we had to do.
We had no idea where to start or what countries were available to us, we weren't sure how long we'd have to wait and we weren't even married. But committing to that decision lifted such a weight from our shoulders.

In those 365 days, we've done a lot of bushwhacking and figured out most of the process. We got married, obtained our government's approval to adopt, were judged and evaluated by social workers as a family, gathered a lot of documents, put together our Dossier. We've fallen from our cloud when the program was suspended suddenly, we've questioned our decisions and had to defend them in front of strangers, killed time in these infamous months by learning about Sri Lanka, about parenting and about adoption. We've celebrated the re-opening of our program, gotten on the actual waiting list (which I picture more as a huge pile of dossiers in a Sri Lanka office), started picturing ourselves as an expecting couple. We've started the process to give our precious Canadian citizenship (with all the privileges it entails) to our Cinnamon Baby.
To this day, we have put in 3 weeks of our actual wait time.

In those 365 days, I've also started this blog and made friends with a number of amazing people. I've learned about other cultures and other processes. I've received all sorts of useful tips from other parents, adoptive and bio, and also from Sri Lankans. I've poured my heart out on days when this adventure didn't feel so glamorous, and I've celebrated every little victory with you guys. And I've received amazing support.

In those 365 days, Pablo and I have come closer to one another. We've cried and celebrated together. We've both changed our views on so many things, including birth families, racial issues and parenting. And our level of compassion for our fellow human beings has raised substantially.

This isn't an easy road to travel. It's scary, tiring and long. And it's lonely at times.
But it's also a beautiful and humbling adventure. We've never done anything as exciting as this.
And somehow, working this hard for our child has made us love him/her more than words can express, without even knowing anything about him/her.

So here's to another year of paperwork, blogging and learning!
(and who knows? this may be our year!)