A New Chapter In Our Story

Three years ago TODAY, we announced our journey to Miss K! This Christmas marks two years since she joined our family. We cannot imagine life without her and we are blessed beyond words to have the joy and honor of being her Mommy and Daddy. The miracle of adoption changed our lives.

We have been praying for some time now about growing our family again through adoption. While D was in Haiti in August (you can read about his trip HERE), he fell in love with the country and began to pray about being more involved there in the long term. Over the past few months, these prayers have become intertwined and we are now excited to announce that we are on another journey to Haiti. . . a journey to our son!

A new chapter in our family's story has begun. . .

A little bit about the Haiti Adoption process. . .

We looked into adopting from Haiti years ago, but Haiti has traditionally been very strict about its requirements for adoptive parents—that they be married at least 10 years, be at least 35 years old, and have no biological children—and we didn’t meet any of those criteria at the time. On top of those requirements, Haiti has historically been notoriously slow at processing adoptions. Before the earthquake, they were averaging 2-3+ years from referral to homecoming. In contrast to many countries, where adoptive parents may wait years to be matched and then finalization happens over a few months, matches come relatively quickly in Haiti due to the fact that there are many waiting children who are available for adoption and comparatively few families who are seeking to adopt; after the match, however, the rest of the process generally drags on and on and on and on and on. Waiting--particularly after you've seen and/or met the child that you've been matched with--is HARD, and this discourages many families from pursuing an adoption from Haiti.

Haiti placed a hold on new adoptions following the earthquake and since they re-opened earlier this year, their government has been re-working its adoption laws. No one knows yet whether the changes will bring more efficient processing or longer delays, but we are preparing for a long road. At this point, because we have two biological children (apparently the number of adopted children a family has is a non-issue), President Martelly himself will need to issue a "presidential dispensation" approving our adoption. While there are no guarantees, we have been advised that because we meet the age and length of marriage requirements, he will likely sign off and it will “only” add a couple of months to the overall timeframe. But no one really knows. We are expecting a rollercoaster ride, with a lot of uncertainty and some bumps and surprises along the way. If you know what a planner I am and how organized and structured I tend to be, you know that this is WAY out of my comfort zone. I’m really going to have to let go of my desire to control all the details lean on the Lord in this adventure! Over the past few months, God has given me a peace about adopting from Haiti despite all of the unknowns and has confirmed to my heart that He has a plan and it is in His hands.

We submitted our application to our agency, Holt International, on October 27—exactly 3 years to the DAY after we submitted our application to AGCI and kicked off our journey to K (the date thing was totally unplanned—we didn’t realize it until we glanced back at our Ethiopia timeline the night before we sent in our Haiti application!). We are currently in the “paperchasing” stage. A social worker is preparing a homestudy and we are getting physical and psychological(!) exams, background checks and fingerprints. We have questionnaires to fill out, reference letters to request, homeland security and immigration approvals to obtain, and loads of paperwork to compile. That will take a few months We hope to have our “dossier” of paperwork completed sometime this spring. Though the Haiti dossier requirements seem more daunting than the ones for Ethiopia, the race is on to turn it all in by March 27—the day back in 2009 that we sent in our Ethiopia dossier! At that point, the road will veer off in a direction completely different from the one we took on our journey to K (we thought 14 months from start to finish was long! Ha!). Our agency will send our dossier to Haiti where we will be matched with a little boy (or maybe even brothers!, we shall see) fitting our parameters (which we are still praying about), whose paperwork will be combined with our paperwork and begin to make its way through the Haitian social workers, government, courts, and finally to the US Embassy. We hope to be matched within a few months after our paperwork gets to Haiti, and expect that it may take another 2-3 years after that for the Haitian courts to legally declare him our son, Haiti to issue him a passport, and the US Embassy to give him a visa to come home. The process may be shorter. It may be longer. It will all be on “Haiti time” and we have faith that it will all be in God’s perfect time!

While we wait. . .

While we wait, we will keep ourselves busy enjoying our girls (while the adoption process may seem long, time with them always seems to fly by!), praying for our son and his first family, preparing our home for the arrival of a little boy, planning trips to visit our son, visiting him!, learning some Kreyol (the official language of Haiti and the language our son will likely speak when he comes home), practicing some Caribbean/West Indies recipes (yum!), partnering with ministries and organizations working in Haiti, and hopefully becoming more involved with our vibrant Haitian community here in Florida. We may even throw in a trip or two to Africa! While our son will always be on our hearts and minds, our goal will be to not be so focused on the destination that we don't fully appreciate the gift of the journey.

Please Come Along With Us on this Journey. . .

We are excited and hopeful about adopting again and are falling deeper in love with Haiti and its people every day. As we move through this process, we are certain that love will deepen and develop into an eternal connection to this beautiful, tragic, mysterious country that will forever be a part of our son’s story and our family’s life. Thank you for sharing this journey with us! Please drop by our blog from time to time to follow our progress, and please keep us in your prayers along the way!