Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Our First Donation!!!

Well we had our first donation through ChipIn recently, in response to the getCals program (which is hosted here getCals if you need it) So thanks to your donation (you know who you are!) you have paid for one of our passport photos.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Home Study and Ranting about the Child Shopping Network

I am not much of a ranter, but after this short update, I have to vent...

Well, we have made it through the bulk of the dreaded "home study". We have a little more online training to do as well as some infant CPR classes, but it is pretty much done. So now we prepare our final documentation to be notarized, translated, etc. and send off our next big payments to our adoption agency. We were very happy to work with Baptist Children's Home in Mt. Vernon, IL. They were a great organization to work with and were very friendly and helpful.

---BEGIN RANT---

We are hoping within the next few weeks to have our dossier completed and ready to go. Then we wait and save as much money as possible. Visiting El Salvador will not be cheap. We are probably somewhere in the range of $7k - $9k still in fees and travel costs before we can bring our daughter home. It will also take about 10 months for all the paperwork to be processed. It is a long way to go and it really makes me sick when I read about celebrities who jet over to some country pick out a kid and those countries grease the wheels for them like in this case of Angelina Jolie's Vietnam adoption which will only take 3 months. Friends of ours who are adopting from Vietnam who have all their paperwork submitted still plan to wait another full year before they can bring home their child.

These people (Madonna, Angelina, etc) make me sick. They throw their money around, have their lawyers get all their paperwork together, and go get their kid. Then try to look like some sort of humanitarian by bringing home a child that their nanny can take care of. Then there are many people that I know who spend 1-2 years of paperwork, tens of thousands of hard earned dollars, emotionally taxing ages of waiting to do the same process. Do I have sour grapes? Sure. Would I prefer to have millions of dollars to just slap down and bring our little Miley home? Absolutely. But I don't. I just wish more people would be able to see how difficult it is to adopt a child if you are not a 'super-star'. That you have to invest a lot of your time, money, effort, heart and life into bringing this child home. It is certainly not the child-shopping-network that the super-rich get to use when it strikes them that they want a baby without the hassle of that whole getting pregnant thing.

---END RANT---

So anyway, thanks for reading. If you want to make a contribution to our adoption you can of course use the chipin widget on my sidebar.