another adoption update

i have a hard time going too many days without blogging. clearly that's the case since it's just been 3 days since my last post. but we've had a couple of minor things happen on the adoption front that i wanted to share because every mundane detail is important to us and one step closer to our babies. first, we did get our USCIS fee and I-600A form sent off last week. we are now waiting for a fingerprinting appointment at the CIS office in charlotte. second, we are finally getting our medical exams done for our homestudy! our friend cecilie, who is finishing up her med school residency at a clinic here in WS, has been trying to get us into her clinic free of charge. it looks like we're still going to have to pay the co-pay for our visit, but at least we won't owe a huge bill just for having someone listen to our heart beats and sign a sheet of paper saying we're healthy enough to raise children. the medical exams are the very last thing we need for our homestudy. we'll send all of our papers off to our social worker (hopefully by the beginning of next week), and she'll write our homestudy. third, and this is a huge finally, we are going to pay our first fee to CWA. we have been waiting forever to pay this fee. thanks to some generous friends, $700 was knocked off our first fee. we are so grateful to those who are helping us pay this fee, as those dollars are dollars we don't have to find elsewhere.

speaking of dollars, we found out yesterday that we might have overlooked an additional fee for adopting a second child. this doesn't at all affect our decision to request 2 children, but it does knock us back on our behinds again as far as money goes. everytime we think we've found a solution for funding most of our adoption, we find out about another fee. just recently, we decided we'd live without furniture indefinitely so we could use our new homebuyer's tax credit to pay all the fees associated with sending our dossier off to ethiopia. but now that we're looking at an additional fee that must be submitted with all the other dossier fees, we're going to have to get creative with finding the money. there are actually many wonderful non-profits that provide grants and interest-free loans to adoptive families. the only drawback to those is that your homestudy must be complete before you can apply, and then it can take a couple of months for the money to actually become available to you once you've been approved. so for the sake of getting our dossier sent ASAP, it looks like we'll be trying to have a yard sale (if we can find enough stuff to sale) and maybe even calling local businesses (chick-fil-a has been suggested to me) to see if they'd be willing to donate a percentage of profits to our cause.

one last thing -- awhile back, we did a little Q&A on here about our decision to adopt. one of the questions i wish we'd answered is "but don't you want to have your own kids?" i promise that all adoptive parents, especially those of us who have chosen to adopt before having (or for some, instead of having) biological children, have heard this question at least once since telling people they decided to adopt. of course, what the questioner usually means is "but don't you want to have biological children?" for most people, this is just a matter of semantics, but i bring it up to say that this is one of those times where language is really important. the question is totally OK since most adoptive families would readily agree with me that natural birth and adoption are 2 equally beautiful and wonderful ways of building a family. it's the language of "your own kids" that adoptive families find hurtful, especially since adoption has become (in some circles) a controversial issue. i read recently on a blog a comment from a reader who said she believed adoption should only be "in addition to" biological children rather than as a "replacement" for biological children. this girl was quite adament that adoption is an inferior way of building a family. i've even heard people say they didn't believe someone could love "someone else's" child as much as "their own" children. but something tells me these people have never seen the fierce love an adoptive family has for their children, even if their children aren't even home yet. i love my sons as if they were in my womb. from the day we decided to adopt, i loved my children as my own. so when somebody asks me "but don't you want to have your own kids?" i can only respond "yes, and i already do."