Funny Conner Story

James and Sue came to visit us on Friday and Sue wanted to go to the Philbrook Art Museum. Conner said, "Is it Chinese art?" Sue said, "No." Conner said, "Good. Cause I'm about Chinesed out. With her (me - Lori) it's Chinese this and Chinese that."
Poor guy. I guess he thinks I'm over doing it a little. Oh well!

The Fun is Just Beginning!

Just about a week after we were approved we started our home study process and our immigration paperwork. Our home study case manager is Rebecca Hackworth (Pastor Paul's daughter - Pastor Paul is the founding pastor of St. James, where we go to church). We met her and had our first meeting last Tuesday. We left Ethan with our neighbor because he was voted "Most Likely to Distract," but the other two kiddos were with us. Rebecca is taking her time during our visits getting to know all of us, asking lots of questions about our family (extended family and our little immediate family - is anyone scared?), our parenting styles, and just us personally. We have two more visits and a personal inventory, we should be done with the home study the second week of July. After our visits are done, she writes a summary and sends it to immigration as part of that paperwork. As we were leaving the Dillon offices from our first meeting with Rebecca, Conner starts telling her about the time he was at his PaPa's house practicing shooting a bow and arrow and almost hit his cousin with the arrow! It was a lovely way to end a great meeting. I said that that was why we don't go to PaPa's house very often. Thankfully, one of the requirements Dillon has as a parent adopting is a sense of humor.
I mailed the first of our paperwork to USCIS today! Immigration can be challenging to deal with, so I kind of sweated over my part of the paperwork, but it's off to OKC and out of my hands now. Once it visits OKC it gets sent to China to let them know we are planning to adopt.
Nicci and I are signed up for China Heritage Camp the second week of July! Conner will be at church camp that weekend, so he couldn't go. But, Nicci and I will have fun learning about the Chinese culture, food, people, and everything else. I think Nicole is a little nervous because she won't know anyone, but she'll be fine once she gets going.
The China Center of Adoption Affairs has not moved much. This is the organization that handles ALL adoptions in China - matching orphans with families. They are currently caught up to June 15, 2005! It seems that they update their site every 3-4 weeks and only move about a week at a time. We are just praying that they start to pick up again. If they start to get too far behind then we have to have some documents redone and resubmitted - that would be a huge pain, but not impossible.
Please feel free to leave comments if you want! We'd love to hear from you!

WE MADE IT!!

We officially are approved! We passed! Everything is clear!! We are definitely going to adopt a baby girl from China!!
I turned in the last of our paperwork today and we got word from Bethany, our case manager, that we are officially approved. The next step is to go through the home study. This will consist of one home visit and and two visits in the office with a home study case worker. During this we start our immigration paperwork and dossier paperwork. The immigration paperwork is filed with USCIS (United States Center for Immigration Services - I think that's what it stands for) and just lets China and US know we are bringing a resident from China to live in the US. The dossier paperwork is kind of an advertisement about us to the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). The CCAA is the nationwide organization that handles all adoptions in China. The CCAA will go through our dossier then match us with a child. They will look at pictures of Lyndal and I on separate sheets of paper and try to find a baby that looks like us. (We're gonna get one with a big nose, aren't we? Ha Ha! - that's Lyndal's joke) It sounds wierd that they try to match a caucasion family with an Asian baby, but remarkably they do a very good job! I am very happy with this process in that I could NEVER look at a file folder of pictures of baby girls and pick one to be ours, I would pick them all. Or I would find one for everyone I know. The CCAA is caught up with everyones dossier to June 15, 2005! They seem to do about a weeks worth of dossiers in about 3 months!! There are a lot of people wanting to adopt baby girls from China, there aren't as many babies that are "paper ready" even though there are A LOT of children in orphanages, and domestic adoption is on the rise in China. This gives us some things to pray about.
Now that Ethan has turned a very ornery 1 year old, our baby girl can be born at any time now. The last batch of referrals that came in (babies matched with their families for Dillon, our agency) were 6-10 mos. old. My thinking is that since we haven't turned in our dossier yet and since the CCAA is running at about 11 mos., she will probably be born around December or January of 2007? I could be completely off base, especially since I'm not much of a math person! At any rate she is probably growing in her mommy's tummy right now! Despite what I think, God knows every hair on her head, her birth mommy's head, and her birth father's head, and He is going to surround her with love wherever she is. She will know she is a chosen one right from the start. I pray for her birth parents a lot and this horrible decision they are going to have to make, that they have a peace about them and just somehow know that this is the right decision.

Not just yet . . . but soon we will be approved!

We have to turn in one more piece of paper and then we will be officially approved! I have to have Conner do an updated physical (Nicci and Ethan's was within the two year time limit). I didn't think I needed to do this, I thought I just had to go in and have a current height and weight and a copy of their shot records. But that is the only thing I sorta messed up on!! Pretty good for turning in all that paperwork.
Bethany, our case manager, said she enjoyed reading our application - that was so nice to hear! She said that once we turn that in then we will be approved and get to move on to the next step which is the home study process. We meet three times with a home study case manager, once in our home and two times at Dillon's offices which are based in Tulsa. Our home study case manager is Rebecca Hackworth. She is Pastor Paul's daughter. Pastor Paul was the pastor at St. James before Pastor Gary. We do not personally know Pastor Paul, but I had one of his granddaughter's in my class at church (not Rebecca's daughter). So, that connection is kind of cool.

Cool Bible Verse!

Isaiah 43:5 Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.

Isn't that just awesome! Because God is AWESOME!

Bethany is currently reviewing our application. Once she's done we will know if we get to move onto the next phase which is the home study. Hopefully I'll know something by this Friday!

TELEO!!

I think that means "it is finished" in Hebrew. I learned that in college. Anyway, we turned in our App. II today!!! They say that this is the hardest part of the whole process and it's all downhill from here. I am so relieved! This has been our fourth child for several weeks now and hopefully I can get back to taking care of our house and laundry. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to my family, especially my husband, for neglecting things around here because I've been so busy with this paperwork (I know ya'll still love me!).
The next step is for us to be approved. I asked our case manager what causes a family to be unapproved and she said that if there was something in the background check, some medical problem, or a concern in a reference letter then a family would be turned down. So, we should be approved next week and then we move on to the home study phase. We meet with a home study case worker three times. I think while this starts we get the first part of the paperwork for immigration.
God is so good!

STILL crunch time

Well, Monday has come and gone and we still haven't turned in our App. II and the paperwork that goes with it. We had a little delay in our taxes, but that will be remedied tomorrow and I am planning to turn everything in Thursday or Friday. We took some more pictures of our whole family this evening. I finished taking pictures of different rooms in our home yesterday. I am signing and dating things today, waiting on a couple of things from Lyndal, we got our application notarized today, and I still have to make copies of everything. We are REALLY so close now that I can almost taste it! What a relief. I'll post again when we actually turn it in.

What do YOU take with you to the storm shelter?

I'm a born and bred Oklahoma girl. I've seen a few tornadoes in my day, been in the storm shelter more times than I can count, I've even been tied into a tree with a fishing stringer during a tornado (I DO love my Uncle Gary!). So, when I saw that we might be in for some tornadic activity this beautiful Spring evening I cleaned out the closet under the stairs, grabbed the children, the radio, some books for the kids to read, AND, as any Okie girl preparing for an adoption would, the precious computer that has all my information I have been working on for the adoption (my autobiography, which is 4 pages long; my letter to the People's Republic of China, etc.), and "the" notebook that has all the documents, forms, instructions, etc.

I'm not stupid.

CRUNCH TIME

By this time next week (Monday 4pmish) we will have our Application Part II turned in!! So, the rest of this week is filled with completing forms, tying up loose ends, organizing, taking pictures (will be used for our dossier), and running errands. It feels sooooo good to be this close to the end of this part! After our App. II is approved we are moving into the Home Study section, and while that is going on we go through the process of filing immigration paperwork so our baby girl will be legal!!


YEAH!

Just Plugging Away!

Well, our goal is to have the Application Part II in by the end of this month. So, everyday this week I have been trying to fill in blanks, gather paper work, asking questions to our case manager, and just kind of being anxious! I don't know why I'm anxious, just because of all that has to be gathered and done. I just have to remind myself that I need to take one piece of paper at a time.
There are about 4 families from our agency that are in China right now having their Forever Family Days. I have been enjoying watching their videos and seeing their pictures and reading their online journals via their websites. I cry when I see their first pictures as a family together. I can't imagine what that sweet baby girl is thinking when she is handed over to "strangers!"
In the mean time I am trying to remember to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Lyndal is out of town during the week just for the month of April and that keeps me hopping with me and just the three kiddos. I try to make it fun by going to the park and getting ice cream, but I'm going to be a cow if I don't watch it with all my milkshakes! Anyway, if you are reading this, just say a little prayer for our family.

The McMurphy Family Christmas 2005 

An Organization in Oklahoma Helping Orphanages

Packages of Hope Incorporated provides a wide range of necessities to orphanages around the world. Visit www.packagesofhope.org to find out what they are doing, where, and how you can help. They even look for groups to help pack up boxes to be shipped. Their offices are on Garnett between 51st and 61st.

Some More From Lost Daughters of China

Here's a little more from the book:
- The only time a birthdate is really certain is if a mother delivers in a hospital, giving a false name usually, and then disappears, leaving the baby behind, or when birth parents leave a note with the child containing basic information. Otherwise the birthdate is an estimate, picked at random or for convenience. It's not unusual for a pediatrician here to disagree with the assigned birthdate.
- Ethnic minorities within China - there are numerous strains, particularly in the borderlands, but they add up to less than 10 percent of the population as a whole and were in some cases diminishing - were routinely aloud 2 children.
- Forced sterilizations, mandatory insertions of metal IUDs - which could be monitored by X ray to make sure they remained in place - became commonplace assaults on the women of China, as did forced abortions, even at full term. (Broken Earth, The Rural Chinese by Steven W. Mosher, 1983) (Human Rights in China documents "Caught Between Tradition and the State," 1995) (Slaughter of the Innocence: Coercive Birth Control in China by John Aird 1990)
- Officials of the Women's Federation of the Communist Party kept track of women's monthly cycles, and listed those to be sterilized and those required to have IUDs inserted. (A Mother's Ordeal by Steven W. Mosher, 1993)

Something to read to help pass the time . . .

I have been reading this excellent book called The Lost Daughters of China by Karin Evans published in 2000. It is about her adoption of a Chinese baby girl and the plight of Chinese women and their babies. There is tons of information in it. I just finished it, but am rereading it to share with everyone some different facts. There's so much more to this than just babies being abandoned.
- It is predicted that by 2003 there will be 30,000 Chinese children living in this country, most of them girls. (US Immigration)
- Chinese women's reproductive lives are largely controlled by the state. Permission from the government was required in order to have a child; women who became pregnant without consent were often forced to have abortions, even late in their pregnancies. If that baby was a girl, her husband and his family could disown her for giving birth to a child of the wrong gender. She could lose her job and her home.
- For rural women, who constitute 70% of China's populace, life is desperately hard, even in boom times and model villages. The suicide rate among women in the countryside is the highest in the world. China is, in fact, the only nation where the suicide rates for women top those for men. Most victims are young. The means of self-destruction, most often, is a lethal gulp of the poison closest at hand, agricultural pesticide. (NY Times January 24, 1999)
- A Chinese parent who wants to give a child a chance at being adopted must conveniently disappear, and so must the rest of the family, if anybody else is around. It's the Chinese equivalent to what's known in this country as "making an adoption plan." Thus, a birth parent who disappears is often intentionally creating a chance for her child to find a new home.
- Abandoning a child is against the law in China, another reason why parents are usually careful to leave no traces. A specific provision of the 1992 Law on Protection of Women's Rights and Interests forbids "forsaking" baby girls (often, on Chinese adoption papers the child is listed as "found forsaken"), although no one has reported any substantial pattern of prosecution. (Human Rights in China, December 1998)

An Update . . .

We have been given the green light from our case worker to go ahead and start the process of Application II. She said that we can turn it in as soon as the end of March. I don't think we'll be getting it in that soon because it is very involved and wants to know lots of things about us: how much our house is worth, full physical check-ups for Lyndal and I, health status on the kids, background checks, reference letters, notarizing things, etc. We have had to go slow at first because there has to be at least a years' difference between our last biological child and our adopted child. So, she hasn't even been born yet!
I went to this website called www.redthreadmaps.com it shows some provinces and where most of the orphanages are. There are between 30 and 50 orphanages in each province. I'm not sure how many provinces there are in China, but China is very large! That is a ton of orphanages! China has started using foster care for some of the children.
Here is a general guideline of the steps we have to go through: fill out and turn in Application II, go through a home study, file paperwork with USCIS (immigration), gather and turn in our Dossier (this is the last of the form gathering we have to do I think) to our agency, our agency waits for any other families on the same timeline as us then mails all the dossiers at once - called DTC (dossier to China), we get a Log In Date (LID) of when our dossier is logged in with the Chinese government, wait for the Center for Chinese Adoption Affairs (CCAA) to review our dossier and match us with a baby girl (they actually try to have your baby look like your family), the CCAA sends us a picture of the baby they have matched us with called a referral, we take the information on the referral to our pediatrician and have him review it with us, we approve or disapprove of the referral, tell our agency we accept the referral, they tell CCAA that we accept, then we wait for travel clearance. WHEW!! The CCAA is currently estimating that it will take about 10 months from LID to referral. That time frame changes frequently throughout the year, it could be longer or shorter of a wait. I'm not sure what affects this timeline.
We told the kids of this plan tonight at dinner. Nicci was very excited and already has plans for her to sleep with her when she gets bigger because she has a big bed. Conner was a little apprehensive. He said, "Mom, you know how I like to fit in and not stand out? Well, this is, well, you know." We told him that he has a year to pray about it and get used to the idea and we'll learn how to deal with standing out together. He also said, "Chinese people eat dog Mom!" I told him that we were going to take Sammy with us to China. He thought that was pretty funny. Ethan said, "BAH!"