What had we gotten ourselves into?

My heart overflowed with joy for the remainder of our vacation up North. I printed out a few pictures we’d taken of my future son and daughter and carried them around with me wherever I went. While in Indiana for our last few days, I met with several friends at my favorite coffee shop. I can’t even describe how wonderful it felt each time I shared those pictures of my future children. Nothing could stop me from bringing them home.

Other families we met in Austin told us the process normally took about ten months at the most. Many took even less time! We started our home study process a few weeks earlier, so I assumed we might already be ahead.

Mike handed me the package from our new adoption agency as soon as David and I arrived home after our trip. Inside that package, I found applications, instructions, timelines, and lists of every necessary document, also noting which ones to notarize and which ones to apostille, or properly authenticate, by the states they came from.

Then I read even more instructions on how to apostille our documents, plus I found tips from other people who adopted from Colombia in the past. Tips on what to do and not do during the process, how to speed up parts of the paper chase, and tips on travel and residing in Colombia (most families stayed between four to six weeks in the country with the child while waiting for the paperwork to pass through all the courts). The packet also included a few success stories. As I read them, I imagined our own success story included in someone else’s adoption packet someday.

We composed our letter to the Colombian government stating our petition to adopt Juan David and Viviana. I speak fluent enough Spanish to teach bilingual education and to travel and communicate with ease, but I did not trust my Spanish to write such a formal letter. I asked some friends to translate it for us, and then they asked a Colombian friend to make sure it looked and sounded okay.

Once the kids returned to their country for a specified amount of time, we sent the letter to Colombia via DHL. Wow. How quickly we found out that a huge portion of expenses in an international adoption goes toward postage and airmail.

An e-mail response from Colombia came fairly quickly, asking for more information concerning family history issues that led us to counseling in the earlier years of our marriage. However, the actual counselor we saw had since moved and left no address or contact information with anyone. After sending a few e-mails back and forth with this first contact in Colombia, and making an appointment with a new counselor, we gained permission to proceed with the adoption process as long as we addressed the issue in detail in the required psychological evaluation later.

Now officially in the process, we immediately faced problems. My summer vacation quickly came to a close, making all my “free time" disappear. This impeded the speed of how much paperwork we accomplished each day, and it made doing so much more stressful than when I still had summer hours to work on it at home.

We started our application with the new adoption agency first, which required half of the agency fees up front: $2,225. This depleted our adoption savings thus far, since our previous adoption plan gave us more time to save. The rest of this adoption meant a complete walk of faith, one step at a time. We knew many organizations offered financial aid for adoptions, so we immediately started applying for as much help as possible. We went by word of mouth recommendations, and we researched online for as many organizations as we could find.

Completing a dossier for an international adoption is a tedious, time-consuming process that will challenge even your sanity at times. Piles of papers occupied our desk, each requiring a similar yet distinct list of forms. Documents accumulated for the agency’s checklist, mostly originals which cost a small fortune to acquire. Other stacks of forms needed to be copied and notarized. Different financial aid applications requested even more paperwork. Our home study still lacked a few documents, plus we needed to make copies of everything for our own files.

 I often wondered what in the world we’d gotten ourselves into. Yet one glance at those beautiful faces in the pictures now hanging all over the place gave me a new burst of inspiration every time.