Long Time, No Write!

I haven’t updated this blog in quite a while. My last fund raising post doesn’t really count, which means it’s been a year and a half since my last rumination on life and update on our journey to parenthood. You must be thinking, wow! So much must have happened! But no... just a lot of waiting, I’m afraid.

In June 2009, three months after my last post, we finished getting all the requisite papers together for the Ministry of Children and Youth Services, the entity in charge of approving one to adopt here in Canada. Usually it takes about 8 to 12 weeks to get that approval, but it was late November, early December when we finally got the letter we were waiting for. This was greatly due to the fact that an international adoption agency, Imagine, had gone under and the Ministry was busy helping the families who it left hanging complete their adoptions. At least they had a valid reason!

Of course by then all the papers we had submitted in our dossier were expired and we had to get new ones of everything. That took about three months. In March, with our file approved and updated, we sent it to Peru. It took another five months for it to be officially received and translated. We have a case worker now and the review process is still underway. We’ve been told that October 20 will be the date they issue the letter of approval. To summarize: first you must be approved by Canada, then by the country you are adopting from, and no, that doesn’t mean you’ll be matched right away. It will take another 9 to 12 months for that to happen, if we’re lucky!

In any regard, we just got the unofficial heads up from the Ministry in charge (MIMDES) that most of our papers are once again out of date, so here we are, scrambling again to get updates: Toronto and RCMP police checks, update letter from our adoption practitioner, from our accountant, from the psychologist who assessed us, and from our doctor. We think that should be it and we hope to have it all ready, translated, certified, notarized, authenticated and legalized by the time the letter finally arrives requesting them. We hope to be able to send them via courier the day the letter arrives, but we are sure that there will be some document we hadn’t thought of that will delay us just a bit more. Patience is really a virtue with finite qualities.

So that’s what has been going on. People I don’t see often will ask me, “so, any news on the adoption front?” I don’t mean to be a grouch, but I secretly hate this question. If I had any news, you wouldn’t have to ask me, I would have already yelled it out to the four winds!

A lot of other things happened while we were waiting; both our families suffered big losses. It’s been a tough year, what can I say. Of course, while one goes through things like the stuff we’ve been going through, less important things like bookkeeping and putting away Christmas ornaments fall by the wayside. I had a lot of catching up to do, which I finished just in time for the Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF as it now calls itself.

Sometimes my poor body has to be the one to put its foot down for me to actually give it a break. I had been pushing it, I know; busy and often stressful days of work followed by long nights of partying and early wake-up calls. I kept telling myself, TIFF happens but once every year. Enjoy it! Honestly, I don’t party like that the rest of the year.

But I really wasn’t enjoying it much after day 5 of 10. I was going out because I had to. The lovely summer weather we had enjoyed two weeks before had changed to more fall-like windy and cloudy days, and rainy and cool nights – the kind that make you pull your duvet out from the deepest recesses of your closet, spread it out gingerly over your bed and then smile as you wrap your whole self in it. Anything to avoid turning on the heating in September! But I also wanted to see Andrés whose TIFF job meant he would be pretty tied up until September 20th. As luck would have it, I woke up sick that day and have been ever since.

I managed to avoid staying in bed until Thursday, even with a bad hack and frequent sneezing, but Thursday morning I had no energy left and that is how I ended up here, day 3 of being bedridden. However, I have to say that except for the nighttime, when I cough until my throat feels like sandpaper, and yesterday, when I had a fever that made my eyeballs feel like they were on fire, I’ve actually quite enjoyed these three days of downtime. With my faithful Lucas at my feet, I’ve watched movies, I’ve written in my journal and I’ve filled three photo albums (and took the obligatory walk down memory lane, of course)! The cough was a problem, because when you cough like that you can’t rest like you need to, but I meditated on that yesterday and realized that coughing is often a compulsion, a way to scratch an itch. So I decided I would try and observe the itch, name it, breathe through it and see what would happen, like I had learned to do in meditation. And lo! I slept through the night. And then I slept through the morning and the early afternoon. I slept a total of fifteen hours.

When I finally woke up, my fever had broken, my cough was manageable and my energy level was greatly improved. My body was smiling victorious. If only I listened to it more often.