What's Going On with the Adoption?!

This is the question we get whenever we bump into friends who we haven't seen or talked to in a while. When we were in the process of attempting to have a family the "bio" way (including through in vitro with a generously lent uterus), we would tire of hearing the question, "So?" Sometimes I would be pregnant, and the "so" would be followed by "How's the pregnancy coming along?" Whenever I heard that, I felt like running away to a beach cove I know in Chile and hiding out there till things "happened", come what may. How was I supposed to know how the pregnancy was going?! I didn't have a camera to monitor it every day! I was already getting ultrasounds every other week, thanks to our wonderful healthcare system, without which I wouldn't have been able to be so closely monitored, or try all the therapies that I did. I was already stressed out enough by the pregnancy itself to on top of it all have to relive each detail with every person who asked about "the pregnancy". Hence, the blog.

The blog was a great way to update everyone on the goings-on in one fell swoop during our attempt at surrogacy, and when Andy underwent a complicated surgery, but when we left behind the desire to continue the "bio" route and changed the route that we were on toward parenthood to adoption, I grew tired of updating the blog, because honestly the milestones were so few and far between that I seldom had something to tell. Also, they were completely unsexy milestones. "Hey, we got our police clearance certificates in the mail today! Hurrah!" Or, "Today we went to the notary to get everything stamped! Yippee!" Compared with, "Today, my friend selflessly offered to house my baby in her uterus for nine months!" I rest my case. You have been spared of two and almost a half years of unsexy milestones, but you still want to know, so here's a summary.

From October 2008 to June 2009, we ran around like headless chickens getting copies of all our certificates (birth, marriage, police), chasing after our accountant for letters about our financial health; sitting in waiting rooms to get X-rays, blood tests and overall medical checkups to attest to our physical health; applying for police certificates and getting fingerprints taken; taking a course in adoption and attending multiple seminars; persuading wonderful friends and relatives to write nice things about us; and visiting with our adoption practitioner to complete what they call a "home study". All those papers went to the Ministry of Children and Youth Services of Ontario in June 2009 so they could approve us to apply for adoption in Peru, and thus began one of many waiting periods to come. It should have lasted 8 weeks, but it ended up taking five months, because a well known international adoption agency went bankrupt and left a lot of families hanging. The Ministry had its hands full.

We finally got our approval at the beginning of December 2009. Of course by then ALL the papers were expired and we had to get it all redone to send now to Peru for their approval. In addition, they required that we be assessed by a shrink, so she could write us a letter asserting that we were not demented and that we were a sturdy couple. D'ya think? Finally, we had to write a profile photo book with copy about what a great couple we were and how much we wanted to be parents, addressed to the social workers in Peru who would review our file. Our file left Canada in March 2010 and we entered another waiting period.

In the heat of last summer I started to get antsy. We hadn't heard from Peru and it was taking too long. Turned out that our papers had not even been translated yet (they had to be translated in Peru by their certified translators). Five months had gone by and, being a translator myself, I felt like strangling someone. I or any of my colleagues in Toronto could have translated the entire thing in just a few weeks. But there was a backlog somewhere, and, well, that's just how it goes.

In October 2010, we got a letter from MIMDES (Peruvian ministry in charge of international adoptions) saying that the file had been translated and was being reviewed, but that a lot of the documents were by now too old and needed to be reissued (and retranslated, renotarized, reauthenticated, relegalized, etc.). We were so tired of the process that it took us a day or two to react. They wanted everything redone in 4 weeks. The police clearance can take up to 12 weeks! So frustrating... But there we went again. All the medical exams redone, including a letter from the shrink saying nothing had changed, all the police clearances redone, financials redone... the list goes on and on. But when it came time to send, we thought what if all these docs get caught in the translation void over there and expire yet again? So we took a risk and had the translations done here. In the end, it took some persuading for them to accept the translations we had done, but they did and on November 17, 2010, we were finally approved to form part of their registry of waiting families.

So, what's going on with the adoption?! We're in another waiting period for now, one they say should take about a year, but if we're lucky, before 2011 comes to a close, we should have a child referred to us and should be running around town again getting papers in order for the final leg of the race: the 6 to 8 week trip to Peru to pick up the fourth* member of our family.

*The third member is Lucas, of course. Here he is having laser treatments for arthritis pain. He's quite the warrior at age 12!



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