Twenty is enough

The cover story for the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Thanksgiving Day was all about a Virginia couple celebrating the holiday with their 20 adopted children.  Wow, that’s about all I can say.  Twenty is enough: Va. couple, their many adopted children thankful on ‘our most special holiday’:

“We didn’t really set out to adopt 20 children,” said Mike.

But that’s precisely how many will be gathered around the table today — plus two boyfriends — to say grace over a pair of 22-pound Butterball turkeys, stuffing cooked in twin lasagna pans, Meg’s mother’s corn pudding recipe multiplied by 10, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, 72 rolls and six pies (two sweet potato, two Toll House, one apple and one mincemeat).”

Mandarin language classes becoming popular

We are hoping to learn a little bit of Mandarin before traveling to Taiwan.  I recently found out about a local school that offers classes for children, and the principal told me that he is considering starting a class for adults in January if there is enough interest.  We have also considered the Pimsleur program, as well as a program called Fluenz.  USA Today published an interesting article today, saying that more US schools are offering Mandarin than ever before and enrollment is booming.  As China booms, so does Mandarin in schools:

“The number of elementary and secondary school students studying Chinese could be as much as 10 times higher than it was seven years ago, says Marty Abbott, spokeswoman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

When the council surveyed K-12 enrollment in foreign language classes in 2000, there were about 5,000 students of Chinese, Abbott says. The council is collecting data for another survey, but Abbott says early figures suggest the number of students now studying Chinese has “got to be somewhere around 30,000 to 50,000.”

Nationwide, there are Chinese programs in more than 550 elementary, junior high and senior high schools, a 100% increase in two years, according to The Asia Society, an educational group. In May, when the College Board offered Mandarin Advanced Placement exams for the first time, 3,261 high school students took the test.”

“Gotcha Day” For Two Families

The neat thing about our adoption is that we have been able to meet so many other families online who are also adopting from Taiwan. We are able to follow their journeys and learn from their experiences. I can’t imagine what it would have been like even ten years ago to adopt – the wealth of information available online and from other families is incredible. With that said, it was really cool to witness two families today celebrate “Gotcha Day” with their newly adopted children. Some friends of ours are currently in China adopting a little boy named Lian. We look forward to meeting him when they get home in a couple of weeks. Another family we met online traveled to Taiwan and met their new little girl, Sophia, today. We hope to adopt our child from the same orphanage in Taiwan where their daughter has been living.

Our dossier is on its way!

We shipped our dossier to our agency yesterday.  We started collecting this paperwork, required for our adoption, back in August and it has been a somewhat tedious process.  Most of the documents must be original and notarized, and the notary’s commission must not expire for at least one to two years.  After a few trips to the police station to have our criminal background checks re-notarized, and a second trip to our doctor’s office to correct a misspelling, I think everything is now in order.  It was hard letting go of the documents when I went to mail them.  When I took the packet up to the counter at FedEx yesterday, the employee looked at it, slapped a sticker on it, handed me a receipt and tossed it in a bin behind him.  I felt like telling him to be more careful…these are important papers and I don’t want anything happening to them.  Of course, I am sure it has been tossed around more since then.  Hopefully our documents will arrive safely at our agency on Monday.  (By the way, I’m tracking our package and right now it’s in Memphis.)

Adoption Expo

For those of you in the DC area, the Freddie Mac Foundation will be hosting an Adoption Expo on Saturday, December 1.  The event is free and will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.  The expo will feature resources and information for those considering adoption, as well as post-adoption resources for parents who have adopted.   

International adoptions surge

Adoption researchers say American parents view the international adoption process as more reliable than domestic adoptions.  Parents in U.S. choose to go global for predictability:

Americans adopt some 20,000 foreign-born children each year — a rate that tripled between 1990 and 2005. How to explain the surge? In a word: predictability.

Domestic adoptions are more random. A baby could be in your home in two months, two years — or more.

“But with foreign adoption, there are set milestones that help with the tick of time. … It’s that definitiveness that draws so many people,” said Elizabeth Swire Falker, an adoption attorney in Westchester County, N.Y., and author of “The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Adoption.”

Adoption Update: Home Study Finalized

We have officially been on the waiting list for an infant from Taiwan for one month now, and we received our finalized home study report in the mail today.  Woo-hoo!  It feels great to have this major step completed. 

Our next step: compile the paperwork for our dossier and mail it to our agency.  The dossier includes several official documents: our home study, notarized copies of our passports, physicians’ reports, criminal background checks, a financial statement and verification of employment, as well as our birth certificates, and our marriage certificate.  Eventually our dossier will also include approval from the US Government to adopt an orphan from overseas. 

Cry of the Orphan Campaign

Several Christian broadcasters will be devoting their airtime next week to focus on adoption and how we can all make a difference in the lives of orphans. It is part of the 2007 awareness campaign, called Cry of the Orphan, to reach out to the estimated 143 million orphans in the world.

The schedule includes how to pay for an adoption, interviews with families who have adopted, and practical ways to reach out to orphans around the world. Also, you can learn more about the children throughout the world and here in the United States who need homes.

James 1:27 in the Bible tells us, ”Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans and widows in their troubles, and refuse to let the world corrupt us.” 

To search or not to search?

The New York Times Magazine published an interesting article last Sunday about adoptive parents who search for their child’s birth mother, even before their adopted child has requested any information, and in some cases, before the child is even old enough to understand adoption.

My initial thoughts after reading this article focused on the motivations of adoptive parents who choose to search on their own. Do they feel an obligation to the birth family? Is it out of curiosity, or a need to provide the child with an identity? And if the search is fruitful and the adoptive parents are able to track down the birth mom, what if it turns out that she never wanted to be found? How will the adoptive family handle that, and will they share that information with their child when they are old enough to understand? In many ways it seems like opening a Pandora’s Box to me.

From what I have learned about adoption in Taiwan, the process is more open than in other countries. There is a possibility we will meet the birth mother at the time of the adoption, and may have some family medical history for our child, at least from the birth mother’s side. Even if we do not meet her, I hope that I will have some information about her that I can provide to our child someday.

We are not planning to search for our child’s birth mother before our child is old enough to request more information. We plan to tell our child about his or her adoption from the start, and our child may have some questions that we cannot answer. But we would support our child’s decision to search for his birth family at the appropriate time in an effort to find the answers.