Explaination of the Adoption Fees

Wow. I just have not been able to come up with any good titles for my blog posts lately. I guess my brain is drained. If you are here visiting this blog looking for entertainment, you might want to just keep clicking. My posts lately have lost their luster, and tend to focus more on practicality.

For a while now I have been meaning to write a post that breaks down and explains all the fees and expenses associated with our adoption. Somewhere along the way I got side tracked, and completely forgot about it. I have been so immersed in the whole thing, that I forget that those around me(especially those who are completely unfamiliar with international adoption in general) really have no clue why in the world adoption costs so much. I can see why when you start hearing amounts like $22,000 and $28,000, you could possibly start to wonder if something unethical is happing somewhere down the line for an adoption to cost so much. I hope that this break down helps explain where all the money is going and why it costs so much. If you get to the end of the post and still have questions, please feel free to ask. If I know the answer I will readily give it. Here goes:

$1000-Promise Trust Deposit
This was our very first adoption fee. :) This deposit put Daniel on hold for our family with Reece's Rainbow. It takes him off the waiting child list, so that we can start the process of adopting him. The reason Reece's Rainbow charges this Promise Trust Deposit fee is because when anyone with half a heart looks at their website, they immediately want to adopt about 20 of the children on there! But once the rubber hits the road, not everyone is cut out or prepared to do so. It would be unfair to a child to take him off the waiting child list because someone has great intentions, but isn't actually going to be able to adopt them. Being removed from the list they miss out on the chance of a family seeing them that is truly equipped to go through the process of bringing them home. It is basically a safety measure for the child. Our Promise Trust Deposit will be applied towards our travel expenses when it comes time for us to travel.

$275-Love Offering to Reece's Rainbow and Family Sponsorship Application
I really wish that we could give them more. What they do for these children is just amazing. They provide an avenue for children who have been written off as useless. Not only have they helped united over 300 children with families(that would not have been adopted without the exposure they received from RR), but they also provide hope and help to so many more!
The Family Sponsorship program helps to raise money for our adoption grant. (Aren't they just great?!) RR truly does everything in their power to make sure that every child finds a loving family.

$1100-Homestudy
We were super blessed to be able to have our homestudy done at such a reasonable price. Reece's Rainbow informed us that the average fee is about $2000 for a homestudy, and I have heard of others paying closer to $2800 for their homestudy. Praise the Lord that we were able to have ours done for such a reasonable price, and that our social worker was nice, speedy, and knowledgable about the requirements of homestudies for Daniel's country. Such a blessing!!

$830-USCIS, I-600a, and FBI fingerprinting
Can I just say that we were blessed here too?! We barely slid our application in before fees went up on this one. This is all the immigration paperwork that we file with our government. It is a petition that requests that we bring a foreign orphan in to the states.

$1000-Various Document Fees
This is everything from aquiring "official" copies of documents needed for our adoption, to copying, faxing, notarizing, apostilling...(those four steps are done over, and over, and over again.)

$1000-Medical Expenses
We haven't gotten the lab bill in yet, and insurance doesn't cover the bloodwork part of our medical expenses, so I am praying that we don't go waaaay over this figure.

$5000-Flights
This was an estimate given to us by RR(Reece's Rainbow), of what we can expect to have to pay. From the research I've done, I'm thinking that we can expect to pay a good bit more. We will be bringing Kellen(which we are pretty sure won't be a full ticket fee, but there will be a fee). Also, there is a very good possibility that we will be bringing a friend or family member to keep the baby while we are at the orphanage and in court. I have to find out for sure if Daniel's orphanage will allow him in or not. If we do have to bring someone with us, we will of course, be paying their ticket and expenses. The main reason I am thinking that we will be paying more than that is because when we anticipate traveling, the prices will be approaching peak season prices. $5000 is just an estimate, but I am prepared to have to pay more than that.

$1700-First trip lodging($80/night for 3 weeks)

$1100-Second trip lodging($80/night for 2 weeks)
This is just an estimate too. It is very possible that we could end up paying a little more or less. From what I've seen from other families experience, I think this is a pretty good estimate.

$700-Food and supplies for 1st and 2nd trip

$2000-Transportation
-to and from orphanage everyday(sometimes twice a day. yay!!!)
-to and from court and all other appointments
-to and from the airport/train station

$600-Daniel's passport

$555-Daniel's visa and medicals in country

$1000-Orphanage donation/dossier prep
It makes me sad that this is all we are giving the orphanage. If we raise money over our intended goal, it will either go to another waiting child with special needs, or to Daniel's orphanage.

$8600-Facilitator Fee
I put this one last so that I could explain it in detail. You probably saw $8600 and went "Facilitator What?!!" I know it seems like a huge amount of money(because, well, it is), but I want to explain to you how it is saving us literally thousands of dollars.
We are doing an independent adoption, which means that we are not using an adoption agency. The facilitators are people in Daniel's country who are helping us tremendously with our adoption. We have one main facilitator that we are working with, with several others assisting her. Let me just say, the facilitators do it all!
They:
-Review and approve all our dossier documents. They check them over thoroughly and check for errors and make sure that they will pass the scrutiny of the SDA
-Translate all dossier documents
-Notarization of dossier documents
-Submission of dossier to the State Department of Adoption(SDA)
-Work with the SDA until dossier is approved
-Pay the legal and expedition fees
-Translation of all Daniel's documents required for the US Embassy to get his visa
-make all our appointments and go with us to translate
-Set up living arrangements and transportation
-they know the system, the region, and help us navigate through it all
-show you where and how to get food(markets and restaurants)

Basically, they are amazing! Without their help we would need an adoption agency to do this adoption. Paying a facilitator as opposed to an adoption agency saves THOUSANDS. I love our facilitator already!!

I hope this helped explain where the money goes. Alot of the expenses are travel related. The money isn't going to the government or an agency, and just a small portion actually goes to the orphanage. If you have any other questions please feel free to ask! I may have failed to fully explain one of the fees or expenses. It is my hope that we raise more than enough money to fund our adoption, so that any of the extra proceeds can go to another waiting orphan's grant, or to provided needed items for Daniel's orphanage.

Laptop Fundraiser Reminder

For anyone interested, the laptop fundraiser is still going! The drawing will be held Nov 23, so you only have a few days left to enter! 1 entry is $10, 2 is $20, and 3 for $25!

The laptop fundraiser is being put on by a wonderful lady named Lisa. She is Daniel's Christmas Warrior. The Christmas Warrior program is a program through Reece's Rainbow that helps raise grant money for waiting orphans(all with special needs, of course). Lisa has such a heart for orphans, and Daniel inparticularly. It blesses my heart beyond measure to know that there are people out there that advocate for and love Daniel, just like we do! In fact, there are people out there that have been loving and advocating for him before we even knew he exisisted! Amazing!

Anyway, you only have a few days left to get in on the raffle, if you are interested in doing so. Tonight I will be looking over our homestudy in detail and seeing if every. single. aspect. lines up with Daniel's country's criteria. Once again, it has to be worded just so. Exhausting process. Our social worker is 100% awesome though! I've heard some horror stories about other adopting family's social workers, and we have been very blessed to have a super nice, extremely knowledgable, and easy to work with social worker. During our home visit, she and Luke even had a long discussion to the pros and cons of different video gaming systems. She's the mom of 4 boys and Luke was pretty impressed with her game system knowledge.

Anyway, besides reading the homestudy, I play on playing Uno with the kids and spending time doing absolutely n.o.t.h.i.n.g with Josh. Hooray for doing nothing for one night! Let's see if I can actually make myself do nothing.....

Update(I seriously couldn't think of a better title)

This has been quite a week. Overall, we made steps in the right direction, but it was not without much stress, prayer, worry, prayer....and more prayer.

-I finished all my medical clearance stuff. I am officially HIV, syphilis, and TB free! Whew! *wink* I am also free of drugs, alcohol, and mental disease. And shocker of all, apparantly I am completely sane. Yeah, even I was surprised at that one. Inspite of passing all my medicals with flying colors, I'm not completely done with the process. There are two documents that I needed from the dr and one was signed in black ink, instead of blue. Out of the 900 documents that have to be done for our adoption, this is the ONLY one that has to be signed in blue ink. Now the whole document has to be redone. Not the dr's fault though. The document criteria can be a tad bit ridiculous. I have to go get the document redone this week and I'm not looking forward to it. Like I said before, I don't like telling people that it wasn't done right, especially when they have gone to alot of effort to do it right in the first place, but they just messed up on one out of 32 rules for filling out the paper. Ugh.

-We filled out our I-600A form and got it in the mail, but it took running around like a chicken with my head cut off all afternoon one day to do it. Guess I should explain what the I-600A is. It is our immigration paperwork. It is basically a petition filed with the government seeking there approval for us to adopt a foreign orphan and bring them back in to the United States. I mailed in the application form, our marriage license, mine and Josh's birth certificates, and a cashiers check for $830. Yep. The application fee is $670, and then it is $80 a piece for Josh and I to be fingerprinted with the FBI. Once they receive our application, they will put our case on file, but they won't process it until they receive a copy of our completed homestudy. I went ahead and filed our application, though, because the fees are going up on November 23. This was another form that had to be filled out very precisly. I am pretty sure that I am going to have a head full of gray hair by the time this adoption is finalized. The documents are killing me, man!

-Last week I mentioned that Ray was going to have to have a test done on her bladder this week. I dreaded it all week. Ray was pretty traumatized by her recent hospital experience, and this test was going to be worse than anything she experienced while in the hospital. Needless to say, I was NOT looking forward to having to subject her to that. I made arrangements for Josh's mom to keep the boys so that Josh and I could both be with her for the test. We got the hospital and did the whole admissions, hospital bracelet, argue with the folks about how much they want you to pay, and get her in to the hospital gown thing. Only one parent could go back with her for the test. As much as I wanted to be with her, we let her pick, knowing that she would pick Josh. This girl is a major Daddy's girl.
They got in the room where they would do the test, and as soon as the nurse said "catheter", Ray started screaming. I don't think the nurse expecter her to know what that was, but after her hospital stay, she knew exactly what it was. Josh couldn't pry her off of him to put her on the table. After a few minutes of trying to fight her, the nurses basically talked him out of having the test done. They said that they were pretty sure that they wouldn't be able to do it with her fighting like she was and that she could be injured in the process of trying to start the catheter. So, the test didn't get done. Now we're not really sure what our next step is with her....

-Packet 1. Remember the packet of documents that I made the trip to Austin to have apostilled, then I paid good money to have with shipped overnight to Daniel's country?? When they did NOT arrive overnight. That was ok. I really figured the overnight thing was too good to be true anyway. I kept checking everyday with the tracking number to see where they were. The last updat on the USPS website, was that they left Chicago to go overseas on Nov 10th. By the time Wednesday rolled around and they still hadn't arrived, I started to freak out. Thursday I called USPS and put a trace on them. (Which really doen't help me at all, since they said it can take up to 30 days to trace the package!!!!) Thursday evening I got an email from my Reece's Rainbow stateside helper(she is the one helping us through the dossier document gathering process) saying that I should probably go to Austin and have another set of documents apostilled and sent overseas through UPS, not USPS. Sigh. I was pretty upset about this. It felt like starting over. These are such important documents though, that I really didn't have a choice. So yesterday I resigned myself to the fact that I would be making a trip to Austin on Tuesday. I figured out how I would get the documents printed, signed, notarized, and faxed to Reece's Rainbow tomorrow, and apostilled and sent overseas on Tuesday. Then tonight after church I come home and check the computer and low and behold my documents made it over the ocean!!!!! They arrived in Daniel's country and made it through customs!! They haven't been delivered to our facilitator yet, but I am expecting them to tomorrow or Tuesday. PRAISE THE LORD!!!! We still need to pray that the are delivered to our facilatator and translated ASAP, but it is sooooo good to know that they FINALLY made it overseas.

-We also got a draft of our homestudy!! It just needs to be checked over by us and Reece's Rainbow to make sure everything is worded right and that all the information is correct, and then she will send us the final draft!! Oh, and we were APPROVED!!! YAY!!! I was pretty sure that she was going to approve us to adopt after how great our home visit went, but it really good to see it in black and white. I've heard alot of social worker horror stories, so how wonderful our homestudy went was a HUGE blessing!!

-Last, but most importantly, the vote in Daniel's country has been scheduled. We got official word today that the bill is scheduled to be read in Parliment sometime between December 14-17. If it passes this second vote, then all adoptions between Daniel's country and the United States will be closed. Closed, not postponed. Completely closed. Even those adoptions in progress. I cannot even begin to tell you how important it is that this DOES NOT HAPPEN. Not just for Daniel's sake, but for the sake of literally hundreds of families that are in the process of adopting from Daniel's country right now. I'll post more about it this week, but please be praying about this. The only saving grace right now is that the bill is close to the end of the list of bills to be read, so we are PRAYING that they don't have a chance to get to it. That is only a temporary fix, but it'll work for me for now.

That's my update of this week. Be praying that our documents make it to our facilatator tomorrow! Praise the Lord for the victories that we have won so far!

Want to know his secret?

(That is Daniel on the right. His friend, Timothy, is on the left.)

Somebody whispered in my little boy's ear, "Hang on, baby! Your mama is coming!"

Why else do you think he would be smiling so big. Hey, he may not know english, but I'm pretty sure he understood her. ;)

Doesn't that little face just make you want to smile?

Paper Chase Update

Things are progressing quite well, paper wise. The only part of the adoption process that we really have any control over is part of the paper chase. And even then, it isn't really in our hands all that much. For a control freak/planner like me, this can be very stressful. So doing what I can do helps take my mind off of all the things that are out of my control in my life(adoption related or otherwise).

When I was in Austin getting documents apostilled to be sent over seas, I went ahead and got 3 documents for our dossier apostilled. There is another adoption term. Dossier. Our dossier(pronounced dos-ee-ay) is all the documents that will be sent over seas together and submitted to their government so that we can adopt Daniel. All different sorts of documents and papers make up a dossier: our homestudy, marriage license, medical records, proof of homeownership......and the list goes on and on and on. Almost every single document in our dossier has to be apostilled in Austin. In fact, off of the top of my head, I can't think of a single document that doesn't have to be apostilled. But long before getting apostilled comes things like official letter head, notarization, and tracking down the right folks to fill out and sign each and every document. Once you have it done perfectly, then it has to be faxed off, looked over by the document checker people, and approved, before it is ready to be apostilled. It can be quite a processes. I've tried to take it one step at a time and keep chipping away at it, instead of looking at the big picture, which can be very overwhelming.


So anyway, while I was in Austin getting our pre-dossier apostilled, I had a few dossier documents ready to be apostilled also. I went ahead and had it done so that I could set them aside completely finished. So far I have 3 documents completely dossier ready, and I have 9 others ready to faxed off to be checked over and (hopefully) approved to be apostilled. The document gathering part is pretty stressful to me, and I have a serious case of document paranoia. Each document has to be done very precisely in order to pass the scrutiny of the international courts. I don't like telling complete strangers how to do their job, so explaining how each document much be done has been stressful for me. I pray the entire time someone is working on a document that God will guide their hands, because I really do not want to have to tell them that it isn't done right. So far only one document has been messed up in the notarization process, so that has been a huge blessing!


I also had my blood work and TB test done today, so once those results come back, my medical paperwork can be done. Josh should be getting his bloodwork done this week also, so that's another step in the right direction.

Non-adoption news:
The baby cut tooth 7. I think it was painful for the entire family. Yikes! Number 8 is coming in right behind it, but hopefully it won't be as bad.
The baby's new hobby is pulling all the books off the bottom two shelves of each and every bookshelf in our house. We have alot of bookshelves, so that equals alot of books.
The baby(he does have a name, but usually just gets called "the baby") has figured out where Luke and Ray's rooms are and he can crawl there from any point in the house in about 7 seconds. We do have a small house, and that kiddo is fast when he's on a mission. He also has learned that he can push open the bedroom and bathroom doors if they aren't completely shut. It's been interesting.

We thought Ray had completely recovered from her UTI, high fever, dehydration, hospitalization thing. But when I took her to her post-hospitalization check up today, the dr found that she has a UTI. Don't know if it is the same UTI or a new UTI, either way she has to have a urinary tract test done now. The test is invasive and we were really hoping to avoid having to do it, but it looks like that is what she needs. Depending on what the results are, she may wind up having surgery. Pray for her, when you think about it. Her test is on Friday morning and I am dreading having to subject her to that.

Last but not least, please continue to pray for the upcoming legislative vote in Daniel's country. Still don't have a date on when the vote is going to take place, but it could be as early as next week. The wording in the bills states that all adoptions will be halted(even those in progress) until new laws are put in place. Pray that the wording in the bill will be changed! Russia did/is doing some things very similar to what Daniel's country is trying to do, but they have continued to process adoptions while they are working out there new system. Daniel's country could do the very same thing, but that is not the way they are leaning right now. Pray they will change there minds and allow adoptions to be processed while they re-vamp things.

Thank you for all your prayer and support!

My Sweet

The unknowns hang over our heads like big dark coulds,
and sometimes it feels like I'm waiting to be swallowed up in the deluge.

This paper chase seems never ending.

The process is stressful,

and exhausting.

And the results are completely out of my hands.



But that sweet little boy has been waiting for me, for 4 years too long.

So I can't stop now.

Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep doing. Gotta keep praying.

E.V.E.R.Y.D.A.Y

until he is home,

where he belongs.

New Raffle!

It's time to start a new raffle!!

My friend, Carol, made this GORGEOUS bracelet to raffle off.
Yeah. That's right. I said she M.A.D.E. it. She is a very talented jewelry maker(Do jewelry makers have a title? Jeweler? Oh, I don't know...We'll just call her a jewelry maker.) Anyway, she made this beautiful(and very expensive!) bracelet and donated it to be raffled! How sweet!

The entries go as this: 1 entry for $3, 2 entries for $6, and 4 entries for $10. The drawing will take place on Monday, December 13th, so get your entries in now! One entry could win it!! And here's one last look at this little work of art.

Seriously, I don't know how she does it! That is a talent!

Don't forget that there are still two other raffles going on right now, also. The laptop raffle, which goes until November 23, and the diamond ring raffle, which goes until December 10th. Entries for the laptop raffle can be made here. Entries for both the diamond ring and bracelet raffle can be made through PayPal by clicking on the Chip-In at the top of the page. Make sure that you note in the comment box which raffle you are donating for. You are more than welcome to entry both raffles with one donation if you so choose(i.e. An $8 donation can be one entry in both the ring and bracelet raffles). Just make sure that you say in the comment box when you pay with paypal what raffle you are wanting to enter. Thanks!