Mere paas ek billie hai
Originally Posted August 6, 2018
Suprabhat! (Good Morning!) It’s time for a much delayed update!! While we suffered a challenging period of delay, we have been making progress lately and are really excited to be moving again on our adoption!! The stress and uncertainty associated with waiting has definitely worn on both of us from time to time. But we’ve been finding ways to manage the stress, mostly by keeping busy. We have been sharing what we can with friends and family as they ask, but it’s more complicated than we could have imagined navigating the question, “How’s the adoption going?”. With that said, we have good news with things moving forward, and we are really hoping to soon have more clarity on when we will be traveling to India!
After 3 months of waiting for some official documents to come from India, we were able to start filing the next round of paper work in the last 6 weeks or so. Over the summer we received our kid’s original health documents in the mail to sign off on which made our match official, Woo Hoo!! We mailed it back to our case manager with a bunch of other referral acceptance documents (when they send you information about a kid you could potentially adopt it is called a referral). We also put together our dossier to send to India; the dossier is a file of paperwork about ourselves that goes to CARA and the court in India. It contains all of our financial documents, health reports, letters of reference, employment certifications, and photos of us and our home. We also became pros at getting things notarized and learned all about apostilling (this is something that needs to be done when official documents are sent between countries to certify that they are authentic). After that we registered our child with immigration and received our article 5 and our I-800A approval which means after we adopt our kid we can bring them into the country! Score! Now we are just waiting for our NOC (no objection certificate) from India. It is the last approval we need before we can register for a court date and this thought makes me want to dance in celebration!
We did recently learn that there is a chance we will be required to travel to India for a court appearance before placement. Two other families adopting from this state have needed to travel on short notice for court recently, so we may get to make a last minute trip around the world. While part of this is stressful, because we will have very little notice and it will likely mean an extra trip to India, which is very expensive, I am still feeling excited about the thought of it. There is a chance we could meet our kid, which I can’t wait for, and taking a spontaneous trip with Ryan sounds really fun (I’m not even being sarcastic). But, as with everything, we just won’t know until the times comes!
Sooo, we have seen some delays but are thrilled to be making steps forward. And this has given us lots of time to do things just the two of us, like camping, and start learning Hindi! Our child will be coming from the state of Chhattisgahr, India. There is a regional language that is similar to Hindi, but Hindi is the official language of the state, so we thought it would be fun to learn some of the language. They make so many fun language learning apps these days that are really cool! We know lots of random phrases and vocabulary at this point, but my favorite is the word for cat, which is “billee.” It is probably the only Hindi word I will remember years from now ☺
As always, we greatly appreciate all the love and support we have received from our friends and family on this journey. It has been quite an adventure so far, and will likely get wilder in the future! Alavida!
