Good News & Bad about the Legal Stuff

The good news is that the USCIS (homeland security) office in Bangkok responded to my e-mail inquiry right away. And they told me that they have our I-600A (approval to receive the I-600) and our latest fingerprints. Yeah! But, at the end of the message they said to note that it is presently taking 14-30 days to process the I-600. The I-600, as far as I understand it is the approval to issue our daughter an immigrant visa. You see, she will be entering the US with a Thai passport, not a US passport. So, homeland security has to give her an orphan immigrant visa to allow her to enter the US. Our adoption coordinator is trying to get to the bottom of why the processing is suddenly taking so long. There are two WACAP families in Bangkok right now who are being held up by this delay. It's surely quite a hassle to have to let their employers know that they'll be gone for who knows how much longer, besides the financial burden of changing their airline tickets and getting longer hotel reservations (if they can). WACAP is working hard at trying to speak to all of the government officials they can to see why things can't be expedited. I'm contacting our state representatives, as well, to see if there is anything they can do about this matter. But, Andrea said that some other agencies were reporting that those with all of their paperwork in have been getting their I-600 processed in a timely manner. So, since this, again, is something that will be beyond our control we'll trust that God will cause things to move in His timing.

I-600A and I-171H

I don't know about you but I have a hard time remembering what all of the different documents with the random letters and numbers mean. After all, it's been so long since we filled out all the paper work for them. But, we did find out that our I-171H is scheduled to expire on December 20th. That needs to be up-to-date in order to be able to file the I-600 A while we are in Thailand. We also found out that Washington D.C. has been slow at forwarding the I-600 A approvals to the embassy in Bangkok. Another couple adopting just before us said they had to e-mail the US Embassy in Bangkok three times before they finally got a response back that they did not have their latest finger prints, which is necessary for the I-600 A approval even though they got their fingerprints done in March and it shows they were sent to CIS (Homeland Security) in September. So, now we're starting to e-mail our Colorado agency as well as our placement agency and the embassy to try and make sure that we have all of the necessary paperwork in Bangkok by the time we travel there. If we don't, then we'll be stuck there until it all arrives. So, we'll need a very flexible ticket just in case the worst case scenario happens. Let's all hope and pray that all of the slow government agents get a move-on things.

Blowing Away

Well, we're not quite sure when we'll get to blow away to Thailand, but we feel like we've been blowing away here in windy Colorado. We've had strong, cold winds lately. In fact, so strong one evening that our sunshade umbrella on our patio was lifted right out of the table and went up over the roof. It sailed along the whole distance of our house, bounced off the roof and managed to land, wedged between the roof and a tree. So, we ought to have fun this weekend trying to get it down. The college-aged neighbor offered that he could climb the tree and get it down. I think we'll try first by reaching from the roof. We needed to get up there anyway, to blow the leaves off. Now we'll have a little added excitement to our boring task.

We did get one phone call in regards to our adoption. It wasn't quite the one we were hoping for, but it's one step closer to our daughter. The day after the Wed. board meeting in Bangkok we got a call from Andrea telling us that the DSDW needs us to update our info stating our net worth. Since it had been a year and a half since we first filled that out and things have changed since then, in particular, we bought a house, they just need to make sure we still seem to be financially stable. It's really understandable, given all the news of recent about the shaky American economy and people not being able to pay off their mortgages. It's good that they are being thorough and want to make sure that these Thai kids will be well taken care of. So, we updated it and e-mailed it back to Andrea. Hopefully, she'll be able to pass it on to the DSDW quickly and they will soon decide that we can travel there to get Penny.

We're really hoping and praying that we'll be able to bring her home by Christmas. What's neat is that I just found out that I should be able to get an almost brand-new Christmas tree for free. I put a wanted ad on Freecycle dot com and got a quick response by someone wanting to get rid of a tree that they've only used twice. So, we're planning to take a look at it tomorrow. My mom promised to pass down the handmade Christmas tree skirt that she made for us when we were kids. If we do end up traveling in December we may need to decorate for Christmas in November.

Connecting People to Jesus

We're very honored to join a new church, today, which is celebrating 20 years of connecting people to Jesus. We've been attending Redeemer Lutheran since Easter. We have found it to be a very warm, loving group of people who truly love Jesus and love to share Him with others. We hope this will be just the nurturing place to help our daughter meet Jesus, personally, too. What's cool was that they did a little write-up in the bulletin about each of the sixty some new members in the bulletin. A couple sitting in front of us read this and came up to welcome us and meet us afterwards. Turns out they adopted their son from Kazakhstan. We have now met at least two adoptive families from the church. And we hear there are several more. So, I got this inspiration to start a new yahoo group specifically for people from our church whose lives have been touched through adoption. So, I'm hoping this will be the start of something special with new ways to connect with other adoptive families in our own community.

This weekend I've been continuing to working on the ongoing painting project in Penny's bedroom. I'll let you know when it's done. Jay is out blowing leaves. Yesterday we visited a woman who is a music teacher to preschoolers and who has also gone on a mission trip to Japan. We enjoyed some yummy Japanese food prepared by a mutual friend, Tomoko. She made "okonomiyaki". Yum! Even my husband seemed to like if although he's sometimes hesitant to try exotic foods.

Another highlight of the weekend for me was having the opportunity to share about my faith with my hair dresser. I was getting my hair cut/colored. Somehow we got on the subject of religious faith. This woman explained that while she was not religious, she considered herself "spiritual" and she thought all religions are good because all truths are the same. I had to share with her that I politely must disagree. I explained using an illustration that I think God gave me on the spot. I told her that just as her instructor had made the first cut for my haircut and she needed to follow it to make the haircut turn out right, so there is one truth. Her teacher called it an "A-line". I said that I believe there is one "A-line" for truth. It is the measure by which we can measure all things in life. If it matches up to this one ultimate truth, we know it is from God and can be trusted. It wouldn't work if there were several different lines or different truths. I'm not sure she got the logic of my point. But, I was thankful for our very civil discussion and a wonderful opportunity to plant a little seed of the truth about Jesus into this woma's heart. For, as I told her, I have investigated the bible and have found that Jesus stands up to the test and proven Himself to be this one truth. May we all seek to know Him deeper!

One more Thai language resource

It seemed by the response to my last blog entry that several people are interested in finding out more about tools that can help them with learning Thai. I'll recommend one more helpful source. It is an electronic dictionary that actually speaks the words so you can hear how to pronounce them. We found one that wasn't going to really break the bank. (It also helps when the future grandparents offer to buy it as your Christmas gift). It turns out that we really like this one. We think it's going to be a great help for Penny when she gets here. And as a bonus it not only translates English and Thai, but Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malay as well. Our model number was the Vocal 610-SEA It is made by Oxford University Press. Hope this is helpful, especially to those of you adopting an older child from Thailand. For more info go to www.LanguageTeacher.com

Preparing to Communicate

While we are waiting I've ordered a couple of books, which I hope will help with our communication with our daughter. One is the Oxford Picture Dictionary. I loved using this way back in the late 80's/ early 90's when I was teaching ESL. Well, the latest editions are much better and they come in various bilingual editions, including English and Thai! I think Penpohn will love to take this with her when she is studying English in school. I think her teacher will love that she'll have that as well as an electronic dictionary that even says the words! For ourselves, I ordered Thai for Beginners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker. It does seem to be more practical with the beginning conversation lessons than our Pimseleur's Thai CD series. Although, the thing I like about those CD's is all of the repetition. It's really helping me understand grammatical structure as well as pronunciation. Thankfully, Penpohn will be able to teach us, as well. If, that is, we're not too old of dogs to teach us new language tricks. I'm sure she'll be the faster learner. I guess all this waiting gives us more time to brush up on our English and Thai.

Since we haven't heard anything, we're guessing that perhaps our acceptance letter will be reviewed at the next DSDW board meeting, which is a week away. So, perhaps after then we'll be able to know some travel date possibilities. We're guessing it'll be December. The other good news was that the last time we checked the airline tickets for December went down in price by about half! Yeah! I guess the recession is good for something.

No news.... :(

We were sure hoping that we'd get a call by the end of the week telling us that the DSDW (Thailand Dept. of Social Development & Welfare) had reviewed our acceptance letter at their recent board meeting on Wednesday and stamped their final seal of approval on it. But, alas, again, we just WAIT. No matter how long you do this it's still not much easier. We also heard that at the same time there was, yet, again, more protests and political unrest happening in Bangkok. Between all of the adoption unknowns and all of the depressing news over the economy, etc. we are feeling rather burnt out and not even wanting to listen to the news at all. I'm just very thankful that we have jobs. It's not always easy to be a preschool teacher, especially on a day like today when I had a splitting headache all day long. But, I'm trying to count my blessings and be extra mindful of the moment-by-moment joys, like when one of my three year olds just suddenly hugs me and says, "I love you, Ms. Chandra!"

Life Books

This morning as I added more new pages to our own custom-made Life Book that I’ve created for our daughter and the thought dawned on me, “It might be helpful for other adoptive parents out there to let them know that I could design a Life Book for them!” And then I got to thinking, “Hey! This could be a new, fun innovative way to raise some more funds to help defray our upcoming travel costs!” How about that? You can call it a crazy notion, a moment of inspiration or an attempt at creating a business plan. Nonetheless, I have personally e-mailed all of the people that are in my address and connected with adoption in some way or another to let them know. If you know of anyone who might be interested please tell them to e-mail me. japaneseartist@me.com The plan is to charge $20 if you want just the template of the book saved on a disk and mailed to you. For an extra $5 I’ll actually print it out and put it together in a binder to mail it to you. I hope it will assist many families in saving the precious memories and history of their own unique children.

For Those Adopting an Older Child

You'll find lots of very helpful info from the following website...
http://bringingbackbaby.typepad.com/being_schooled_by_the_old/

The family writing this blog adopted a 12 yr. old in December 2006. That was right when we started our adoption process. I've been a faithful reader of their blogs. It's been so neat to watch their daughter grow up and figure out who she is. We should be able to get our own 13 year old daughter just two years after we started the journey.

Bountiful Harvest

Wish Penny could be here to enjoy our bountiful Fall harvest. Although many of my veggies suffered from our hailstorm, like the corn and the cucumbers, there are still many that thrived. We've picked between 4-10 zuchinni almost on a daily basis until our recent cooling trend. I had just enough cukes to make my favorite Grandma Lindwurm's sweet pickle recipe. We had several eggplants, a few ears of corn. The peas finished earlier. We picked one watermelon too early and four other tiny ones. We have dozens of carrots and ten pumpkins. You'll also notice plenty of vine weed growing amongst the pumpkin patch.