I800-A Application is Sent

Our immigration application was sent Friday and received by them yesterday. So our count starts April 19th. Not what I thought it would be exactly, but that is okay! Now the real waiting has begun.


I read a China Adoption Forum and from the stats on there (someone has made a chart for all of us on the forum) it looks like right now the wait for immigration approval  is anywhere from 43-60 days. And that is only if there isn't a "request for more evidence" (RFE). I am hoping with the thoroughness we had with our social worker that there won't be any need for that.

Once that is approved we get that document notarized and authenticated, then off to China! Whew, I can' t wait for that day. Then our dossier sits in China, hopefully getting looked at sooner than later, and we wait for their approval to adopt this little guy.

 Until then, we pray daily for Asher. Our prayers are that he is being well taken care of and loved, that he is healthy and that somehow in his heart he is being prepared to accept and attach to us, Jay and me especially.


We also sent off our application for a LifeSong matching grant. It takes up to 2 months for us to hear about that. Meanwhile, we keep saving each dime we can. We are eating more simply, cutting down on music lessons, not driving around as much, no vacation this year and doing less activities right now. We even sold Jay's car and bought something for half the cost, and only hold liability insurance on it now. This car happens to be better on gas mileage too. It isn't as pretty and a bit smaller than his Saturn was, but it does the job.


This will only be for a season. We typically have so much and in reality don't need half of it. Our kids have been very understanding, especially when we eat oatmeal for the 3rd time that week. They have also been very generous in giving us some of their own monies from jobs they do, all on their own. We have never asked them to do this, nor encouraged it. They just all want to bring Asher home and realize that $30,000 is a LOT of money. I am so blessed. 

Post from another Blog about Success in Adoptions

Adopted Children (Transracial and Same Race) Are Doing Just Fine

Posted by Dawn - April 12th, 2011 - 6 Comments  

Published in * Adoption, Adoptive Parenting

Adopted Kids (Transracial and Same Race) Are Doing Just Fine
The myth of ”the troubled adoptee”  is pervasive. It’s all the more insidious because it’s seldom voiced, but exists as an undercurrent.  This myth is a bit fuzzy on the details of causation.  Are problems with adopted children caused by poor prenatal care or early abuse or abandonment? Do adoptees perceive their adoption as a rejection by their first mother?  Are adopted kids” just plain ole bad seeds with inferior genetics”?   And if adoption itself is inherently problematic, then heaven help the poor transracial adoptee that has the added burden of not resembling his adopted family and a potentially convoluted sense of racial identity. This myth’s resilience frustrates the heck out of me mostly because it flies in the face of volumes of research.
Case in point: I ran across a fascinating meta-analysis of 106 studies the other day: Adoptees Do Not Lack Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis of Studies on Self-Esteem of Transracial, International, and Domestic Adoptees (Psychological Bulletin; American Psychological Association 2007, Vol. 133, No. 6, 1067–1083)  One of the main advantages of a meta-analysis is the ability to look at very large sample sizes and to even out design variations between studies. For these reasons, meta-analyses are particularly useful for generalizing to a larger population.
This study focused on self-esteem because that is considered to be one of the most important pillars of healthy personality development.  Low self-esteem is associated with not only internalized problems, such as depression, but also externalized behavior problems, such as aggression, antisocial behavior, and delinquency.  Self-esteem is particularly useful for studies of adopted people because if correlates highly with attachment.
I suppose it’s not altogether unreasonable for researchers and the general public to assume that adoptees are at greater risk for low self-esteem.  They speculate that adoptees may not only feel cut off from their birth parents but also rejected by them (Brodzinsky et al., 1992; S. L. Smith et al., 2000).  It might be reasonable to assume that adoptees may blame themselves for their relinquishment and think that they were not worthwhile enough for the birth mother to keep them.  They rightly may perceive differences between their adoptive family and themselves in terms of temperament or learning abilities and feel less capable in comparison (Tieman et al., 2005).  International and transracial adoptees may feel out of place in another national, cultural, or ethnic environment.  They also have the added difference of physical appearance to add to other potential differences with their adoptive family.  This litany of woes makes the results of this meta-analysis even more satisfying.
Self-esteem of Adopted Persons Compared to Non-adopted Persons
The researchers looked at 88 studies, which in total compared 10,977 adoptees with 33,862 non-adopted persons.  They found that adoptees’ self-esteem did not differ from the self-esteem of their peers.  The researchers dug deeper to see if there might be a difference in self-esteem of specific subgroups of adoptees when compared to non-adopted persons.  They looked at the following subgroups to see if adoptees in these subgroups were more vulnerable to low self-esteem:

• International adoptees
• Domestic adoptees
• Transracial adoptees
• Male vs. female adoptees
• Adoptive placement before and after first birthday
• Developmental stages (4-12 years, 12-18 years, and 18+years)

They found no difference in self-esteem between adoptees and non-adopted persons.

Self-esteem of Transracial Adoptees Compared to Same Race Adoptees

Researchers looked at 18 studies involving more than 2,000 adoptees and found that transracial and same-race adoptees did not differ with respect to their self-esteem.  They also looked at subgroups within this population (age at adoption, age at assessment, whether the same race adoptive families were of color or white),
They found no difference in self-esteem between transracial adoptees and same race adoptees.
Conclusion
The study concluded as follows:

Contrary to expectations, adopted children are able to develop normative levels of self-esteem, and this appears to be the case throughout specific groups of adoptees (those placed before or after their first birthday, international or domestic adoptees, transracial or same-race adoptees), across the life span, and independent of informant (self- or other report). We did not find any statistically significant difference in self-esteem between adopted and nonadopted persons.

The study authors speculated that adoptive families may be at least partly responsible for this positive outcome. Adoptive parents invest substantially in their child’s upbringing, and they usually offer the child an enriched cognitive and emotional family environment. Adoptive parents often also work to establish secure parent– child attachment, which would be result in higher self-esteem.
This study is looking at only one predictor of mental health–self-esteem.  It is not saying that there are no inherent risks faced by adopted kids. Lack of prenatal care, poor nutrition, abuse or neglect, and substance exposure during gestation can and do cause problems for children throughout their lives.  Nor is this study saying that adopted children as a population have no problems.  Other studies, including other meta-analyses, have found that adopted kids as a whole have more learning and language problems and are over-represented in referrals to mental health professionals.
I also want to be very clear that by focusing on this meta-analysis study,  I am also not trying to negate the experience of individual adoptees who are suffering from problems they believe are caused by being adopted.  Their experience is very real on an individual level.  One individual's experience, however, is not very useful to predict for the whole.   And on the whole, adoptees are doing just fine, at least as measured by their self-esteem.

We Got Our State Approval Today!

Found out today that we already got approval for home study with our state, which is our last step before sending in for immigration approval.
Please pray that we can get that in the mail on Friday.
We are on our way!!

Another New Blog

I have begun this blog to share our journey to China, to adopt Asher Charles Quan. I also plan to talk about adoption in general.

James 1:27


 "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

Not every Christian is called to adopting an orphan, but everyone of us is called to "look" after them.
For Jay and I we believe our calling is adoption.

I have, for years had a heart tugged toward orphans and wanting to really give them a mother and father, a family. For me it began in the days of watching the starving children of Ethiopia as a 13 year old, to seeing video footage of the Russian orphanages in the 90s, and then actually meeting families who adopted, the last 10 years or so.


As I became a mother time and time again to my "tummy babies", my heart only felt more compassion and longing to show an orphan child what motherly love they were missing. A person who would protect, love unconditionally and disciple that child to live for Christ. I am not at all a perfect mother and I make many mistakes, but I knew my heart and desire, along with God's help would be just would I needed to fulfill that roll for an orphan.


Jay, has always been a very involved and loving father to our children. At first, he wasn't sure he could give of himself anymore. But as time went on, the Lord impressed on him so much that He would be his source of everything, even a father to the fatherless, Jay could not turn back.
Today he is probably more involved in our adoption emotionally than I am.


Since we have been matched already, with a precious 1 year old boy from China, I have been falling in love with his photo. But, I have to admit, because things aren't moving as quickly as I would like and we have run into a few stresses with the homestudy, I have been guarding my heart. I believe God brought us to this point, and He will see it to completion. But walking through it day by day, or hour by hour, hasn't been easy for me. I know when I see this little boy in person and get to hold him in my arms, I will fall head over heels for him. But I have to admit right now, I am scared a little bit. I am scared someone is going to say, "We are sorry, we changed our minds, you can't adopt this little boy." I know I need to put my worries in God's lap. I tell you, I have been doing this a lot lately. Some of my new words are, "He is your child, God. This is your money, God. This adoption is yours, God. I am your child, God." I have to say them out loud several times before I actually "believe" what I am saying at times.


I am so thankful to have an easy-going, sensible husband who keeps directing me toward God's truth about adoption. I praise God for him. This process has made me fall in love with him, all over again. It is sort of like when you have a biological child together and you see your husband in a whole new way and you begin to love him for the first time in huge, different ways. Adoption has brought another new way for me to appreciate and love this man God has blessed me with.

I can't post any pictures of this little boy on the blog yet, not until China gives us an official Letter of Approval, also called LOA. We hope to have that in maybe 4-5 months. Please pray for our homestudy to really, finally get approved this week. It is a long frustrating story as to why it hasn't been already. But like I said before I am learning to trust God even in that.