Honduras 2015

I went to Honduras in June of this year. About two months ago. I haven't really mentioned it because...I don't really know why. It was an amazing experience. I learned a lot and saw things that I had never seen before, I met some amazing people, and we participated in a dental mission that met some of the needs of the people in various villages there.
So why have I not been talking about it? The answer: I don't know.
I really struggled when I was there. I mean, really struggled, so much that I cannot really define it. Back in December, I learned of a team from our church that was going to Honduras to work as part of a dental mission: several dentists and lay people from the church and community would be going as a team to visit various villages outside of San Pedro Sula in Honduras and work with some of the people to check their teeth, perform extractions, and do cleanings, as needed. Even though I do not have experience working with dental patients, I thought that there might be something I could still do as a nurse, so I emailed the trip coordinator and said that I was interested in going.

Fast forward six months. I boarded a plane with about 25 other people that I barely knew and traveled south to Honduras. I have never been to Central America before. I do not speak Spanish. It didn't matter. The people that I traveled with were, in a word, amazing. I met many wonderful people who were all there to help the people of Honduras, to meet a need for dental care. The dentists that traveled with us were so awesome...they had such compassion on the people there...and each had a very strange and interesting sense of humor, as I would find out.

The country is lovely. They grow coffee, bananas, and pineapple, among many other things. The people are hardworking and kind; they love their children and take pride in their work. I had many encounters with the local people who came when they heard that a dental team was coming to their area. In some cases, they waited all day to be seen. Sometimes, they didn't need dental care, but they learned that some medical people were in the area and would we check a blood sugar level or look at a recent finger injury? Sure.

It was humid. I had one episode of car (or rather, bus) sickness that involved some amount of vomiting on my part. But no parasites, no food poisoning, the power went out a few times and it was hard to sleep. Once, a toad crossed my path and I thought it was a small rabbit because of its size. We shared showers with frogs and scorpions and there were some incredibly large bugs.

This is as big as it looks, and it's real.

I also met people who had tremendous hearts for those who lived in Honduras. People who traveled back year after year to serve those who needed dental care. I have little to no experience with dental care, but I worked in post-op for those who had teeth pulled. They were tough. They walked away with gauze in their mouths and a free toothbrush and were fine, instead of needing iPads and games and toys and all of the other things that we in the U. S. sometimes seem to need when we have dental work done.

So why was it so hard? Maybe because it was such a different culture and a different time. Maybe because I missed my family terribly. I do believe that I was meant to go. And it meant something. And sometimes when things do not seem like they are the right time...they are actually God's correct timing, whether we realize it or not. Although I had a hard time there with almost everything that I encountered, it was still meant to be and I was supposed to be there.

Going to Honduras meant that we had good times, and we had bad times, and we had...times. It was worth being there and it made a difference. The people are amazing..both the people who live there and those who volunteered their time and energy to go and serve. And I'm quite sure that they would do it again, and I really admire that.

The Center of Home

It's hot. Well, it's July, so I can't complain that much; it's to be expected, but still, I sometimes wish for a 60-degree day thrown into this mix. I'm not a huge fan of humidity, tanning, beaches, and searing heat, which is probably why we went to Banff for our honeymoon instead of Mexico. When it's this hot, I do my time and then go inside.

This is pickle-making weather. What do you do when it is so hot outside that your kids run through the sprinkler every day and the air conditioner runs at a near-constant pace? You heat your kitchen even more by making pickles with fresh cucumbers from the garden. I don't make dill pickles. I don't really like them but when we need them for sandwiches or something, Vlasik from a jar works just fine. The pickles of our family are sweet pickles, much to the chagrin of some I know who have inadvertently bitten into one without realizing that it was not a dill pickle. I love to make these. They are tangy and they have bite; they make your eyes water a little from the vinegar and I could even drink the juice when the jar is empty. Okay, I don't do that part. 

I like canning things and we have a lot of pickles, but we also eat a lot of them. My kids have them almost every day with their lunches at home. I've seen Asher eat half a jar of bread-and-butter pickles in one sitting. We like them. It comes with the bounty of the garden, which is a blessing. We also pickle beets, which may sound even more gross to some than even sweet pickles. I have a strange set of children who live here. They like these kinds of things. When setting out a dish of pickled beets for dinner, I frequently hear, "Yes! Pickled beets again!" and that is not even being sarcastic! So, I really love making them. I think they look so good when they are all sealed and lined up on the shelves. 

This year, our garden is in sad shape. The ground that we tilled a few months ago to create a garden space has not been used for planting anything in over 10 years, so it is not well conditioned and doesn't have a lot of nutrients. It does have a lot of clay in the soil and is great at growing weeds. It is not so great at growing other things, such as peas or broccoli. Things are coming in, but it is slow. Most of my produce comes from my mom's wonderful garden and next year, I'm hoping to have more bounty from my own after a year of composting and using the soil to grow things again. 

Until then, we'll enjoy what we get. It's still fun and I love seeing these finished products of canned pickles, beets, salsa, spaghetti sauce, and tomato juice sitting on the shelves. I'm sure other people have different ideas of fun than I do. Maybe they'd rather be outside in the sun soaking up the heat! Give me my kitchen any day...I love being there cooking and canning in the center of home. 

A couple of weeks ago, we received an email from our adoption agency that they would be asking China for an update on JQ and did we have any questions we wanted to pass along?

Yes.

So, we asked a little more about his foster family and where he lives, if there is anything he doesn't like (so we could try to avoid that or at least know ahead of time) and if he knows he is being adopted. The agency said they would ask and then let us know, but keep in mind that it could take up to a month to get an answer.

A week later, they sent us an update on our sweet boy.

Current health is good. His development is normal. He can run and jump. His speech is normal and he can say some simple English words.

They call him Jia Qing. He is extroverted. He does not like when other children take his toys or things. He is excited about coming to the United States. He does not have any fears about coming to the US.

He has been in a foster family for three years. There are foster parents and three other children from the orphanage. He knows what adoption is. He knows he is being adopted. He and another younger boy share a room. He does not share a bed. He showers daily. He has a best friend. He brushes his teeth daily. In the school, he will help sweep the floors. When he is at home, he will help fold the quilts.

And, we received two new pictures:

They also sent his current measurements. He is the same height as Caleb and weighs two pounds more. Caleb, in response, has started eating more and told me that he needs to put on weight now since he is the oldest. In reality, Caleb and JQ are 10 months apart. They are both 8 years old right now, but Caleb will turn 9 in a few weeks. I have the feeling they will be mistaken for twins once they are together.

The boys are very excited about JQ. They will share a room with him they keep finding things that they want to show him or to take along to China when we go.

Speaking of China, we are going sooner than we thought. At least, that is, if everything keeps going at the same pace as it has. We are in stage 2 of immigration paperwork and may now be traveling in September! We shall see. We have really had only one snag so far, related to Asher's passport. It's more of a hiccup than a snag. We got the kids passports--Caleb's was renewed and Asher and Ellie's are new. Since they were all born in China, we had to send birth certificates and some Chinese documents for Ellie (it's a convoluted story) and then we waited. We received new passports for Caleb and Ellie, but not for Asher. Instead, we got a letter asking for more documentation about him and his citizenship.

Here's a tip: if you need to talk to someone--a person--about the status of your passport and what is needed to ensure that your 6-year-old son's passport is renewed in time for you to get a visa to take him to China, don't call the hotline provided. It gets you nowhere. Russ put his phone on speaker while he was on hold for 45 minutes. We all listened to the elevator music playing on the phone while we were sitting down to dinner. He was told there were 143 callers ahead of him. He finally got a hold of an answering service and left a message, in which they reminded him that they have 2 weeks to return his call.

So that was not productive. We mailed some more paperwork back and prayed for the best and now we are waiting and hoping that they will give us Asher's passport. This must be in time for us to apply for visas to go, which is soon. Unfortunately, Asher overheard us talking about it, so we tried to reassure him that it will work out and be fine. Still, the next night at dinner, he asked to say the prayer before the meal and it was something like,

"Dear God, thank you for this food. Thank you for JQ. Please let me get my report card [his term for his passport] on time so I can go to China, too. If not, I guess I'll stay home by myself. Amen."

Sigh. Please, no. So we talked about it some more and reassured some more. It will be fine. I wish he had not heard us in the first place, but it was hard to cover up the fact that his passport never came in the mail. So, we press on. We are going forward on faith that it will work out. This will not be the worst of our snags in this process, and this is all actually going so fast that sometimes, it makes my head spin. Six months ago, it was the middle of winter and our main focus was moving furniture and getting the house done. I never dreamed I'd be heading back to China before the end of the year. Well, that's how life works, and it keeps things interesting.

Hope and Homecoming

What a blur the past week has been. We are now (almost) mid-July and are enjoying the summer so much.
This past weekend, we celebrated Independence Day by going to a small-town, 4th of July, all-day event complete with a parade, amusement park rides, craft booths, food stands, and the like. It was beautiful weather and a very nice day to be out in the sunshine, celebrating our freedom.

I'm pretty sure the kids liked the parade the most. Has anyone noticed how parades have evolved into something of a candy fest...in other words, if the latest float isn't throwing candy to kids, there isn't a lot of interest. This kind of bugs me, since I think it should be more about recognizing those in the parade. Still, we enjoyed it and the kids were still in awe of many of the floats and specialties passing by. Caleb and I had this conversation:

           Me: "So, what was your favorite part of the parade?"
           Caleb: "I liked the veterinarians that were marching by."
           Me: [silence....crickets..] "Huh?"
           Caleb: "You know, the guys with the Army uniforms that marched                with flags and we stood up and clapped for them?"
           Me: "Ah. I liked them, too. For future reference, they are known as              veterans."

Sweet kid. :)

On a different note and a JQ update, this adoption is going fast. Faster than our last three. Fast. It doesn't seem so fast when one looks at the months it takes to complete, but when I think about how we accepted his file at the end of March and how we will probably travel this fall...that is fast. It's okay. We're good with that.

We have already received the copy of his Letter of Acceptance (LOA) and are awaiting the hard copy of the form to come in the mail for us to sign. If anyone still reads this blog from years ago, the LOA is a pretty big deal. Once you turn in all the paperwork, you wait for the LOA to come, which means that you will be traveling in a few more weeks. For Caleb and Asher's adoptions, it took about 2 1/2 months from the time we sent our paperwork to get the LOA. I think with Ellie's process, it was close to 2 months of a wait. This process: 5 days.

So things are going fast. They are faster this time because we had some paperwork done that had actually been sitting in China for the past four years...which is a long story that I won't get into. Suffice it to say that this time around, we have to be on our toes and be prepared. So we continue to prepare.

A little over a week ago, I sent JQ a package. We have done this with all of the kids...we want to send a few nice things to have during the rest of the wait and also a photo album so he knows who we are. Our agency has Chinese translation that we can add to the pictures to identify "older brother, younger sister," etc. There isn't much of a way of knowing if he receives the package or not, although with all three of our other adoptions, the kids showed up on the day of the adoption carrying the photo album and at least the stuffed animal that we sent.

I was thinking about past packages we have sent off into the realm of the postal service to hopefully reach our waiting child. Here are a couple of things that I sent Caleb, now nearly eight years ago:

He still has the stuffed puppy. He showed up on his adoption day with it and it remains in his room, along with a multitude of other stuffed animals. However, the puppy has changed a bit over time.

He lost an ear and part of his nose, not from too much love from Caleb, but rather from the work of this unruly beast:

Well, these are what memories are made of. The stuffed puppy is loved by more than one member of the family. I'm hoping JQ will get his package and will enjoy what we have sent, but more than that, I hope he is finding out that we are here and we are his family; that he is treasured, he is wanted, and he is loved.

It's Been Awhile

Okay, seriously, no judgement here. I know it has been 3 1/2 years since I wrote a word on this blog. We basically adopted Ellie, came home from China, I wrote a blog or two about it, turned off the computer, and didn't return to the site again. Life just gets in the way, sometimes. Actually, it gets in the way a lot, as I'm sure most anyone reading this knows. It is hard to keep up with a blog and I admire anyone who is faithful with theirs.

So, a lot has happened in the last 3 to 4 years around our house. Here is a short recap of our life in abbreviated form:

• We adopted Ellie and became a family of 5.
• I started working in surgical recovery at the hospital and the kids went to school/daycare.
• I changed jobs to work as a school nurse at a Head Start program.
• Russ changed jobs and started working at his current position with the State.
• I quit my job outside the home to stay home with our three lovies and work at what I love: writing.
• My beloved Dad died of leukemia.
• We started homeschooling. 
• We sold our house.
• I went back to China to work with Love Without Boundaries' cleft team, caring for kids undergoing surgical repair of cleft lip or palate.
• We moved into an apartment after selling the house. (Yikes!)
• We started building our new house on the land left for me by Dad.
• Our house was finished and we moved in!

That's a recap of some of the major events we have been involved in lately, although there is so much more...too much to write in one blog post, certainly. We moved into our house in the country on January 31st of this year. The next day there was a blizzard. Since then, we have managed snowstorms, hail, flooding, and a small tornado. Alternatively, we gaze every morning at a beautiful expanse of land, wildflowers growing, trees swaying in the wind, and space to run. We have room for a garden, we planted trees, and we are growing grass. I walk up the driveway to the mailbox and we live on a gravel road. We have country sunshine and beauty all around us and we love it. I can't say that enough.

So, we have been happily living in our house and adjusting when one day we happened along a post from our adoption agency that we used when we adopted Ellie. China requires 5 years of post-placement visits after adoption, so we have stayed in contact with them. Russ and I had been thinking somewhere in the back of our minds that we might adopt one more child, someday, but as time has gone on, it never really materialized, for several reasons. 

1. All of our children were toddlers when we adopted them and we weren't sure that we wanted to go through the diapers, tantrums/screaming, complete lack of rational communication thing again. Really, once you're out of it, it's nice to be out of that stage and we didn't really want to go back.
2. While it may seem like we go to China a lot (okay, maybe more than the average person), it really is a big deal to go. It is not just jetting off to Asia once every couple of years because we have the time and money to do so. It's a big deal. Adopting another child is a very big deal.
3. We were tired. Maybe too tired to consider it anymore. 

Because of these reasons, we were mostly content to just be. Until one day, while going through some post-placement stuff for our agency, we learned of a little boy who was waiting for a family. We were a bit thrown by his age: he was seven years old and turning eight soon. We had really never considered adopting an older child. I'm sure it has its own joys and its own issues as well, but we just hadn't thought about it and we weren't sure that we wanted to think about it. 

But, the whole thing persisted. The topic kept coming back to greet us and we couldn't turn away from it. Could we adopt an older child? Would we be right as a family for this child? Was it even possible? Finally, we asked our agency for more information about him and they sent us a file about him to review. When I first opened his file to look at his pictures, I was greeted with this handsomeness:

And....that was pretty much it for me. This sweet boy grabbed my heart. I couldn't believe that he had not been adopted and that he was still waiting for a family. The more we read and learned about him, the more we knew that he was to be our child.

His name is Jia Qing (JQ) and he had a birthday about 10 days ago; he just turned eight. He was actually hosted by a family in the U.S. this past winter and we had the amazing opportunity to speak with them about him and his time here. They had wonderful things to say about him and sent us many more pictures and videos, which was such a blessing. In truth, with our other adoptions we received about 3 grainy pictures of the kids bundled up in five layers of clothes or sitting propped in a basket or a chair. Through the videos and photos of JQ, we were able to see so much more of his personality, which just shines through. He is awesome.

It didn't take much more convincing. We said yes.

We contacted our agency and submitted a Letter of Intent, which is a letter saying that we want to adopt him and why, as well as how we will care for him. We received a soft "lock" on his file, which meant that we were matched with him but couldn't really announce it or say anything for a while until it was made official through China. We had to redo parts of our homestudy, meet with a social worker again, and file immigration papers again.

We are currently waiting on our immigration paperwork. We have an appointment to be fingerprinted with the Department of Homeland Security, which sounds intimidating, but we've had to do it three other times before. After our fingerprints are processed, we will receive approval and then we can move into the next stages of processing.

That is it in a nutshell. I know it doesn't do anyone justice to provide a short re-cap of life over the course of a few years, as well as a very important process that we are taking on again. If only I had been updating this blog for the past three years! Oh well. For now, I will continue to add updates here as we go through this process. And let me say...we are over-the-moon excited! Our lives are so blessed and full to begin with and now we are adding another precious child to our family. Our cups are overflowing!