Travel Approved

Okay. What was I doing six months ago?
We had lived in our house about one month. There were blizzards. There was influenza (me). There was the all-around adjustment of 'hey, this is our house now! No more apartment! How great!' and, 'I'll be fine to just stay settled in here...we've had a lot of change in the last year...it will be nice to just relax and enjoy living here right now.'

I can also tell you what I wasn't doing: thinking that I was going back to China again in 12 more days. But that is our reality. Of course, that was before we lost our hearts to JQ.

We received our travel approval yesterday. This is the point when we get notice from China that it is time to travel and to come and adopt our son. I had an inkling that things were going to go fast, but really, not this fast. On Monday, we received notice from the consulate in Guangzhou that they had picked up our Article 5, which is part of processing JQ's immigrant visa. We knew the next step was that we would eventually be notified of our travel approval. Our agency informed us that it takes between 10 and 21 days. I remember this. I remember getting this pre-paperwork notification about Ellie's immigrant visa at the end of November the year we adopted her. We received our travel approval a little over two weeks later.

So, I thought we had 10 to 21 days to wait it out, but we didn't. We had three days. Instead of taking 1 to 3 weeks from the Article 5, we had our paperwork picked up from the consulate on Monday and we were notified of our intent to travel on Thursday.

How's that for a fast turnaround?

As I said, I had his feeling...something was going to happen. Just that morning, I had been driving to Wal-mart at 7 am to get Asher some Tylenol and I was thinking and praying about this situation with travel. I had plans in my head...those that think about all of the things to do before leaving (maybe take on one more work project or finally finish painting the trim in the front room), those that think about what will happen while we will be gone (running a Half with two awesome friends that I signed up for this spring), and really just considering my own needs, to be honest. But I really felt this heaviness...I just needed to let some of this stuff go because the time that you wait for, the time when it is supposed to be "right," never really happens. It never seems to be the right time, you just have to go with it. I felt like I needed to let go of my plans and just wait.

And then I figured that once I did that, we would have some snag or delay and not get our travel approval until October.

But that didn't happen. Instead, we were notified about three hours later. And then we waited to find out about our consulate appointment while we are there. And then we looked into flights and booked our tickets, and now we are set to leave in 12 days, on September 9th. We will meet JQ on September 14.

Despite some of the peace, I can't say that I'm still not stressed. I am. Since yesterday morning's news, I have been doing the third thing I do the most when I feel stressed out, which is cook. (The first thing is to eat everything and the second thing is to bite my nails.) So, I have been working in the kitchen to take my mind off of things and ended up baking two loaves of bread, making some homemade mozzarella, cream cheese, breakfast rolls, a chocolate pie, and I canned some spaghetti sauce. I feel better.

This is a one-step-at-a time thing. This whole process started five short months ago, but it is going according to plan. Just not necessarily my plan. But that's okay. We are thrilled and excited and nervous and stressed out and happy and so many other things at once. And it's okay; in fact, it's really good.

But I probably need to stop cooking so much or else I won't be able to eat all of this food before we go.

These are our passports as we are getting ready to go to China (hopefully) soon. Note that there are five. That means that Asher’s finally came through and was mailed to us. Yay! Actually, it came last week right before Ellie’s surgery and I haven’t had a chance to mention it until now. One more thing to check off the list before getting ready to go. The list still seems to be very long; I feel as if I am not making a dent in it. One day, it won’t matter because we won’t have time to complete one more thing. We’ve done this three other times and it still catches me off guard every single time. I will never get it all done. However, it is a good thing that we have the passport snag taken care of.

On another note, I took Caleb to the orthodontist this morning for an appointment as a new patient about his jaw. Being the parent of a cleft-affected child, I knew that orthodontics were in our future. But that’s just it. Future. Not necessarily at 8, going on 9 years old. Yet here we are.

Caleb doesn’t need braces (yet); we actually met for a consult about his upper jaw and his two front teeth. They really had amazing technology in this office…they took a wrap-around x-ray of his head to capture his jaws and teeth from all angles and then had it on this big screen to point out different things to me while we talked. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I could see where his teeth were coming in when they hadn’t erupted yet, where he won’t have teeth (ever) and how the bone of his jaw fit together. Maybe that’s weird, but I thought it was very cool.

When a child is born with a cleft lip and palate, it generally is considered to be either unilateral, where the opening is on one side, or bilateral, where it affects two parts of the lip and palate. Of course, there are other situations, too, but that’s a generalized description. Caleb was born with a bilateral cleft and he had lip repair surgery while he was still in China before we adopted him. When his lip was repaired, it was very tight, such that you pretty much can’t see his top teeth. If you notice his smile, it is always bottom teeth only.

We have always known that his cleft is a complex case: he has a very small mouth, a lip that is very tight, a very high palate, his teeth are in various positions, and he has a fistula (hole) that developed after one of his last surgeries. Brushing his teeth is a challenge. We have met with a number of physicians and surgeons about his mouth because it is complicated. I’ve had one physician tell me that Caleb’s is the most complex mouth he has ever seen. I’ve had another tell me that he could not help us because of the structure of Caleb’s mouth and that our case should be managed through the Mayo Clinic (because, we travel to Rochester, MN all the time, so why not?) (Note: sarcasm).

Anyway, today I was very encouraged because we actually made plans for Caleb and his jaw. By looking through the x-rays, we also discovered—as the orthodontist pointed out—that Caleb doesn’t have much of a bone under his two front teeth. They’re sort of just held in place by the gums. He will most likely need to have his front teeth pulled and have prosthetic teeth placed someday. We are planning to start palate expansion—where there is an arch in the roof of the mouth that slowly pushes the upper jaw apart when you turn it with a key—so that eventually he will have bone graft surgery to fix his upper palate.

Whew! That’s a lot of information. And while I was staring at the x-rays in fascination, I also felt sad. I didn’t want my kid to feel like a specimen. I didn’t want him to feel like a weirdo for something that he cannot help. Last night we were at swimming lessons and he was playing with another kid there who he had just met. I heard the kid say, “what happened to your lip?” and Caleb just responded with, “yeah, that’s just what it looks like. Anyway…” He just brushed it off, partly because he has probably been asked about it a thousand times in his short life.

He is such a good sport. He is a great kid. I see him, almost 9 years old now, and I remember when he was three and four years old and still only speaking in vowels because he had such a hard time getting past the speech difficulties. He has worked so hard and made such great gains because he keeps on trying and doesn’t give up.

I love this kid. He’s a rock star to me.

Today, our blog post is about someone who does not always get a lot of press around here: our Ellie. Not that she would let you forget it if you saw her in person. She pretty much acts as if she is little Miss Thang most of the time, but she definitely has her sweet moments.

Today, Ellie is having surgery, which is a first for her. We've been through multiple surgeries with the boys, but for Ellie, this is new. We've had several talks about what will happen and why she is having the procedure, but it still makes her upset. The boys, who are practically professional patients, talked her through her part in the process:
     "They'll give you medicine that makes you tired!"
     "The mask smells like strawberries!"
     "You'll get to play with an iPad while you're there!"

Wait--what?
The hospital where we have had a number of surgeries does let kids borrow iPads to play games for distraction. So, the first question Ellie had when we got here was, "where is my iPad?" Then we had to explain that it was not hers to keep, it was to borrow, etc. We ended up just watching TV and pretty soon, she was tired from the medicine anyway.

Ellie was born with bilateral microtia and atresia, meaning she does not have external openings in her ears that lead to the eardrums. On the outside, she has small bumps and flaps of skin that resemble earlobes. On the inside, she does not have ear canals or eardrums, but she does have cochleas and the small bones of her middle ear. Since her adoption, she has worn a BAHA, which is a hearing aid that is anchored to her head through a headband. The hearing aid conducts sound through the bone of her skull. Today, she is having surgery to place a port in her skull to attach the BAHA. She will still use it in the same way, but without a headband. And, the sound is much closer to the central nerve in her head that sends sound messages to the brain, so what she is able to hear through the BAHA should be even better than before.

We didn't know what we were getting into when we adopted a child with hearing loss. I know a thing or two about cleft lip and palate and having worked in pediatrics, I have seen a few things. But I was unaware of the extent that hearing loss can have on communication, relationships, and cognitive function. I thought that if Ellie had a hearing aid, it mostly corrected her hearing and she could catch up. That probably makes me sound naive, but I just didn't see a lot of literature about the extent of hearing loss among kids with microtia/atresia in both ears, or many of the other issues present. For instance, Ellie was adopted at 20 months old; before her adoption, she did not have a hearing aid at all and she lived in China, so what language she did hear was Chinese. She got her BAHA 3 weeks after we brought her home, plus she was hearing and learning English, plus she was a toddler who was moved from her home in China to a new place with new sights and smells and two older brothers and a lot of other white people. It was probably confusing for her, to say the least.

So, despite being 5 years old, Ellie's language is delayed and she often doesn't get a lot of what is going on. A person who cannot hear clearly often does miss out on those little things that happen all around them--those things we often take for granted. She not only misses some parts of conversation and pertinent words, but also inflections and humor. She often doesn't understand what we are talking about or she will react in a way that seems inappropriate, but in reality, she doesn't always know because she missed some of the key information.

Today's procedure will not fix everything for Ellie. Because she does not have eardrums, it is unlikely that the doctors could ever create something that would work as well and that would conduct sound in a manner that would allow her to hear within a completely normal range. It is okay. She is a strong girl and she will adjust. She is remarkable in what she has managed to accomplish so far in the short time that she has been with us. I have great hopes for this girl.

The Steel Beam Phenomenon

We were very blessed to receive new pictures of JQ last week! A friend traveled to China to adopt her daughter, who happens to be from the same area as JQ, so they met and she sent me these pictures! Doesn’t he look so happy? She said he bounded down the steps to greet her and he was all smiles. Aw…our sweet and wonderful boy.

We are not without a certain amount of stress right now. There is so much going on and I’m doing my best to keep up, but I’m going to be honest here, this is a stressful time. I don’t really want to be edgy and irritable because I spend a lot of energy trying not to worry, but it’s happening.

As much as I want to go to China again and meet JQ and bring him home to join our family, I’m trying to stay cool about the timeline here. In the past, we have struggled with adoption timelines: they were always too slow and we experienced one snag after another that made the process drag out. This is not the case this time around; in fact, the opposite is true and this process is going very fast. Where I thought we might travel around Thanksgiving or early December, we may now be on our way in less than 8 weeks.

In less than 8 weeks, we will (Lord willing) get on a plane with our crew and make the journey to the other side of the world to meet our son. We are thrilled!

But this is where the stress part comes in: because it is so much faster this time around, we have less time to prepare, whether it’s our home, our finances, or our hearts. Sometimes, there is so much in front of us that it is overwhelming and it’s hard to know what to tackle first. We have been fundraising and I have been trying to work extra to pay for many of the expenses that go along with all of this, but again, it is hard.

I work from home. I’m a “stay at home mom” in that I don’t leave my house to do work. I teach my kids at home, too, but I have a business as a freelance writer that I have worked for several years to build. Some months, it is slow, and sometimes, it is extremely busy. For the past year and a half, I have been very busy with different contracts, sometimes working on several at once. It is nice because I like to work and to write and we have been able to pay off some things, like, you know, debt.

Since finding out that we are going to China sooner than later, I have been trying to work more to help offset some of the cost. I have prayed that the Lord would continue to provide for what we need to pay for this trip. And then, as I finished projects and turned in invoices, I reached a point that I have not been in for almost 2 years. I had no work to do.

I don’t mean I had nothing to do. I just mean that I had no income earning potential in front of me at all. Not one contract, not one word to write that was in any paying form. Every company that I work with had snags from their end that were delaying their processes, hence, they had nothing for me. It’s a shaky business sometimes. Being a freelancer means times of feast and times of famine. I just have been frustrated with the timing of the famine this time around.

Adding to the stress is Asher’s passport situation. I was half joking a few weeks ago when I made comments about calling the customer assistance line at the passport center for help. It is now a problem. We still do not have Asher’s passport and we cannot get a hold of anyone who can tell us what is going on. In this day and age, it seems weird that you shouldn’t be able to call, email, or otherwise message someone to get answers, but after several weeks, we are still in the same place. This morning, I FedEx’ed more paperwork to them, overnighting it to Virginia. We paid extra to have expedited service, which we were told they cannot guarantee anyway. We also contacted our Congressman’s office to ask if they will inquire for us as well.

It’s a problem. It’s stressful and it’s hard. We have reached the point that Russ and I refer to as The Steel Beam Phenomenon, which means that during a time of great stress, you cannot sit and focus on the problem(s), you have to just sit back and wait. There is nothing you can do. Last year, when we were building our house, we reached the point where we had a hole in the ground and a basement filled in. There were then plans for placement of a large, steel beam under the floor on the first level to act as support for the rest of the house. A good thing. But the county engineering department wouldn’t sign off on it, for whatever reason. They were in disagreement with the architect and the builder and despite calls, emails, changing plans, making modifications, more calls, and more emails, there was nothing we could do. The situation took a month to be resolved, in which there was no work done on the house at all. Our hole in the ground sat and waited while three different parties worked out the details about a steel beam.

But that’s how it goes. Three other parties (not us) worked it out. We tried (we really tried) and grew more and more frustrated with each day. There was no amount of work on our part that could change the situation at all. We just had to wait. It was painful to sit there and do nothing. It goes against the grain of life sometimes. But that is what had to happen. We couldn’t fix it and we had to rely on others to work it out and trust that it would eventually work out. And it did.


I will keep trying to reach someone about Asher’s passport but I don’t have access to their paperwork. I can’t force clients to contact me for more work. However, I can give up the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth that seems to happen under times of stress. Okay, I don’t really do that. How about giving up repeatedly checking emails? Wandering around heavily sighing in distress? I’ll think of some other things I’ll let go of as a response to stress and remember that this too, shall pass, and then one day, it will be a distant memory when we step off that plane and know that in a few short hours, our family will grow yet again and our son JQ will be with us.