Moving Houses, and Moving Blogs!

As I get further involved in creating this blog I realize there are some major kinks to wordpress.  Namely, you have to pay to modify the CSS code and you have limited options regarding menu bars etc.  For these reasons I am changing blogs. 

Our new blog is:

http://housdenadoption.blogspot.com/

It is much more user friendly and easier to update.

Hope to see you there!

Oh, the joys of a ‘older’ new home and other renovation stories!

Well, somehow our renovation time line has gone a little bit awry.  Everything seems to take longer and cost more then we were expecting. 

We wanted to get the basement suites renovated first for tenants.  And we found great tenants who are moving in August 1st.  Our electrician was supposed to start today, but with the Vancouver city strike the permit desk is a little behind.  I am not really clear on why the strike is actually happening.  It seems like both the city and the union are saying that the other isn’t talking, so bargaining has broken down.  If the union does have a strong point or a justifiable reason to refuse a  3 year contract (extending past the olympics) then the media

has really done a poor job in letting us know about it.  Basically as a lay member of the public all we hear is that the strike is happening. 

So back to our reno’s, the strike really puts a kink in getting an electrical permit. 

To top things off, we have found out that rats were living under our deck in the deck insulation (only a small room under the deck is insulated) so we had to tear that down completely.  The previous owners never disclosed that.  The previous owners also never told us that the upstairs appliances don’t work (although we purchased the home with 3 working sets of appliances).  I am also frusterated that they never forwarded on their mail, just left us a message to contact them as their mail arrived….RTS as far as I’m concerned (well, maybe I won’t be that harsh, I am just feeling frusterated).

It is also Shawn’s big project wrap up next week, so he is super busy with work.  We had to cancel the movers for tomorrow and book them for Sunday only with the hopes that on Saturday we can finish our painting.  (however I am avoiding painting by blogging). 

We won’t even have started painting the upstairs before August, maybe not even before the fall, although I am not sure how long I can live in the room I have affectionately named the ‘toothepaste room’.  The previous owners painted the entire thing, including the lovely fireplace and mantel the colour of old fashioned mint toothpaste.  They even had the style sense to finish it off with red velvet curtains, which also have a lovely black rose print on them.  I can seriously say I don’t understand where some people get ideas for paint and decorating…I mean, all they have to do is look in one magazine and think hmmm…I don’t think that toothpaste is the colour for the season, perhaps I won’t purchase 6 gallons of it.  Thank goodness the upstairs is a strictly aesthetic makeover, I don’t think I could handle multiple contractors in the main living area right now.

As for our adoption, things keep moving along.  Homestudy is going well.  I already have visions of our childs room.  There are two rooms on the main floor, both of them really large and this time next year, hopefully I will be setting up one of the rooms for our little one (very exciting).  I will be painting it neutral colours!  No toothpaste for me!

First video post..hopefully this works!

This is my first attempt at imbedding a video into a wordpress blog.  It is a good one about how the AIDs epidemic has effected children in Africa.  

Our homestudy continues to go well.  There is a lot of paper work and self reflection.  Excellent process to go through in the journey to becoming a parent.  I am sure it has been discussed before, but it sure seems like it is something that everyone should go through before parenting any children, either biological or adopted.

We are officially moving into our new home in a week.  We get posession tomorrow and the painting/ updating starts at that time.  I am pretty sure August is going to be a very busy month, but fun.  It is going to be so nice to have our own space and no longer be tenants!   

Enjoy the film

We are homeowners again!

Well, Shawn and I have exciting news.  We have just officially bought our first home in Vancouver.  We are so happy!  It is in East Vancouver in the Mt. Pleasant area.  It has two basement suites which we will be renting out as mortage helpers, and three bedrooms upstairs.  It is much larger then our current place, and has a large deck and backyard.  Hopefully all our family and friends can come visit us soon!  We will officially be moving in mid July, although we have our current place until August 1st, so it gives us some time to paint and prepare our new home.  We have been house shopping for a while, but it is difficult to find something in a nice area that is affordable (or relatively affordable).  The house does need some work, new paint, eventually a new kitchen, and updating of the bathrooms.  They previous owners also had a very ugly addition put onto the back porch which will have to be torn down, but that is an eventual plan, for now it is livable and I think we will be very happy there!

We had thought about purchasing outside of Vancouver and doing the daily commute, but in the end it made the most sense to try and get into the Vancouver market.  With having one more year of school to go for me, and Shawn needing to get downtown early this is a great location.  I am steps to a direct bus line to UBC and closer to downtown then we are right now in Kerrisdale. 

Here is a picture of our new place!

 

Choices adoption works quickly!

Last Sunday was our official start to our adoption and on Tuesday we received our adoption package and this weekend we had our first visit with our social worker Duanita.  We have also heard from our friends who are acting as our references that they received their reference package on Tuesday as well. 

The homestudy for an adoption is quite lengthy and involved.  The first thing we need to do for our homestudy is write our autobiographies and answer various other questions about why we are choosing adoption.  We are also required to complete a family map and an eco-map of the various influences in our lives. 

There is also a large adoption workbook that we need to work through, which contains various articles and questions we need to read and complete.  All this is to be done by September. 

Our first meeting with our social worker went well.  The first meeting was really to get to know us and start to assist us in organizing the paperwork and other things we need to start sending in to Choices.  We have already gone down to the Vancouver police and ordered our criminal record checks. 

Right now we are each working on our personal autobiographies and work book.

We started reading the various articles, and one of the articles spoke about the differences between adoptive and biological parenting.  It was fairly straight forward, but it actually said “try to refrain from using the threat of sending your adopted child back as a punishment”.  I couldn’t believe that they would actually need to tell some people that.  The thought that someone would actually use that threat against a child was so shocking it was almost unbelievable.  Almost..at the same time it really illustrates how many adopted children must experience a lot of confusion and fear, especially if they aren’t able to trust their new families. 

On another note, we had some friends staying with us this weekend from Williams Lake.  We took them to one of our favorite Vancouver restaurants Fassil Ethiopian restaurant on East Broadway.  This is a local family run restaurant at the bottom of Fraser on Broadway.  Not only is the food absolutely amazing, but the owners are some of the nicest and warmest people you could meet.  They are more then happy to create a variety of menus and dishes for your table, and the food is always superb.  We have tried other Ethiopian restaurants in Vancouver, but the food wasn’t as good.  Ethiopian food is served on large share plates with lentils, vegetables and meats in the centre of the plate, all resting on a special type of bread called Injera.  Injera is a spongey flat bread that has a little bit of a sourdough taste to it.  You are also served plates of Injera that you tear and use to grasp the various foods.  It is so yummy! 

Our next appointment with the social worker is in two weeks, so we must continue to work on our autobiographies!

Thank you for all your warm wishes.  It is wonderful to know how our family and friends are supporting us in this process!

First step…initiated!

Well, today was the day.  Officially we dropped off our cheque today, to start our homestudy with Choices adoption.  We should hear from a social worker this week and start receiving paperwork to complete.  Paper work such as adoption medicals, criminal record checks, references etc.  Most people say it takes about 3 months to complete the homestudy, and then your dossier and information is sent via CAFAC or Kidslink to Ethiopia for further processing/ placement of a child.  It makes it feel pretty official to have actually sent in the cheque!  It certainly feels more real now and we are both very excited. 

So now to answer some other questions we have had.  Firstly, we are often asked why Ethiopia?  Why not China, India, somewhere in South America, the USA, or Canada?  We are often told that there are a lot of children in Canada that need homes, so why are we choosing to adopt from so far away?This is definitely a difficult question to answer.  Firstly, we have always been intrigued by Africa, and in 2002 Shawn and I spent 2 months traveling from South Africa up to Kenya.  We traveled through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya.  We went via overland bus, and stayed in tents the entire time (except for South Africa where we stayed in various hostels and rode the infamous Baz Bus  http://www.bazbus.com/  ).  It was an amazing trip!  Not only did we fall in love with the cultures and landscapes of Africa, we fell in love with the people.  Africa is an amazing place.  Often in North America when we think of Africa we envision desert land, starving people and war.  What we experienced on our trip was a different face of Africa.  A peaceful Africa, a green, lush landscape and the warmest most wonderful people.  Of course, we weren’t blind to the hardships people face throughout the continent.  It is easy to see that HIV/Aids has ravaged Africa, and that poverty and corruption are driving the economics of many African countries.  However the people of Africa are some of the most resilient people I have ever met.  Even through all this destruction both personally and politically, the people of Africa are still hopeful, still welcoming.  I don’t know if I would be able to maintain the same level of composure in the face of such massive destruction. 

 I have heard many times that a trip to Africa ‘gets into your bones’, as crazy as that seems to sound, there is some truth to that.  Ever since our trip to Africa we have longed to return.  And somewhere on our personal journeys between then and now, we have just realized that in our hearts, our child is somewhere in Africa.  It is a difficult thing to explain, we are not religious, but if we were, I could see describing this knowing as faith.  We believe that we are meant to bring our child home from Africa. 

The choice of Ethiopia versus other countries in Africa was an easier decision.  There are only 4 countries that Canadians can adopt from in Africa.  There is South Africa: which has recently opened its doors, but which is mired with paperwork and red tape.  There is Lesotho, where you must be a practicing Christian to adopt from (which we are not).   And there is Liberia, which takes upwards of 3 years or longer.  Finally there is Ethiopia.  Ethiopia has been welcoming foreign adoptions for longer than many of the other country in Africa, the process has fewer hurdles and Ethiopia welcomes adoptions from single parents, older parents and parents with previous children.  That being said, it is common knowledge that when you do adopt from an international country there is always the potential that the process could be interrupted at any time, or the paperwork could change.  The political situation could also change which could effect our adoption.  All we can do is plan to address specific hurdles as they appear and hope that our adoption goes as smoothly as possible.

 The question of Canadian adoption is one that we struggle with.  I know there are many children in Canada who are looking for ‘forever families’.  Besides feeling in our hearts that Africa is the right choice, we also have some concerns in adopting from Canada.  I am sure a lot of this is my lack of education on Canadian adoptions, but I have actually had a patient who adopted in Canada and the infant was taken back by the birth mother 3 months after placement.  I am not sure if I could cope with the loss of a child as such.  I have been doing a lot of readings on open adoptions, and how open adoptions are really beneficial to the growth and development of the child, and how they can work so wonderfully.  I am not sure if an open adoption is the right choice for us at this time.  I think I would be insecure (perhaps this is my maturity or again lack of education) that the birthmother would decide that she no longer wanted us to parent our child.  I think I have also been influenced by the work that I do in the Downtown Eastside.  Many of the women I work with have children that are often placed for adoption.  My concern is that some of the children who are adoptable in Canada my have been exposed to drugs, alcohol and tobacco in utero and may be developmentally effected.  Yes, I did say tobacco.  Studies have actually shown that infants exposed to alcohol and tobacco have longer term developmental side effects then infants exposed to cocaine, so the uproar of the ‘crack babies’ of the 1980’s is really an urban myth http://www.come-over.to/FAS/crackbaby.htm  . 

Now with an African international adoption, although we wouldn’t know for sure, we can be relatively sure there wouldn’t be drug/ alcohol exposure.  We would have different prenatal challenges to face, such as poor nutrition and HIV.  Again, this issue of adopting internationally or adopting from Canada is something that we have struggled with and there is no right answer.  When it comes to the HIV/ Aids situation, we often get asked about if we are scared that our child will have HIV.  The answer is no, we are not worried about this.  The children undergo an extensive medical examinations and HIV tests before placement.  We also are interested in adopting a toddler, 2-3 years, which eliminates the risk for a late + HIV seroconversion.  Besides which, only 24.8% of children born to HIV positive mothers are HIV positive.

What it really comes down to, is what we feel in our hearts is the right decision for our family, and that is to adopt from Ethiopia. 

Below is a photos from our last trip to Africa.  I will try to set up our print ordering page later this week

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Welcome and other introductions

Welcome to our new blog!  We have decided to start a blog to chronicle our journey to create a family.  Like many young couples we struggled with when the right time to start a family was and what that journey would look like.   After much discussion we both agreed that for us this journey would start with adoption.  For us, adoption was our first choice.  We both feel in our hearts that our child is already born and soon to be on their way to our home. 

As we have started to discuss our plans with other people we often get a mixed response.  Most people are excited and happy for us, and many people have questions.  We are often asked “are you going to have your own children?”.  We just wanted to say upfront that our children, whether they will be biological or adopted are our own and loved completely as our own.  As to whether or not we will choose to have biological children, we can’t answer that question right now.  Like many couples, we plan on starting with one child and then deciding how to continue to build our family.  Most of the time we know that when people ask this question they aren’t being rude or insenstive, rather they aren’t sure what the right way to ask this question is, or how to discuss adoption with us.  As we bring a new member into our family we realize that there will be a lot of questions from our extended family and friends.  We know that all these questions are important and we hope we can answer them as we progress.

We also hope that this blog will allow our friends and family to share in this journey and excitement, serve to offer links to adoption education and resources, and help dispell many of the myths that exist regarding adoptions.  We intend this blog to also act as a written journal for our child to look back and understand how our family was created..

I am also a photographer and will be posting travel photographs from our last trip to Africa and the Middle East.  These photos will be available to purchase and all money will go to assist us in bringing our child home. 

We look forward to hearing your comments and support throughout this process!