First step! You’re one your way!
There are definitely different challenges with adopting an older child than with an infant. Without going into details, my brother and SIL adopted a little girl who was about 3 when she came to them, and it took 3+ years. In that case it was not a voluntary surrender on the part of the parent, of course - and I’d imagine that’s a more common issue with older kids.
Anyway - exciting stuff and I wish you all the best luck in finding your baby!!
I am so very happy for you! We adopted our daughter 14 years ago, she turned 15 a few weeks ago. We brought her home a day before her first birthday. I wish you all the best as you go through the process and please keep us posted. This made my day, thank you for sharing such happy news!
Congratulations! Félicitations! Gratulojn! 
Congratulations! It sounds like you’ve got this in the bag.
As an adoptive parent myself, one thing I would recommend is to get as much medical history from the birth parents as possible. There will be a lot of times where doctors or schools will ask you if there’s a history of XXXX in the family and you just flat out won’t have the information.
Very inspiring, congrats!
I no longer post here much, but you make the exception. Congratulations on the start of a long and wonderful journey. We did the same long ago and I have never regretted it, not one second.
I met George last Friday and I’d remembered his age wrong, when I first posted about him: he just turned 2. He’s a bit confused by all these new people who talk funny; I wasn’t there for his birthday party but I’m told he got a bit overwhelmed at one point, and he went to his Mom and grabbed firmly onto her skirts but without hiding. And yesterday, Jay and Lupe gave us the date for their wedding, to be held on June 10th unless there are delays in paperwork. The priest who’ll preside is the same one who presided the wedding of my other brother.
I wish you guys the best.
I dunno what your seasons are like over there, but in Michigan, June is a good month for a wedding (mine was June 11th.) I wish them weather as perfect as ours was that day.
There’s been a slight delay in wrapping up the home study because I didn’t know I was supposed to send them the fingerprinting receipts, unfortunately our ‘‘6 to 8 week fingerprint processing’’ we thought we began a month ago has to start over… so we’re hoping to get on the waiting families list by February. But they have wrapped up the home visit portion and the rest of the paperwork, and the home study lady was impressed with us. She said she has no reservations whatsoever about recommending us. So the vetting process, at least, is almost over.
All the adoption stuff in December was stressful so I wanted a bit of a break from having to think about it for a while. My husband’s family is huge and they are always throwing parties, so at the annual Christmas party last night (50 people or so) his grandparents gave us a box full of baby clothes (for a boy or girl.) It was incredibly thoughtful and a good sign they are accepting of our decision to adopt, but it also threw me for an emotional loop. I felt sad. People were asking about it and they are excited for us, I know there will be joy and excitement but it will take a while to get there. I’m not exactly doing cartwheels yet, just trying to pace myself for the inevitable long wait, the emotional ups and downs and not count any babies before they are hatched.
I’m glad everyone is excited for you, but I agree…let’s slow down until Spice Kit is officially yours.
Yikes in a variety of ways to the box of baby clothes in front of dozens of people. Generous of them, of course; but I would have felt like I was on display or being scrutinized. When our surrogacy attempts were done and we’d closed the door on a chance at being parents I had a small stash of baby things I’d bought in a moment of hopeful dreaming; I gave them away as fast as I could to move forward wholeheartedly.
I completely understand the emotional ups and downs. It’s great that the family is excited, but without actually going through the process, no matter how excited people are, they just don’t understand all the ins and outs of the process. It’s not like being pregnant and approximately 9 months later there’s a bundle of joy. It could be much sooner or in our case from start to baby home was 16 months, a long pregnancy! We thought our daughter would be home at seven months old, she was a day shy of a year old. Keep an open mind and heart and it sounds like you are dealing with it well. One day at a time, deep breaths!
Just an update, because I am frustrated and need to vent.
Still in the home study process. First I screwed up the fingerprinting, so that got delayed. A few weeks ago I get a call from the agency. They got the fingerprinting results back. We are not in the child abuse registry (duh) however I’m showing up in their system as having had contact with social services, and they have to follow up. Naturally, there is no explanation for why I’m in the system. Not even a date to give us a clue.
Of course, it has to be related to my history of abuse. 
They already know all about it, I was 100% forthright with them about my childhood and they have gone out of their way not to make me feel weird about it. So it’s not them. I know they are just doing due diligence. The lady I spoke with said she’d have to check with her supervisor but she doubted she had to do any more follow-up and we’d get the home study completed in the mail soon.
But then weeks went by, nothing. I called on Monday to follow up and was told that they have to do the research after all, and DHHS is not returning their calls.
Honestly, I kind of freaked. That whole abuse debacle was such a nightmare for me, it pisses me off that yet again, I’m being punished for something someone else did to me. I didn’t even want anyone to find out about it at the time, unfortunately, the counselor was mandated to report it. I had no warning and no control over who found out, and now it’s holding up an already ridiculously long process just to have kids. Worse, I feel like I’ve done something wrong, though intellectually I know I haven’t.
Sr. Weasel has tried to talk me down. He gets why I’m freaking out but he says it’s just a delay and everything is going to work out. But I’ve been very depressed this week. I’ve been waiting for kids for so long already, and if this got resolved tomorrow it would still be 2-3 years. I’ve been tempted to say ‘‘fuck it’’ and go through the hell of pregnancy again just to get this over with. But I will stay the course because pregnancy is medically risky and because adoption is what my heart wants.
Just to throw it out there, have you considered surrogacy, where another woman carries your fertilised embryo?
I don’t know a lot about the process but I’m not sure that would negate all of the medical issues. One of them is the anticonvulsant I am on, which raises the risk of birth defects, combined with my age, to a frightening 9%. Since it also does the dual work of treating my depression, it would be a bad idea to go off of it. I have no idea if that 9% is an in utero developmental thing or a risk from conception. I think the idea of surrogacy slightly freaks out my husband. Maybe because his cousin was the first one who offered. :eek:
Something to discuss with your doctor, then?
{{Spice Weasel and Sr. Weasel}} It’s hard, but please try to hang in there. You are doing a good thing, but not an easy thing. Vent as needed of course - bureaucracy is awful. Sometimes you have to bend with the winds like the willow. Or whatever fortune-cookie type advice gets you through.
Taking anti-epileptic drugs most likely would not be a barrier to surrogacy since the concern about these drugs is about how they affect a developing fetus, and of course for surrogacy the egg is harvested before even being fertilized.
Some of the anti-epileptic drugs are much worse for developing fetuses than others are, so if you did decide that you would prefer to try to conceive a bio kid, it might be possible to talk to your doctor about if there is another option at least temporarily during pregnancy. It’s worth noting that the baseline risk of birth defects in the general population is around 2-6%, so depending on the specific concerns your doctor had about your medication, the 9% risk may not really be that much worse than the typical risk.
The main reason few people do surrogacy is that it is pretty expensive (though you can save a lot of money if you can find a friend or relative who is willing to do it for free rather than having to pay a stranger to be the surrogate). It can also be very legally tricky depending on where you live.
Using a surrogate in another country is apparently an option that some people go with because it ends up being cheaper, but some people have complained that it’s unethical to pay women in other countries to bear children for wealthy westerners.
Spice Weasel,
I just want to thank you for keeping us updated and informed throughout this process.
Mrs. Guest and I are talking with my exwife about formally adopting the fosterling due to some (potentially) serious medical issues with her and this has been an informative thread for me, since my research into what and when and why and where and who of the adoption process has been less than fully informative.
I wish things were going totally smoothly for you, but from over here it looks like, despite the delays, you and Sr. Weasel have this pretty well in hand.