Update Before Travel!

I haven't been very good at keeping up with blog posts this adoption, but we are coming so close to bringing Caroline and Hanna home! The financial aspect of it all makes it very stressful, I would give anything to be fully funded right now, but it's just not the way this adoption worked out (Gia's fundraising was a breeze!) BUT the joy of being so close to having the girls home far outweighs the stress! :) It looks like we will be traveling in November, thank goodness! Nick is leaving in January, so we want the girls home by then, so Gia is taken care of by her daddy while I'm in China, and Caroline and Hanna can have a little bonding time with him too!

Speaking of, I updated our timeline on the right side of our page, and we did things a little out of order this time. Back when we thought Nick would deploy this fall, we let our agency know, and they sent our I800 applications in early, so that the lockbox wait would be over when we received our Letters Seeking Confirmation from China. He is no longer deploying with his unit this fall (it was starting to look like it would be impossible to get the girls home in time, but prayers were answered!), but like I said, he'll be leaving in January to provide medical coverage to training in California, so it's still somewhat urgent, and we're very grateful for everything our agency did to scoot our timeline along! :) We have a couple more steps ahead of us, but they should go pretty quickly!

Everything at home is all set up for the girls! We have their bedroom done, clothes and jammies purchased, the bags are somewhat packed, and the siblings are super excited! Well, three out of four are excited...one appears to be excited but her anxiety has been peeking through more and more as we get closer! ;) It's going to be quite the adjustment for Gia (and the others too), but we know in the long run she'll have a special bond with them.

I'm anxious about going to China without Nick, he and I both are sad that he won't be there for those first days that the girls are in our family. However, I am less nervous about all the traveling than I was last year! I know what to expect as far as China itself goes, so hopefully the culture shock won't be such a, you know, SHOCK. :) With Gia's EB, we had NO IDEA what to expect, and man was it hard to manage her needs in China, but with Caroline and Hanna, I pretty much know what to pack and how to take care of them, and I hope they'll sense that they have a momma who knows her way around EB! And finally, I'll have my wonderful friend Stacie with me, an adoptive momma and China veteran herself, to help me out when I need some food, or a nap, or a hug! :)

Here are the newest pictures of our sweet girls, they both look great and we can't wait to have them home, safe and sound! <3

Hoffmann Baby #6!

As many of our friends and family know, we will officially be bringing home TWO girls from China during this adoption trip! The grand total for the Hoffmann clan will be six children: four girls, two boys; three adopted, three biological; three children with EB and three children with their own challenges: ages 9, 7, 5, 5, 4, and 3! However you hash it out, our family will be busy and blessed! :)

The newest daughter to our family is a five-year-old cutie with EB like her sisters. We have been following her since LAST year, when we were in the process of adopting Gia. At the time, she had a family in the process of adopting her too, but shortly after we had preapproval from China to adopt Hanna, we found out that this little lady was available for adoption again. Her file was with another agency, but we were in the middle of our home study, and decided to get the okay from our social worker to adopt two at once, JUST in case! :) Last month, the agency that had her file FINALLY agreed to transfer it to our agency (we had been pestering them since April!), and we got preapproval from China soon after! It will be surprisingly easy to add her to this adoption (logistics-wise, anyway)! Like I said, our home study was already written for two children, so our approval from USCIS was also for two children. And she lives in Guangdong province, so we'll be picking her up in Guangzhou, a stop we would have been making anyway to adopt Hanna, since that is where the US Consulate is located! Oh and there is one more seat available in the mini van, and one more space for a bed in our home. ;)

So WHO is this newest one?? :) We will be naming her Caroline Ling, and isn't she beautiful?? <3

LONG Overdue Update!

I read over my last post and laughed a little! :) I was anticipating it being hard, and it has been SO much harder than I ever anticipated, but so much more rewarding than I anticipated as well!  We adopted Georgia Mei Hoffmann on November 11, 2014, nearly six months ago now!  Our trip to China was memorable but difficult.  Taking care of a child with epidermolysis bullosa is a very steep learning curve, so it was incredibly stressful but we got the hang of it quickly.  China was beautiful, but we were both pretty homesick (we're homebodies and our other three kids were back home with my parents), and I told myself if I never went back to China again, that would be A-OK with me!  I checked the entire Asian continent off my travel list!  More on that later! ;)

After we brought Gia home to Savannah, it got very crazy very fast.  We were quickly feeling overwhelmed with Gia's medical needs.  She was in much worse shape than we thought she would be, we were running short on supplies, we took her to several doctors, all of which either shrugged or gave us very dismal prognoses.  Not only that, but Nick had orders to move to Fort Drum, New York and the movers were coming to our house THE FOLLOWING MONDAY (we arrived home from China on a Friday!)  We realized right away that Gia NEEDED a doctor who was familiar with EB, and that was nowhere near us in Savannah, GA or in Watertown, NY, so Nick called and cancelled the movers, and started the process of getting her enrolled in the military's exceptional family member program, so that the Army would have to station us where she could get the appropriate medical care!  Unfortunately, because Nick's job is so specialized (he's a Flight Paramedic) and there are only a handful of clinics that specialize in the treatment of EB, it took the Army several months to even find a spot for us, at Fort Carson, Colorado!

 

So we finally moved to Fountain, CO in March!  Gia's behavior among all that chaos and moving (we also had to move homes in Savannah because our landlord wouldn't extend our lease) was challenging, to sugarcoat it! :) We can't really blame her, she was used to having some say in her life in China (or at least, that's how she perceived it), and then she was kidnapped, put on airplanes for about 20 hours, had everything packed up and moved homes twice in four months...and had mean old mom and dad expecting her to do as we ask and treat her new family kindly! ;) However, she has bonded with us and her siblings, she loves her new home here in Fountain, and we are slowly getting her used to the new normal!

We took her to the EB clinic at Colorado Children's Hospital in Denver on April 1st, and it gave us the answers that we've needed!  They were very happy with her current condition:  her weight, her wounds, and her outgoing personality!  She saw several doctors in the span of a couple hours, and it was all very overwhelming for both Gia and Mommy, but by the end of the day we had a plan and a diagnosis:  Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa (RDEB).  It's one of the most severe types of EB, and with this type she will have a lot of severe scarring and will undergo many procedures to battle the scar tissue.  This summer she will be put under anesthesia to have an esophageal dilatation, because she already has scar tissue in her esophagus causing strictures.  But it was very reassuring to get the "keep doing what you're doing" from her doctor, because the previous five months of going it on our own had been very worrisome!

Now that you're up to speed on Miss Gia and the rest of the Hoffmanns, rewind back to February!  That was when a friend of mine showed me the picture of a sweet two-year-old in China with EB, waiting for a family.  Nick had been teasing me for months that we needed to adopt again.  We were at Gia's home in China for two days getting to know her and her medical needs before we adopted her, and I think it's no exaggeration to say that Little Flower is the BEST place for orphans with severe medical needs in China!  But it's still so haunting to see so many babies with such extensive needs and no families to take care of them.  Even Gia, who was getting dressing changes every day and was doted on like a princess, has improved SO much since we've brought her home.  So, like I said, Nick was ready to hop on a plane back to China right away! :) I was a little more reserved, especially during the time when we didn't know when or where we would be moving next (and we still hadn't met a doctor to treat Gia).  But when I saw this little girl's picture, and then showed it to Nick, we agreed that we needed to make her a Hoffmann!  Now that we are settled in Colorado, we've completed our home study, and we're hoping to have her home this winter!  We're naming her Hanna Xiu Hoffmann, she's about 18 months younger than Gia, and she has EB like her big sister (although we suspect not the same type).  Yes, it's fast, but the most joyful parts of life go by in a blink! ;)

Y'all. I'm freaking out.

Please notice that the title of this post most clearly says "I'm" and not "we're." Nick is cool as a cucumber, as always. The guy seriously just does not get stressed out. EVER. Which is good in a lot of cases (nobody is better suited for emergency medicine than he is!), but it drives me CRAZY. I'm a worrier, and although most moms are, I'm probably a little more of a worrier than most. Nick genuinely tries to empathize with my stress (although he has no clue what the word means), and he's been doing a great job of doing that lately, because y'all, I'm freaking out.

I FEEL my kids' pain, like on a physical level. It literally hurts my stomach when one of my babies is scared, puts a knot in my chest when I know Abbie is about to go on stage for a recital, and gives me goosebumps to see them shiver.  I'm hoping other moms experience this too, and I'm not crazy! :) So now that we're close to travel, I'm thinking non-stop about what our Gia is about to go through, and it's painful. :( She's going to be taken from everything and everyone she knows and loves, and then go through so many new and terrifying things, with only funny-looking strangers that don't even speak her language to comfort her! And I can't even wrap my brain around the actual physical pain that we are no doubt going to cause her as we're fumbling through her bandage changes. I'm good at maintaining a calm façade in front of my kids, and I'll do the same for Gia...I just hope that from day one, she can somehow feel how much we love her, even when we mess up and cause her pain.

Some days I even feel guilty for adopting her. Crazy, right? She seems so happy where she is. And even on the days when I'm most optimistic, I still wish that there was just another way to bring her into our family (maybe we can convince one of her Little Flower nannies to come home with us!) Nick tells me how kids are resilient, and she'll be fine, but I just hate to think that we're adding to the trauma she's already been through. :(

So that's the bulk of my worrying. Don't even get me started on the stress of riding in airplanes for what will amount to DAYS, or being prepared for Gia with the correct medical supplies and doctors appointments, or what her care will mean for our family, or the MOVE TO NEW YORK after we get home from China! Ahhh! 

China gave us the thumbs up!

It's been a LONG time since our last post, but there wasn't a whole lot to report. We spent our summer waiting for China to translate and review our dossier, and then approve us to adopt Gia. The whole process took 60 days, which is a little shorter than most, and our Letter of Approval (or I've seen some call it the Letter of Acceptance, I guess we'll find out when we see it?) is now on it's way to us! LOA for short from now on. ;)

Looking back, this summer now seems so short (and it was, the big kids only had 10 weeks off from school!), but it was fun! Abbie did paddleboarding camp through the Y, Ryan did a nature exploration camp through Oatland Island, all three kids did Vacation Bible School, we took a week-long trip to North Carolina to see Dad and Mary, and Nick completed paramedic school! The big kids have already been back to school for a couple weeks now, and Eli and I start back at the preschool next week!

So what's next for the Hoffmanns? A LOT. We still have several steps before bringing Gia home, but they'll go by fast (more on that later!), and we're REALLY hoping to bring her home at the end of October, but that would be if everything goes perfectly. Why are we hoping for the end of October? Obviously, the sooner the better, but also, the Army is moving us to Fort Drum, New York this fall! Nick's report date is November 10, they already moved it back once from a September report date, and we're hoping they would move it back again if we're not home with Gia by then...but it would be nice to not have to stress about all that! Worst case scenario: Nick would have to move up to New York ahead of the rest of the family, which is survivable! ;)

As far as the adoption process, the next step is to get our LOA, check the yes box (obviously!), and then send it to US Citizenship and Immigration with our I800 application. We already sent an I800A application to them in the spring, when they approved us to adopt from a Hague convention country, NOW we need approval to adopt our specific sweetheart, and bring her home as a US citizen! After that is a lot of crazy steps leading up to our travel that even makes my head spin (and I'm one of those weirdos that likes filling out forms!), so more about that later.

To summarize, in the next three months, we'll be taking a two-week trip to China, bringing a new baby into our family, and packing up our home and moving over 1,000 miles away to upstate New York....just not sure on specific dates for ANY of that! Hang on, Hoffmanns! And hang on Gia, we're coming soon!!! :)

DTC!

After months and months of paperwork, our dossier is finally on its way to China! All of our sealed documents, along with several family photos, are now bound in a pretty book with a summary translated to Chinese! I wish I could see what it looks like! :) We are about halfway through the process and it now looks like we will (hopefully!) be traveling to get Gia in October. This is a pretty big landmark, because this is now out of our hands and out of our agency's hands for the time being, and it's now time for China to do some homework! Next we will get our log-in date (LID), the date when the Chinese government gets our dossier, which will hopefully be next week. After that is a very long wait to get our Letter of Approval (LOA). It takes at least 30 days for our dossier to get translated to Chinese, and at least another 30 days for them to review our match and approve it. We already have our preliminary approval to adopt Gia, based on a one-page form we submitted with our Letter of Intent, so now that they have ALL our information, they will give us our final LOA, hopefully by the end of the summer! Our last summer as a family of five will hopefully fly by! :) I know I'm not supposed to wish my life away, but Gia has been waiting a very long time already!

May Updates

May was definitely a hurry-up-and-wait month...so frustrating! As far as our progress on the paperwork trail, we are DONE with our dossier on our end! We have compiled everything China needs to tell them about ourselves so they can determine if we will be fit parents for Gia (and our agency is great, so we know that there is no reason for it to get denied once it's in China!) We were waiting for our approval from USCIS to approve us to adopt, so I sent everything EXCEPT that approval to our agency back on May 2nd, in hopes that they would be able to get all that reviewed ahead of time. Then we got our USCIS approval on May 6th, and had to send that document through the sealing process that all the other documents had already been through (notarization, certification by the County Clerk, certification by the Secretary of State, and authentication by the Chinese Consulate in Houston). We rushed and overnighted it through all that and our agency received it last Thursday, on the 22nd! .....and now we wait..... Because we live in Georgia, we first send everything to our agency's branch in Atlanta. It's there that all of our documents are critically reviewed, and because they weren't able to get around to reviewing our other documents (that had been there since May 2nd), they FINALLY got started on our critical review last Thursday and said it would take 9-11 business days to get it done. So everything is STILL sitting in Atlanta. Blah.

So what's next? Hopefully next week it will get mailed to our agency's headquarters in Denver, and there it will be translated to Chinese, bound in a fancy book, and then overnighted to China. They only mail dossiers to China on Fridays, so fingers crossed they can get all that done next week (IF it ever makes it off that desk in Atlanta!!) Then we have the longest and most unpredictable wait in the entire adoption process, the wait for our Letter of Approval (LOA) from the Chinese government. It can take anywhere from 30-100+ days, and there's really no way to tell where in that range we will be! Prayers please for a quick LOA!

We haven't gotten any new pictures of Gia in a few weeks. We are very, VERY spoiled with having her at Little Flower, because most adoptive parents with children in Chinese orphanages only get a couple pictures total...but it's still hard. We are very attached to our little Chinese dumpling already. <3

Fundraising is going great! We received very generous donations from friends here in Savannah, the Benton family and the Pederson family! Thank you so very much! I have also made a good amount babysitting, and Stella & Dot has been a huge blessing as well.

Adoption expenses left to pay, carried over from last month: $23,435
Paid in May: $2,450 (second agency fee)
$790 (fee to China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption - or CCCWA)
Left to pay: $20,195

May fundraising:
Necklace donations: $60
Donation from the Benton family: $100
Donation from the Pederson family: $100
Stella & Dot earnings: $266.54
Savings account for Gia: $10,790.46

We have only $8,878 to go!! :) Still hoping to hear some good news from grants soon! I applied to ten grants, we've heard from two organizations so far that told us they couldn't help us at this time, but that's eight more possibilities to go!

Next month I will be focusing on using my Stella & Dot business for fundraising! If I can sell $2,308 in one month, my commission gets bumped from 25% to 30%, which means I'll make close to $700! I've hit this goal once before, so I know it's possible, it just takes a good amount of shows! So if you are willing to host a show for me, in-home or online, please let me know soon (you could also be making 25% in hostess credits!) Also, Nick has a manly fundraiser in the works too, more details to come. ;) And guess what folks, I think by the end of June we will be DONE fundraising! We have been totally OVERWHELMED by the amount of support we've gotten for little Gia, thank you so much!!