I am a Cheater

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Yesterday we hosted Thanksgiving with a few friends and I took the easy way out. Last week I wasn't feeling well, just a cold, but I didn't know if I would be feeling better quickly.


So, I bought our Thanksgiving meal from Target.com.

On Wed. night Ryan went to pick it up.

On Thursday I heated it up. It was easy and tasted good.

I would do it again in a second.

Psych Eval

Update: We found a new LP and we have an appointment with him on Dec. 8th. He is meeting us for one session and will write the report. The entire ordeal is going to cost us $150. We are happy.

As part of our dossier (application to the Philippines) we have to include a psychological evaluation from a licensed psychologist (lp). Our agency said it is just one trip to a lp and then they write up a simple two page report. They even gave a name of person they have sent families to before and he charges $150. I decided to find someone that took our insurance and was closer to us. I found someone 5 miles from our house and she was even available on nights and Saturdays and our insurance accepted her, great right? We were very excited because she had just finished a psych eval for another couple adopting from the Philippines, great again right? Then at the end of the session she had us book our next 3 visits, hum is this right? Well we thought, that is okay she just wants to get to know us and insurance pays for it. Then we had to take a pencil/paper test (I'll address this later) at another appointment time. When Ryan went to take the test, she mentioned to him that it would cost several hundreds of dollars for our report to be written...WHAT?? When he came home and told me that I called our agency and tried to find more information. I also belong to a Yahoo group of other people adopting from the Philippines and I asked them. Everything came back with no, it's only two pages and shouldn't cost hundreds of dollars. One nice woman even sent me a sample of what it was supposed to look like, something she got from her agency.

So today we went for our next appointment and asked her how much money, she couldn't give us an answer. She told us that it is very labor intensive and it would take a while to write and the last one she did was accepted with no problems. Yes, if you give someone too much information they will say you did a good job, we just don't want to waste the money on something we don't need. We showed her our papers and she showed us hers and we came to the conclusion that we could not agree. We told her nice to meet you, but we need to go somewhere else.

She also gave our test results today, should I post those on the World Wide Web? Oh well, I'm not afraid of who sees them. They came back invalid because we were trying too hard on the test. Let me tell you about the test. It was over 500 statements and you get to choose true or false. Some were easy...I like to kill small animals or something like that. Of course false. Others were very gray, how do I interpret that statement. Anyway we over analyzed it and failed. Sorry, English teacher here, I look at every word and think about it and all of the ways it could be interpreted. So we don't know what we are going to do now. I am going to call the other person on Monday and see if he can fix the whole mess.

What a Week!!

This week has flown by, you don't want to even know what our daily schedule looks like because it is crazy. We started seeing a psychologist for our psych evaluation for the adoption this week, I will blog separately about that because it was interesting. We also had other adoption things, pictures, and just life to squeeze in this past week. However, the biggest addition to our week was Birthdays!

We celebrated Ryan's Thursday night between work and activities. I made him Stromboli (his favorite meal) and the boys accosted him with presents when he walked in the door from work. That was end of the excitement of his birthday.

Liam's birthday is a little more involved. On Friday night we ate dinner in the living room while watching a movie! We had appetizers and pie for dessert. He got to open any presents he got in the mail that night also and the present from us. Then it was off to bed. Saturday we cleaned and prepared for his friend party. At 2:00, 12 kindergarten age children dropped in and we tried to entertain them for 2 hours. It wasn't raining out and the temp was above 32 F, so we sent them out in the backyard for the last half hour of fun. Ryan said the limit on friends next year is 4. After everyone was gone, we drove up to my brother and sister in law's house for another party. Luckily I have the greatest sister in law in the whole world and she prepared everything for this party. It was much more relaxed at the family party and I didn't even drink the wine that was offered. On that side of our family we have 6 birthdays in Nov. and one late Oct. that we celebrate. It is a lot of fun because all of the cousins get together. On Sunday Liam has another birthday party to go to and we get to just sit back and relax.

Thanks to all that sent birthday wishes. We have been busy and haven't responded as quickly as we would have liked. Back to Monday tomorrow!

Kid quotes

Today Lance and Liam were invited by friends to go to the Science Museum. We don't go there often and Lance has really been wanting to go. Of course I said yes to the offer without even asking the boys. When told of the offer Lance was excited, Liam did not want to go.

Lance asked Liam why he didn't want to go and Liam said he didn't know why, he just didn't. Lance told him that was not good enough and he explained it this way.

"You don't have to have a reason why you want to go to the museum, but you have to have a reason why you don't want to go. It is like smiling, you don't have to have a reason to have a smile, but you have to have a reason why you have a frown on your face."

I liked the way that he explained this to Liam.

Liam decided that he didn't have a reason not to go and he went to the museum. They had a great time and we thank our friends for taking them.

Halloween!!

I am not the best person to write the recap of Halloween because I worked that night, however this is what I gathered from the evening.

Liam was Elmo and Lance was a pirate that would not wear the head scarf (he didn't like the way dad put it on him, he looked like a girl) nor the earring that I set out (it hurt). So Lance basically had on a shirt and a pair of pants with a sword. They set out around 6:30 and hit the neighborhood houses.

Our friends Rodrigo and Mariela came over and went trick or treating with them to see what it was all about. They just moved here a few months ago from Buenos Aries and had never seen Halloween. After the boys had a good stash of treats they came home and manned our door for about an hour. During that time they also examined the candy and traded accordingly. For some reason Liam thought Dots were the hot candy this year and he traded really good candies for a small box of Dots from Lance. Liam thought they were medicine or something, don't quite understand that yet and I'm done asking about it. The last group before they turned off the light was a large group that came out of two minivans Lance said. They said one of them held the door open, the other just shoved candy into everyone's bags. I asked Lance if he wants to go trick or treating in the minivan next year, he said no, he has more fun walking. That's cool.

Thanks to Rodrigo and Mariela for going with our family this year and for taking pictures and video!

Homestudy finished!

Today we met with our adoption counselor and we got to read our home study report. It was very interesting to read a 9 page story about ourselves. We had to fill in a few blanks on things we had left out of our 20 page paper we wrote to her. It also included a few quotes from our confidential reference letters written by friends and family. Thanks for doing those everyone, they were great. We are going to have to be billed for the $2100 and she wasn't excited about that, but they have us because we can't go on until they get their money.

We did get the instructions for our dossier though, we just can't turn it in until we have the last payment paid. Plus the dossier includes another $800 payment. In this step we need more reference letters, a letter from Lance, answer more questions, police reports and psych evaluations. Plus some other stuff that I can't remember now. We were told it should take us about a month to complete. Then we mail it to our agency, they finish it and mail it to the Philippines. After that we wait for notice that the Philippines got it, it takes about a month for that.

So, we are moving along. We are just taking each step as it comes. It will all work out at some point, just not as fast as we had hoped. We'll keep you updated.

Creative Financing

I admit that I lack creativity, so I am asking for help. On Tuesday, Oct.30th, we have our final meeting for our homestudy. However, to actually make our homestudy complete we need to pay our next fee of $2100. Ryan works on the side for his friend and this is how we save the money for adoption fees. However, business has been slow for his friend and Ryan is lacking time since he started his new job. Needless to say, we don't have the money for this payment. Now,you could say, well, just wait the money will come. And yes, we will have the money someday, but I want it now.

I've checked into different grants and loans already and the paradox is...they require you to complete your homestudy before you can even apply. I'm not begging for money, I just need some serious advice of how to do creative financing. This is already such a long process and to drag it out more is hard on the spirit. Plus, there is always a chance that a country could close their adoptions (case in point Guatamala in January). Or that adoption laws can change.

So, just think about it please and post comments. Even if you don't have a real idea, a funny joke will be accepted because humor helps.

10/29 Update: Tomorrow we have our meeting with the adoption agency and we won't be giving them a check, however we are at $900 right now. They don't mind billing us, it just delays the process. Ryan has been working a little for his friend and we hope to pay the money soon. Thanks for all of the great ideas!!