Details: Bringing Baby Home

I started checking into the process of being able to bring the baby back into the US. It isn't as easy as I'd hoped (I don't know why I was thinking it would be - duh!). As far as I know, the adoption part and getting the child from India isn't any harder (thankfully). It's just the part of getting the child able to enter the US with us when we come to bring it home. Yesterday I went to the USA Govt's website and just looked at the International Adoption page, and wow, there are a lot of details to consider, and a lot of stuff to do on a timeline, etc. I am still hoping to be able to do the work by myself and not hire a lawyer, but I sure wouldn't want to screw anything up. By the time I get done, I should be eligible for a law degree myself :) There are some things about our situation that will likely make things slightly less complicated, but almost in the same breath, more difficult too. Sounds contradictory - I know.

On another note, an update about us and our decisions: We have decided after much prayer and conversation that we will tell the orphanage/Indian Govt that we will accept a child, pending our final approval, with medical needs. Right now we have no idea what that will entail - what will be wrong, the age or gender of the child, etc. We will likely get an older-than-newborn child, but I don't know how much older. I actually don't know how they chose a child to give you if you are sidestepping the normal routine of just waiting in line for a healthy newborn. I am pretty sure it isn't like baby shopping, where we go in and point and say "That one." Obviously this hasn't been decided in the last 2 days since my previous post - this has been in the back of our minds for a while. Now I can just say that we have actually talked through the issues, like why now on a first child instead of on a subsequent child, why would we take an older child the first time around, how will this affect our marriage and ability to be good parents, etc. I am not saying that we think this will be easy (dealing with everything when Baby is home with us) - but we do feel confident that this is something God is calling us to do. That's enough reason for me to be at peace with the situation.

And, we have also decided that besides general adoption details/timeline, we don't want to tell any of the specifics of our potential child until we are in India and the child is physically in our arms and the whole thing is done. There are many reasons for this...so we won't be telling gender, age, name (which we already have picked out), medical problems, etc, until we are sure that the information we are giving out is about our child - not details about a little person who could end up not working out.

Please be in prayer for us as we continue to make decisions and process information and do the busy work, and for our child - he or she may already be born.