Slowly By Slowly-Negrete Adoption

We had several questions, and the responses are fairly long so this is a bit of a series. Here's Part 2: Have you experienced racist reactions from people? Yes, unfortunately we do fairly often. There is a park near by where a couple times moms have told their kids to stay away from the "black girl." Most have no idea I'm her mom and will say it when I can clearly hear it. We've been accused of only wanting to be Brad and Angelina. We constantly are stared at. People try to touch her constantly, especially her hair. Most often it happens in higher end grocery stores. Ignorant racism is rampant at Sprouts. Most of the racism we see is pity, or are told how lucky she is to be in our family. As if being in a "white" family is somehow better. And as if her being adopted is better than her living in Uganda. We also far more see the systematic racism in education, the government, the prison system because it's personal now. That's embarrassin...

For World Adoption Day I let anyone who had questions about our adoption ask. We're pretty open with what our process was like, our part of the adoption story etc. The only thing we closely protect is Noeline's story as it is her and hers alone to tell. Here are the questions and my answers: What’s the hardest part? And what’s the best part?  💕 Of the process? The hardest is the wait. It's excruciating. I'm a doer, I make lists and check things off. Waiting, especially pointless waiting is really hard. It’s hard to pick the best part of the process. Being matched, we finally got to dream ab out what our next phase would look like, we had a face and a name. Then meeting her, while it was equally hard holding her was surreal. And now, daily life is just the best. Paperwork was far easier when we knew who it was for. It makes the paperwork we're doing now more personal, it's not just paperwork, its for someone. The hardest part of adoption in general? Walkin...

I had a 7:30 AM phone call with our placing agency. They reviewed the complaints against our home study agency and felt like the complaints weren't significant enough to prevent us from working with them. So home study is back on!! We don't have to start all over! So we're moving forward, but we still have to wait until Jan to finish. Our home study is being finalized, and will just sit as a draft, until January when we attend the training in NY to have that date included in the home study. So we're moving forward but very slowly. It seems silly to need to just wait for those dates to finalize the home study, it effectively puts us in a hold for 2 months where we can't move forward. All next steps require our home study to be completed. Our placing agency is very cautious, very thorough, very by the book. I know we will appreciate that. Our placing agency with Noeline was very different, hence the ridiculous 6 month time in country.  We will be asking fo...

We know, all too well, from Noeline's adoption to expect setbacks and delays. We also knew working with our previous home study agency could be an issue. Things didn't go smoothly with them the first time. But, we LOVE or social worker and most importantly, Noeline is comfortable with her. She's been able to make exceptions and help to streamline parts of the process. She's relaxed  and kind and gets the job done. It's the other people in the agency we were worried about. When we initially began our home study, our placing agency (the agency who will match us with our child) asked our home study agency to send an interagency agreement with all kinds of information. One being a declaration of complaints against them for 2018. Well, it was never signed and never sent back until we asked our social worker to step in. She worked incredibly hard and bent over backwards to get this done so we could move forward. We had our home visit and all our paperwork submitted. We ...

Lots has changed since we last posted, here's a quick recap. After 6 months in Uganda, we brought home our precious daughter on September 16, 2016. Our sweetest friends met us at the airport to welcome us home! My two requests were that everyone give her some space, it had been a hard travel day and she was struggling. Moving to a new country with a new family is hard. My next request was that we sing the Doxology. I wanted it to be so clear, especially for our hearts, that this was all about God. His doing, His power, His sovereignty. We found out about a month after coming home that we were expecting. We hadn't tried for biological kids before adopting and we were ecstatic to be growing our family and giving Noeline a sibling. Then, on March 17, 2017 we officially adopted Noeline. She gained our last name and we became a forever family! On July 16, 2017 our sweet son Caleb joined our family! Noeline was convinced the whole time I was preg...

Our first meeting was way different than anything I had dreamed about. We had arrived at our guesthouse at about 1AM to just walls and a bed, no water, no food...nothing! We slept for a couple hours but knowing we were meeting our girl in a matter of hours made sleeping difficult. We were up around 7, ate a Cliff bar and anxiously waited for the orphanage director to be ready to go to the babies home. On the way she stopped at a local grocery store and sent us in to buy food. We got most of what we didn't need, how could I think about what we would eat when we were minutes from meeting our daughter. We did get enough water to get us through a couple days. When we got back into the car, the orphanage director let us know we would be taking her home with us that day. We had been told we would visit until we had legal custody of her. But, because of an early meeting with our lawyer and court the next day she didn't want to go to the orphanage the next day to pick her up (the o...