Thankful

November 26, 2018November 26, 2018 Stoyk

During this season of giving thanks, we are thankful that Bethany Christian Services is willing to take over our home study and that our placing agency, AAC, is willing to work with them also. This transition has not been an easy one. Trying to communicate with two different home study agencies and our placing agency has been hard. There have been a lot of days where we have felt like the middle-man with no control whatsoever over what is happening. Despite the struggles and surprises along the way, we are still thankful to be moving forward.

So where are we in the process? On Wednesday we sent a huge stack of paperwork to Bethany. They do things a little differently than Lutheran Social Services, and they don’t set up their home study visits until you have completed the paperwork. Now that we have completed all of the paperwork (a lot of it the exact same as what we did for LSS) we should be ready to set up our home study visits. We still have not met our new case worker from Bethany, so we are looking forward to meeting them at our fist visit. We are unsure how many visits we will need to do with Bethany, because we were told that some of the visits we already did would transfer over. We are hopeful that some of the additional paperwork, visits, and trainings we have done will all count towards what we need to do for Bethany. Our case worker with LSS told us that she would be sending over our file to Bethany this week, so we think that will help to move things along also.

What’s next? After speaking with our placing agency and Bethany, we are still hoping to be done with our home study by February. This is a few months later than we had originally wanted to finish, but we are thankful it isn’t longer. After we submit our home study to AAC in February, we will apply for I-600 approval. This is basically immigration approval. That can take about 2 months to get approved. As soon as we are approved, we will send our Dossier (home study and all the other paperwork we have been working on) over to Korea so they can match us with a sweet baby. Then we wait! Our hope is to be submitted to Korea by April, Gus will be 2, so we will be more than meeting Korea’s 1 year age gap requirement. We have no idea how long it will take to get matched, but we are hopeful that we will not have to wait long.

During this time of waiting for everything to come together and to finish our home study, we are working on saving every penny we can, reading a lot of books about adoption and Korea, and we are even trying to learn Korean! We really appreciate all of you who are reading this, asking questions, and praying for us along the way. We value all of your support, and we are so grateful to have amazing family and friends standing by us through this process. Even though we are moving slowing, submitting papers last week moved us one step closer to bringing home Baby Stoyk!

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Take Aways…

September 22, 2018September 22, 2018 Stoyk

We attended a two day training in Madison this week, and passed, thank goodness! The training covered what it will be like to raise a child that is not our biological child, the attachment process, traveling to South Korea, and what life will be like for a child from South Korea living in the U.S.A. There was some good information given, and some important things for us to remember while going through this process and for when our child is home.

One of the things we talked about during the training was using Adoption Positive Language. This is something that we really hadn’t heard about until we began this process, so we think it would be a good thing to share with all of you.

Adoption Positive Language

Negative Language Positive Language

Real Parent Birth Parent/Biological Parent

Given Up/Given Away Placed for Adoption

Is Adopted Was Adopted

Adopted Mom/Dad Mom/Dad

Own Child Biological Child

Foreign Adoption International Adoption

** I want to add a side note here that we do not expect everyone to use the correct positive adoption language 100% of the time. We completely understand this is new to most of our friends and family, and if we are being completely honest, we may have been scolded a few times during our training for saying the incorrect things. We are just hoping to educate people about this process, and do the best we can to make sure our child is coming home to a very accepting and loving environment.

I am also adding to this post a post I did a while ago called “Adoption Q & A”. There is a link to this post if you go to the menu, but since these seem to be the most common questions people want to know, we thought we would post it again.

Adoption Q & A

Are you adopting for North or South Korea?

We are adopting from South Korea.

Are you going to get a girl?

More boys are released for international adoption in South Korea. Families in Korea prefer to adopt girls domestically, so that leaves a large number of boys looking for forever families. We are pretty good at raising little boys, and we have a lot of little boy stuff, so we are open to taking a child of either gender.

How long will it take?

I wrote a blog post on the timeline, so please check that out under the menu tab, but the process typically takes about 24 months from the first application to brining the child home. Right now we are finishing our home study. We are hoping to be matched with a child in the spring.

How old will the baby be?

Children are not released to be adopted internationally until they are at least 6 months old. We could be matched with a child 6 months or older, and then after completing all the other steps would be bringing home a child that is between 18-24 months old.

Will the child have special needs?

There is always a possibility that any child could have a special need whether it is a biological or adopted child. We did complete a check list including the special needs that we felt like our family could care for, but that is something that we will keep private for the sake of our child.

How much will it cost?

Adoptions from South Korea typically cost between $30,000 – $50,000.

Why South Korea and not the United States?

This is a very personal decision for anyone adopting. I have always wanted to adopt from South Korea, and know there are children all over the world that need to be adopted into loving families. For our family, we know that God has a child for us from South Korea, so that is where we are adopting from.

What are South Korea’s Requirements for Adoptive Parents?

South Korea has their own unique requirements for adoptive parents. Parents must be married for at least 3 years, between the ages of 25-44, cannot have more than 4 children already in the home, the youngest child in the home must be 1 year older than the child being adopted, parents must be free of any serious physical/mental illness, have no criminal history, and have a BMI of less than 30%.

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A Bump in the Road

September 11, 2018September 16, 2018 Stoyk

We got an email from our social worker today asking if we could have a conference call with her and her supervisor at 4pm. I immediately had a feeling this wasn’t going to be a good phone call. I called her right away and asked if we could make the phone call a little earlier so we would be able to pick up the boys at 4:15. I asked if I needed to be concerned about this, and she said, “We can just talked about it this afternoon.” Ugh, that was definitely not good.

Eric came down to my classroom right after school and we waited for the phone call. Our social worker (from Lutheran Social Services) started off by saying she had her supervisor on the phone and this was a very difficult call to make. She told us they were discontinuing their international adoption program, so as of January 1st they would no longer be doing home studies for international adoptions. Cue the tears! I knew this was going to be a bad phone call, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine them saying they were going to end the program.

So what does this all mean? Lutheran Social Services (LSS) has been doing our home study, which we were almost done with. They are our home study agency and AAC is our placing agency that works with South Korea. Since our home study was not completed yet, we need to figure out if we will have LSS complete our home study and another agency update it before sending it to Korea, or if we will just scrap what we have done before and start over with another home study agency.

We will continue working with AAC as our placement agency, but there is still a huge question mark on what to do about our home study agency. We want to make sure we are doing things how Korea expects them to do done. We are waiting to hear back now from Bethany Christian services, and we will go from there. Bethany has a really good reputation as a home study agency, so we are hopeful they will make the drive to our small town to help us finish up our home study and do our post placement visits.

Right now it is just a waiting game, which is really hard for us, but we are trusting that God has a plan for us. We believe this was meant to be part of our path and there is still one special child that is meant for us in South Korea. Stay tuned for an update on what happens next. We are still going to attend a two day training next week for adoptive parents, so that will help us at least feel like we are a step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk.

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Home Visit

August 22, 2018September 16, 2018 Stoyk

My house has literally NEVER been this clean. Our social worker came over for our first home visit today. We were up late last night and early this morning making sure everything in the house was perfect. We dusted, scrubbed, and I even cleaned the top of our cabinets because she would totally climb up on the counters and check them right?

The boys were really excited to meet her and were running around like crazy all morning. We prepared them the best that we could, but knew that Cal was going to want to show off all his cool tricks. Max was crying because he thought she was going to bring us our baby today, and now he is devastated that he has to wait longer. I think the wait might be the hardest on him.

I got up really early this morning, and as I was having a cup of coffee, I was watching a video of a family bringing their baby home from Korea. I was a mess. A sweet baby just like the one in the video, is the reason I cared so much about the house being clean. I am already so in love with our future child that I want everything to be perfect. I can picture them here with their brothers running around like crazy, and it makes me smile just thinking about it.

Our visit went really well, except for the fact that I was still in my pajamas cleaning when our social worker arrived. We had a little misunderstanding about what time she would get here. She was here for about 3 hours, and the boys gave her a tour of the house, told her how excited they were to get a new baby, and showed off all their cool tricks.

Tonight, as I was putting the boys to bed, we prayed for our baby in South Korea. We don’t know if they are born yet, but we already love him/her and are doing everything we can here to get them home as soon as possible. This child is going to be the missing piece to our family puzzle, and we are now one step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk!

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Psychological Evaluation

August 20, 2018September 16, 2018 Stoyk

Who doesn’t love a psychological evaluation on a Monday? We had our psychological evaluation via FaceTime today. Having a psychological evaluation is a requirement that South Korea has for all prospective families. We were really thankful to be able to get it done before school started, but I am not going to lie, I was super nervous about this one. We heard about this doctor through one of our Korean adoption support groups, and were thankful he could do a FaceTime interview. There are not a lot of psychologists that meet Korea’s requirements in our small town.

The interview was actually very laid back, and the doctor was pretty funny. We spent about an hour on FaceTime with him asking us about our family and relationship history. Have you ever had someone taking notes while you are talking? Well when someone is evaluating your sanity, it sure does feel like they must be thinking you are all kinds of crazy when they are feverishly writing down everything you say.

Now we have to complete two addition paper and pencil tests to send back to him. After he receives those tests, he will write up our results to send to Korea.

Update: We ended up spending about 6 hours completing the tests he sent to us, and are ready to send them off to the doctor. Let me tell you… the amount of paperwork that comes a long with an adoption is UNBELIEVABLE! Aside from this pyshc evalutation, we spend at least 2 hours a night working on paperwork for one of our agencies. It does feel really good to be able to check things off the list, and having this evlauation done means we are one step closer to Bringing Home Baby Stoyk!

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Welcome

May 16, 2018January 15, 2019 Stoyk

Thanks for joining me!

Blogging is something I have been thinking about for a long time. When we decided to start the journey of adopting from South Korea, I felt like this would be the best way to share our story with family and friends.

In May of 2018, we made the decision to add to our family through adoption. I have always dreamed of adopting from South Korea, and now seemed like the best time to completed our family. We are starting this journey with a dream, but not a lot of knowledge about the process. Stay tuned to learn as we do, and follow our journey to Bring Home Baby Stoyk!