Ich bin ein Berliner

It's been a few weeks since an update, and truthfully, not much has happened on the adoption front.  We are still trudging through a mountain of paperwork.  When we first received it, I thought I could tackle it in a week! Boy, was I optimistic.  We have made a good dent in it, just not quite enough to turn it back it.  We're running into the problem that there is just not enough time in the day. We're down to just the paperwork that Cory needs to do.  Between work, school, and keeping himself sane, it just has not happened.  On top of that, we still haven't gotten our FBI clearance or Cory's finger print card done. They are both appointment based, but the only appointments are available Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.  It's a little hard to make those times when you are also always working! I'm trying not to feel overwhelmed and impatient, but those are just two emotions I'm great at!  I have a new goal to get all the paperwork finished by this time next week, and all of our clearances started by the next.

Now, I really shouldn't complain about it taking us so long to finish this stuff up.  We did get to take and amazing week off playing tourist, avoiding responsibilities, and just having fun. Last week we spent a beautiful 5 days in Berlin, Germany.

The Brandeburg Tor

We had been planning this trip pretty much since the day we got married.  This trip has actually been planned 3 separate times.  The first time was after we had been married a few years.  We were going to use buddy passes from my brother (I didn't work for an airline yet), go through Paris, and take an amazing adventure. With that one, life got in the way. We went to Disneyland a bunch, and ended up buying a house a few years later.  Last year year we had the entire trip planned including hotel, rental car,  and train tickets booked.  We were scheduled to fly standby into Amsterdam, and take a train to Berlin. Everything was perfect and set to go. That is until 5 days prior I fell down the stairs at work and broke my foot in 5 places. Not my smoothest move, and the trip got shelved again.  Last summer my airline had a total meltdown.  It was a disaster. Crews and passengers were stranded for days, people will sleeping in airports, and flight attendants were getting lost in the system; stranded for days at a time.  As a thank you, the company gave all employee's positive space passes (real, free tickets) to anywhere we fly.  A few months after that, they announced we were going to start a direct route to Berlin just for the summer. It was a sign! A few months after that we booked the trip, and painful waited the few months for it to arrive. The wait was worth it!

You might ask though, why Berlin?  Before we were married, Cory served a 2 year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. If you aren't familiar with the process, they don't get to pick where they go, and they are in full missionary mode for two full years.  Doing service, proselyting, and spending all of your time teaching the gospel and spending time with members there.

  

Some of the first pictures I saw of Cory before we met where these pictures.  Can you blame me for falling for him?  For as long as I've known him though, he's always spoken so lovingly of his time in Germany.  Don't get me wrong, he often talks about how hard it was, but he still looks back on it fondly.  He has always wanted to go back, and with my work just putting the opportunity in our laps, we couldn't not go. 

It was the trip of a lifetime!  We actually didn't spend much time in areas that he actually served in, so we didn't get to meet any people he knew,but we did get to spend a week playing, exploring, and reminiscing. We did four days throughout Berlin, and a day in Potsdam exploring the old Prussian Palaces. Here are some of my favorite pictures. 

Sanssouci Palace

The Reichstag Buidling

Sanssouci Guest Home

The East Side Gallary

The Berlin Zoo

The Pergamon Museam

The Siegessaule

Inside Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church

Checkpoint Charlie

The Berlin Cathedral

The Berlin Wall at East Side Gallery

 I'm already ready to go back again.  I don't know what it was about this city, but i'm in love!  I already miss the green landscape, history down every street, affordable Haribo gummies, and most of all the Mezzo Mix. I want to go back and bring an entire suitcase full of the delicious orange coke back to the states with me.  You can still buy Mezzo Mix in the state, but only at World Market.  I want it in every restaurant, and in every vending machine!

#bringmezzomixtotheUSA

While it may have slowed our home study down by a week, I wouldn't trade our week in Berlin for anything.  It was the perfect break, and we needed the time just the two of us.  I hope that one day we can bring our future family back, and get to share a part of something Cory, and now I, love so much!

On Your Mark, Get Set, Paperwork!

It's happening, and it's real.  We are officially in the Home Study phase!

We had our first meeting with our home study agency last Thursday.  Though the meeting almost didn't happen. I always thought the concept of "If you're doing something right, it'll always be hard" was a joke.  Why would something right be hard? Well, This must be the most right thing we've ever done! We had gotten over the problem of choosing domestic or international, and decided on a country through trial and error, and found a country that will let us adopt with depression, we thought it would be smooth sailing.  It turns out my job had other ideas.  

Now, you know we live in Phoenix, but what's fun is I actually work out of Salt Lake City.  The airline I work for doesn't have a base in my state.  Luckily this job does come with some great benefits and the ability to commute across the country if you need to.  It's all done on our own time, and it's our responsibility to have a place to stay in the base, and get there on time.  So next time you complain about your 40 mile commute, remember mine is 670 miles.

Of course our meeting was scheduled for the day after I got done working.  Usually, no big deal.  Oh no, this time it was different.  My trip ended up changing, and I ended up getting done too late to catch a flight home. I was a complete mess.  Thank goodness for an amazing crew who kept the trip fun, calm, and helped me see that it wasn't all hopeless. After a night in the airport, I luckily was able to catch a very early morning flight home on another airline.  I landed just in time to drive the hour home and pick Cory up, then head right back to the adoption agency.  Turns out the agency was right next to the airport!

Meeting with our social worker for the first time was great.  She was calm, focused, and laid everything out for us.  She went over the home study process, and made sure we knew all of our options.  We once again discussed the prospects of switching to infant domestic adoption, and she was a great resource for finding out how it really works.  We still feel very strongly about going internationally even though it costs us more, and means we will adopt a toddler instead of and infant. It felt good to talk it all out with someone that didn't know us, or what we've been over so far. Now we are getting down to business, and there is a lot of work ahead of us. The first step in all of this is a ridiculous amount of paperwork! I was expecting it, and I knew it was comings, so I had my binders and dividers ready to go!

I never thought i'd be so proud of a binder.  I am not the most organized person, and this little book is my pride and joy!  Now we are in the process of getting our fingerprint and FBI clearance, filling out monster amounts of paperwork, and getting our certifications of health.  I was mentally prepared for all of the paperwork, but I was not prepared for what was actually required in the paperwork.  In addition to the regular financial, work, and basic lifestyle questions, we have some other fun ones to answer.  Here is a sample of some of the harder ones:

• What age of your childhood did you like most, and why?
• Growing up, how did members of your family show happiness/love/frustration/stress/etc.
• What was the main reason you married your partner?
• what would you most like to change about your partner? what would they most like to change about you?
• How important will grades and school performance be for the children in your home?
• How do you handle privacy and nudity in your home?
• How will you discipline you children?
• What do you think will be your least favorite part of parenting?

The questions just go on, and on, and on, from there.  Some of the ones that are hardest to answer, are all about being a parent.  It's hard to imagine how you'll parent when you've never been faced with it before! For now, we do a lot of googling, and a lot of asking our families what they would do in a situation. 

Our current task is to get this all finished, and in about a week we will apply to our placement agency to start our dossier and USCIS approval! We're estimating about 3 months to finish our home study, and once that's done less than a year until we have a referral for a child! It's still a long ways away, but getting closer with ever piece of paper we fill out!

Wish us luck, and please send help if we drown under all this paperwork.