A Gift to Our Blog Readers

Here's a coupon for a free hot drink from Barnes and Noble. It expires tomorrow. I used this yesterday afternoon and it was great. I didn't actually sleep last night, but aside from that. . . .all good. You can find more excellent deals like this at Money Saving Mom.

Adoption Ministry

David and I have been wanting to make a list of all the not-so-coincidental-coincidences that have happened since we've started working with our church's adoption ministry. There are so many ways that things have just clicked into place with this. We thought that everything would be such hard work, but as is often the case God had everything mapped out and all we had to do was show up--in part because we have been surrounded by a wonderful team of folks that have passionately shared this vision and the tasks we have before us. Here is a sampling of what we have experienced in the last few months.

• A few months ago we thought of having some kind of adoption celebration event. We envisioned a small afternoon concert with a nominal ticket price so that some money would be raised for our church's adoption ministry. We really just wanted to increase adoption awareness as a part of our church's culture.
• We spoke with church leadership about our plans. They just happened to already have a plan for an orphan/adoption ministry with a sponsorship component, programs for adoptive and foster families, and a grant-making fund. Only no one was running the adoption programs. And there was no money in the account. So we were given the green light to do what we could towards re-energizing this ministry.
• David and I just happened to have the exact same vision for what this ministry could look like. Simultaneously over the course of one weekend each of us began thinking of our church as potentially being a one-stop shop for information and financial support for Christian adoptive parents in our area and possibly beyond. We both hoped that if anyone heard of someone wanting to adopt in our area the name of our church would immediately come to mind. (This may not seem like a big deal, but the terms we expressed our ideas on this to each other could not have been more similar, and that is not generally the case with us. Usually our "shared" ideas are the result of much discussion and compromise.)
• In September we talked with some folks in our Sunday school class who had expressed interest in helping with this. They just happened to have even bigger dreams than ours for what sort of adoption celebration event we could do at our church. Their vision included a program and an auction and much more of a push to get others to show support financially for this great cause. They just happened to have the energy to create the event with a very tight time frame.
• We just happened to be able to find a date on our otherwise very crowded church calendar and were able to claim November 13. November is national adoption awareness month.
• A whole lot of folks just happened to want to show support for the event by donating generously to our silent and live auction.
• Our church's search for a new pastor ended in September after nearly two years. David and I had prayed that whoever came to our church would be receptive to our plans. The person that our church chose to fill the pulpit and pastor our congregatation just happened to be an adoptive father of two who just happened to be experienced in starting crisis pregnancy centers and with helping with a fledgling adoption ministry at his previous church.
• David and I started thinking about what other churches in our area we would like to work with on this. One church in particular seemed like a great fit. Before we approached anyone there, we received notification that the church we had in mind just happened to be hosting an adoption seminar with our agency a few weeks before our event is to take place. We were able to talk to some people there about coordinating our efforts.
• A local television station just happened to be planning a story on adoption that will air a week before our event. We had already contacted the anchorman of this station, an adoptive father himself, to be our master of ceremonies. He contacted us about appearing on the program and promoting our event that way as well. (We filmed our part of the story today, and though I felt we had some communication problems since we are so inexperienced with this kind of thing, there was another family there who did really well and I know that it will turn out fine. We filmed our part in our church's library with Faith there with us and she was taking full advantage of our preoccupation with the interview. It is hard to speak eloquently on adoption and your future children when your current child is tearing things apart, dropping books in your lap, and reappropriating the library checkout computer.)

There was coordination of all these happenings on a higher level for certain. We feel very humbled by all of the things we have witnessed through this work. Please continue to pray for us, and if you are in our area email me for more details on our November 13th event!

And More Waiting

Today Faith asked me if Davis and Pearl would be here for Halloween. There is no pacing a 3-year-old. Evidently this conversation a few days ago did not do it. It is also going to be hard to disconnect Davis-and-Pearl in Faith's eyes. She'll be pretty disappointed that they aren't a package deal.

Today it rained. All day long. As Faith and I were walking in the wet from the library to the car, I was talking about the weather and saying how nasty, gray, wet, dark, cold, windy, etc it was. (Adjectives, they are important.) After I got done with my oh-so-cheerful list of descriptives, Faith looked around and said, "It's shiny!" And it was. It was absolutely beautiful, standing there next to our car under a broad green tree with my little girl in my arms and the rain gently falling in misty swirls of shine. And I missed it. It is great to be with someone who can really see.

To cap it off, Faith saw her first rainbow later in the afternoon. And it was totally visible from one end of the arch to the other. It was perfect. And shortly after that we saw perfect rainbow number two. I asked Faith who made the rainbows and she said, "God." I asked her why he made them and she said, "Because Noah's ark wasn't wet." Quite right.

Busy Bullingtons

Not much going on here on the Bullington Board these days because we are caught up in busy-ness. Twice this week I have realized sometime around 2:00 that I have not eaten anything! One time David and I overheard a waitress at Waffle House talking about how she was so busy she forgot to eat for two days. That was a running joke with us for a while because it seemed so ridiculous. Now I can see how that happens. Well, not really, but sort of. Don't worry about me, by the way. I totally make up for any possible caloric loss during the second half of the day.
We are working hard with a team of folks on our Nov. 13 Adoption Celebration/Auction event, which is shaping up to be a really great event. Anyway, since I don't have time (again) to do anything original, I wanted to send anyone who comes by over to Angie Smith's blog for this absolutely beautiful post. Definitely made me cry (not that that is hard these days.)
Leslie

Waiting for bro and sis

Faith asked us last night, "Will I still be little when we get Davis and Pearl?"

We told her she would still be three when we adopt Davis, and that she would probably be six when we go to get Pearl. I was afraid she would try too hard to ponder this, but I needn't have worried. Her focus immediately shifted to joyfully exclaiming over how many birthdays she would get in order to be six.

Be a Tourist in Your Child's Home Town

Here's a brief article about Addis Ababa, the city to which we will travel when we adopt Davis.

Babies Don't Keep

For those opposed to sentiment (as I once was for sure) move along, move along. For those who don't mind wallowing in it occasionally, here's a good one.

Babies Don’t Keep

by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

Mother, O Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing, make up the bed,
Sew on a button and butter the bread.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I’ve grown as shiftless as Little Boy Blue,
Lullabye, rockabye, lullabye loo.
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due
Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo
The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo
Look! Aren’t his eyes the most wonderful hue?
Lullabye, rockaby lullabye loo.

The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
But children grow up as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.


For the record, preschoolers don't keep either. I'm totally taking this as license to continue my current trend in house-not-keeping.

And I can't wait to be rocking my baby.

Alabama !!

I finally got my pictures from the "Blackout/Funeral" game in Athens a couple of weeks ago. I've been fortunate these last two years to be able to attend the Alabama vs. Georgia games with a friend who has gotten me media credentials (thanks Stan). Being on the field for me was better than racing to the den to see what Santa had left under the Christmas tree as a child. While I'm a bit partial to Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa I will say that I enjoyed the outcome of this years contest at Sanford Stadium. The crowd did look cool dressed in black but by half time, and especially during the fourth quarter, it appeared more of a red polka dot crowd. Here is a picture of me and Big Al

I also had a funny but appropriate conversation with Faith last Friday night. We were talking about Davis and Pearl and how excited she was to be expecting a brother and a sister.

Me: You know Faith, when Davis and Pearl get here, you're going to have to help us teach them a lot of things

Faith: Yeah, like how to say ALABAMA!

Me:(laughing) That's right, like how to say Alabama and Roll Tide

Faith: Yeah, and how to dress like Alabama too

What can I say? She's my daughter.

T-Shirts Coming Soon

Our digital camera is without battery power, so you'll have to use your imagination to see the piles of paper on the floor surrounding me - the many, many rough drafts of our T-Shirt design. I have a mocked up* version of the shirt that I've been showing folks, but tonight when I went to make our cleaned-up-actually-going-to-be-printed-on-the-shirts-version it was rough going. There was lots of frustration. Of course, I expressed said frustration through calm, complete, rational, sentences. (Right, David?) Certainly, there was no screeching. The Bullington Board is home to perfect decorum, self-control, and peace, people, it is a place of peace.

Anyway, we're beat. The Bullington adoption "One Love" T-shirts will finally be making their appearance within the next week.

*Did I invent this phrase?

Where Does the Money Go?

I posted this a while back, and when I went back to update it with some new costs we had as of this past week, I noticed a MAJOR error. So I'm fixing that and reposting this. This illustrates the reason why we have to pay skilled social workers to carefully review all the adoption paperwork, right?

One of the questions people ask us most often about adoption is "Why is it so expensive?" The costs are a pretty big deal - the Ethiopia program is considered one of the least expensive international adoption programs and our estimated cost for it is around $20,000. The China program with our agency is slightly higher. These numbers may seem exorbitant at first glance; however, when you look at all the provisions that must be made to adopt a child they don't seem so unreasonable. Also, it is very important to remember that all of these expenses do not come at one time. They are spread out over the process, so you certainly do not have to have it all upfront. Here is a basic-as-I-can-make-it breakdown of where our money went.

Initially, we paid an application fee to our agency of $250. Our first significant cost was the $1200 we paid for our home study report. This went to a separate agency that sent a social worker for several interviews in our home and prepared a fairly extensive report on our fitness as parents that was sent to our agency and became part of our dossier - paperwork packet - that went to the Chinese government. Fortunately, we only required a home study update for our Ethiopia adoption which cost only a few hundred.

We paid about $750 per child to the U.S. Immigration Dept to process their visa applications.

About $100 went towards certifying each dossier at the state level.

We spent around $400 having our dossier certified at the US State Dept level and at the Chinese embassy. These fees for the Ethiopian dossier were slightly less, I think.

We paid $700 to have our dossier translated into Chinese. It cost $600 to translate our Ethiopian dossier.

We paid $1000 in a deposit for each adoption to guarantee that we would complete our post-placement adoption reports. Each country requires that a social worker visit with you after you have adopted a child and send them reports on the child's progress. Our agency implements this deposit system to insure you complete these reports, since it is one of the things that the relationship between our agency and the foreign government involved rests upon.

At the time that we joined them, our agency was charging a $6,000 program fee for China and a $4,100 program fee for Ethiopia. These fees cover all costs that are incurred by our agency here in the United States such as salaries for social workers and administrators, office expenses, etc.

There is a $5,000 international fee for China and a $7,500 international fee for our Ethiopia adoption (up from $5000 when we first joined.) This is what I left out the first time I posted this. Wow! What an error! These fees include general care for your child while they are in the custody of the orphanage, medical care for the children, fees associated with various levels of government processing the paperwork, and humanitarian aid to each of these countries. Adoption is not a simple business transaction -- our agency maintains a relationship with each of these countries that requires them to invest in each country's welfare above and beyond just the children that are released into adoption. I am very appreciative that our agency serves in this manner. These fees also go towards all the costs incurred by our adoption agency - staff, supplies, etc. The CEO of our agency DOES NOT take a salary for his work. He and his wife say that they have been blessed financially and as adoptive parents themselves seek to run this agency as a ministry. Our agency also does fundraising to keep costs for adopting couples as low as possible. These program costs are broken down into three payments that are due upon completion of the dossier, upon referral, and upon receiving the child. We have only paid the initial third of these costs so far. (The new policy, as of just last week, will require adopting families to pay 1/2 of the international program fee for Ethiopia when they send the dossier. Since we sent our dossier in April, we are being asked to pay 1/2 of this by January and the second half when we receive our referral. If the current timeline holds, we will be paying both amounts at virtually the same time.)

The final big expense is travel. Airfare is very expensive these days. Our visit to Ethiopia to receive our son will cost about $6,000, though this may be reduced some in the near future because of some recent changes in the travel arrangements in that country. Our trip to China will cost around $8,000. I'm looking forward to paying for those one-way tickets for our little ones!

We will have to supply post-placement reports on our children and re-adopt them in the United States. That will probably be $1000 or more.

So far by God's grace we have paid over $10,000 towards these adoptions. We were able to sell our home in the spring of 2007, settle our debts, and save a good start on our adoption fund; however, that was when the plan was to pay for the one Chinese adoption that at that time would be years-in-the-making. We then took a huge step in faith and added the second adoption that will be completed hopefully by early next year. We are praying to be taken care of in the future just as we have been all along. We are trying to be good stewards of the money that has been given to us through David's work, and we will be making an effort to raise funds through a T-shirt sale in the near future. We've also applied for grants through Shaohannah's Hope, and we plan to ask for help from our church's adoption fund.

These numbers can be overwhelming, but the truth is that we have seen time and time again how God has provided for others in our situations. I can honestly say that I don't have much worry about these things. I sometimes wonder about how it is going to happen, but more in an excited sense rather than a troubled sense, if that makes sense.

And there is a tax credit of $10,000 that you receive for each adoption. That can seem far away when you are in the midst of the process, but it is a MAJOR help in the long run.

The basic truth is that no one is trying to make things difficult for adoptive families by making the costs so high. There is some government corruption in international adoption, but thankfully that does not seem to be a problem in China or Ethiopia. Particularly in our case, there are many, many people working to try to make it affordable. We are very grateful to that and are hoping to pass on those blessings by working with a team on an adoption ministry which includes a grant that will be available through our church.

Prayer Request

I keep coming back to this post and trying to fix it. But it just won't fix, so if you've been by before now, this is very different than what was here earlier. My sincerest apologies. I realized that I really don't understand enough of what is going on to talk about it. Please do pray for the following:

Please pray for us and those adopting through our agency, America World. Many families we know through our adoption community are facing additional challenges of various forms this week.

Most importantly, there is an infant girl who needs all of our prayers right now as she fights a battle with pneumonia in an Ethiopian hospital.

All children in orphanages around the world are in a precarious situation as far as their well-being and their future is concerned. This thought makes the difficulties of the process even more frustrating. But it also lights a fire underneath me to do more to get more of these children into families.

On that note, please pray also for an adoption ministry that we are working on at our church. We are having a BIG event to raise money for adoptive families in our community and awareness for adoption concerns in November.

I've loaded our music player with songs of hope and His faithfulness to remind us all (me, mainly) to keep my eyes on the Light ahead.


**Look for exceedingly cool adoption T-shirts to be available for purchase in the near future, on this site and directly from fine retailers, umm, David and Leslie -

He's Got the Whole World. . .

Faith, this morning:

God made all kinds of animals.
How does He care about raccoons?
He made fish - I haven't talked about
fish in a long time!
He made hoppity hoppity kangaroos,
He made hoppity friends.
And he made spoooooooky ghosts!

p.s. And in Faith's vernacular, a how question is a why question.

Who's Funny Now?

This afternoon Faith woke up from her nap crying, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"

When I went rushing in there she looked at me with bleary eyes and said "Mama, you're the funniest!"

Maybe she had a nightmare in which my sense of humor became standard. That does sound kind of scary.

Another Mom on Adoption

Here's a link to a blog post called "What I'd Like For You To Know: Adoption." by Mary, mother of 10.

It got me thinking about a few things I'd like for people to know about our adoptions:

We are just as thrilled to be expecting in this way as we were when I was pregnant with Faith. A little less surprised, perhaps, but no less thrilled. These kids are not substitutes for having "our own." They are our own. And since they are our own, there is nothing exceptional about caring for them or overcoming any obstacle to bringing them home.

The hard work really isn't so hard. The waiting is difficult. The paperwork can be intense and frustrating. The unknowns can be intimidating. But all expecting parents have to deal with worry and waiting. Honestly, we have already gained so much more than we have lost in terms of time, energy, and money that they barely seem worth mentioning. And I know that once we hold our children, all the struggle to get to them will seem insignificant. I don't always maintain this future perspective in the here-and-now, but it is true.

I feel that adoption is "doing unto others" to the birthparents of these kids. There is no way to fathom the motives behind our children's birth parents' decisions. We have no way to comprehend the disastrous situation they found themselves in and the immensity of the decision they had to face to surrender their children. The love they showed these children in bringing them into life cannot be forgotten or dishonored in any way. Many people recognize giving children a loving home as a kindness to them. But I am also conscious of a desire to help our kids first parents by giving our children the absolute best I have to offer, just as I would want others to give their best to my kids should something happen to me.