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First congratulations on your referral. We travel tomorrow to go meet a little girl so I'm doing my last minute printing of "what to ask the orphanage director questions."
I've faced your decision now three times, and it always seems so scary and I'm not so sure we did a great job at this at first. In Ukraine we received a blind referral and no picture. Turns out the child had severe FAS. Second time in Poland with information that seemed out of whack with the information being presented. Medical information was much worse when we were there. I mentioned we are traveling tomorrow to meet another little girl. This is it for us - my husband won't do it again so I keep praying that this is right.
I look back on those two experiences and wonder what did we do wrong. First in Ukraine, we didn't have a choice, go see this girl or go home without trying. That was just us getting caught up in a political mess that hasn't worked itself out yet. Nothing we really could have done here. (It is important to note that another family had already traveled to see her and said no.)
The other experience - well we knew something was "out of whack" and deep down we knew it wasn't going to work. But we didn't want to say no to a little girl without giving it a chance and researching it further. While in Poland we found out that two other couples had already traveled to see her and said no. Truthfully, in this case noone felt they were lying. There seemed to be a refusal to believe very serious issues the fostermom was seeing. To do this one over again we should have trusted our instinct and said no upfront.
I have also learned to ask if we are the first people to receive the referral. There are several people on this board who have written about accepting a referral that someone else has turned down and how great it turned out to be. From what I have surmised, these are turned down referrals that don't include travel. That said, there is always a difference in what people feel they can reasonably knowingly accept so use this information as a data point only, just as you would head circumference. However, if someone has traveled to see the child - you can be reasonably sure they went on the same information you have, and then turned the referral down (you know they found out additional information that they couldn't accept.)
Worst of all our 5 year old son was devastated. He met both little girls and just wants a little sister. He surmised that they didn't want to join our family and it must be him. We travel tomorrow for another referral and our son isn't coming this time. He wants to go once she has decided to join our family. This time I evaluated the referral differently.
So this time I asked upfront about whether we were the first ones to receive the referral. I asked for updated measurements. Now these measurements seemed out of whack and our IA doctor was very, very concerned about small head size. So I asked them to go back and do the measurements again and not to round them. I did have to say that my husband was going to turn down the referral if we didn't get the info and I didn't want to. Because of our history, someone went out to meet the girl, redid the measurements, and spent an hour with her. They also sent us the more detailed Hague requirements medical information. We got new pictures from the visit, new measurements which (if accurate made much more sense.) I took the information to another pediatrician to get a second opinion. My mom is a young child developer so she took the information we had and evaluated how severe the delays are - taking into consideration the formula of 1 month delay for every three months in an orphanage. We were looking very specifically at FAS (without the typical facial features) and impact of small head size. I've talked to people that adopted from this orphanage in the past and how accurate the diagnosis were and how good the care was. Now, I feel like I'm pressing the limits of what they normally do for families and they are doing this because of our past experiences, so I have no idea if most people ask for this much extra information and if they get it (I really am very curious about this.)
I posted somewhere else that I feel like I'm getting ready to jump off a cliff and I hope that the person I paid to pack the parachute did a good job and that I can figure out how to land it when the time comes. My husband said that this feels more like the type of referral we had expected. There are unknowns as there always are, but they seem to conform a bit more to what we are knowingly ready to accept.
So I have to end with the same comment I've read over and over on these boards. Trust your instinct, ask for additional information, use an IA doctor but don't be afraid to get a second opinion, understand what you can knowingly accept or how much risk you are willing to take. Good luck and I hope you are happy with the outcome.
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