[crick]

Hi everyone! Welcome to the newest addition to the Adoption.com Forums, Local Adoption Connections.

Please take a minute to tell us a little about yourself. Are you married? Do you have Children, if so, what are their ages? Share with us some of your favorite things about living in this area. What’s your favorite restaurant? Do you belong to any Adoption Support Groups in your area? Help us all get to know you better and start making local friends with like interests!

[ann060658]

Hello,
My name is Ann and I am a newbie to the Guatemalan forums and just discovered this local forum today. My husband and I have been married for 30 years and we have 3 biological all grown up sons. We started the adoption process in January 2005 for a daughter from China and arrived home with our beautiful Hannah the night before Thanksgiving 2006. She is 16 1/2 mos old and very healthy. We are very blessed parents! We knew we wanted her to have a sister and to have that sister connection (especially since we are older parents) and we had been talking about Guatemala long before her referral had arrived but had some concerns about the program. Our agency told us we would have to wait at least 6 mos from the time we arrived home to start the adoption process for another child from China or any other country.
We started looking at all the lists of waiting children and discovered their were alot of children from Guatemala, the country we wanted to adopt from. Our agency had quit taking applications for Guatemala (their website says because of the impending Hague agreement). Since it took so long for our referral from China we ended up having to renew our FBI fingerprints/I-171H on September 11 which unbeknown to us at the time was our beautiful Hannah's first birthday. We grumbled about the expense and all the effort we had to put in to redoing our CIS documents at the time but now we know it really was a blessing. Our I-171H is still valid until March 2008 and is good for 2 children. So that makes us eligible to accept a Guatemala referral off the waiting list. That 6 mos wait was just an agency requirement and our new agency doesn't have that rule. This Monday we accepted the referral of a beautiful baby girl whose name is Tamara (at least right now thats her name) and she was born on December 20, 2006. We had a homestudy visit Tuesday from a new SW because our first agency wanted us to do a complete hs that they would have completed in March (not good enough time frame or cost for us) but our new agency said that all we needed was an addendum. This new SW said she can get it done in 2 weeks. My husband just happened to have a physical a couple of weeks ago and Hannah already had hers so I am off to have mine today so the doctor can write our letters for the dossier and give me a note for the SW so she can finish our homestudy addendum. Our POA is on it's way to be authenticated. Things are moving in a whirlwhind. I am hoping to have dossier done some time next week and off to be authenticated. Looking forward to talking to others in our area.
Ann
(Did I mention we have 6 grandchildren) Sorry for the long introduction.