Best Christmas Present EVER!

Happy New Year!

Hello all,

Yes, it’s been a long while since our last entry. We didn’t even post in 2010! That’s because we thought 2010 was the year. We knew that 2009 was always going to be about The Wait, and we believed that 2010 was going to be the year of The Referral, and ultimately of bringing home a baby. Well, we were right about one of those things…

A few days after turning 40, my birthday wish came true: we got a referral!

I got the call at work. It was someone from our agency, but different than our regular case worker so I wasn’t expecting anything except maybe more excuses or changes in the program. Then she said she was calling to give me some good news. I asked if she had called Bekah. She tried but got VMs. So I conferenced Bek on the phone and we got the news.

First a bit of the details: We’re having a boy! He’s cute and adorable and he was 2months old when we got the referral. (He’s about 3 months old as of this writing.) His given name is Bedilu, which means “in his luck” in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia.

When we got the referral, of course the initial reaction is complete joy. This whole thing becomes REAL. I’ve gone from this abstract concept of parenthood to knowing that I am the father of a baby boy…should we choose to accept the referral.

This is where it gets complicated. It’s not as easy as Oh gee it’s a boy! With international adoption, you are given a week or so to decide whether or not you will move forward and accept the referral. We’re given a couple of photos, a brief history (if available), and some medical records.

We retained a pediatrician at Oakland Children’s Hospital who specializes in international adoption. We sent her Bedilu’s file, which includes weight, length, head circumference, and a whole slew of blood work. This is extremely nerve wracking. Of course we want to say YES, but we know that we’re not doing this for charity, or charity alone. We’ve engaged in this process because we want to be parents and we want to raise a child together.

When we began the process, there are a number of forms to fill out and decisions to make up front. Do you want a boy or a girl, or are you open? How many children? What age range? And of course, what health conditions are you open to? We know that adopting a child of another race from another country is already going to be a challenge. We didn’t want to add health problems on top of that. So we go through a checklist and ruled out HIV/AIDS, cerebral palsy, and a number of other things.

Bedilu’s blood work comes out clean. He was born a perfectly healthy baby. But now he is malnourished and undersized, presumably having lost a lot of weight post birth. Our doctor presented us with a number of worst-case scenarios which put a scare into us. She has reviewed hundreds of Ethiopian adoptees over the years and told us that on a percentile spectrum of healthiness, Bedilu is in the bottom 1/3. There are healthier babies out there, she says. We would not be out of line to refuse this referral. Nor would we be frivolous to accept it.

How will his development be affected? What is his long-term prognosis? We had a little more than a week to decide. We got the news on a Friday, and the following Friday was Christmas Eve. The agency’s office would be closed, so we’re given until the following Monday. We spend several days talking to the doctor, consulting various adoption message boards, we research online, we meet other Bay Area adoptive parents of Ethiopian children, we do a lot of soul searching.

As Christmas approaches, we really want to tell our families, but we haven’t yet made a decision. We are strongly inclined to accept. Bedilu is beautiful. Something feels very right. But we also got a lot of encouragement from the adoptive community. These kids are fighters, they are resilient, they say. We meet a number of families and their Ethiopian kids/babies at a well-timed brunch. We share the news and all are thrilled. They tell us tales of their children and others they’ve known or heard about. Get them home and they’ll turn around.

We want to believe every word of it. We learn that Bedilu is being cup fed. No bottles, no nipples, for sanitary reasons. We research and find that that is not uncommon, but it also makes it more difficult for the babies to consume enough to get their weight up. That explanation actually makes me feel better because it helps explain Bedilu’s slow weight gain. Perhaps it’s nothing more than that?

The day before Christmas Eve, we have dinner with Bek’s family and share the news with them. We got a referral! They are thrilled. We tell them we haven’t decided yet, but all are thrilled by this major milestone. On Christmas Day, Bek and I do a Skype video conference call with my family. Mom and dad are visiting NYC and the whole clan is together at Keith & Kim’s and my parents had just met their granddaughter for the first time. We tell them the news via Skype! Pretty fun like that. Again, we say we haven’t yet accepted.

But we are strongly inclined to. I think it was that day, on Christmas, that we decided, yes we’re going to do this. Bedilu is our son, and we are going to do everything we can to get him home as quickly as possible. We just don't know when that will be.