Monday, October 30, 2006

Sick of Waiting



OK OK so you all think we have the patience of saints ....but frankly we are sick of waiting now!!!!!

are we allowed to scream on a blog ....

it seems at the moment we are waiting for lots of things - we had a new patio laid in the middle of August and we are sick of waiting for the guy to come back and finish the job...sick of waiting for the roadworks outside our house to be completed ...sick of waiting for a parking space due to the roadworks in the street!!!!!!!!

Sick of waiting to hear about the October referrals...we do think that we will hear at the end of November. In the meantime we have had a number of visitors in the house..Clare, Beth and Anna were here last week for three days. then on Friday a friend's daughter arrived from Paris. She is looking for a work placement in London for next January / February.

These lovely apples were on sale in Borough Market - on apple day, and I thought it made a great photo - we have been eating lots of English apples - so we will carr on muching until we hear aboout Nelly!

Monday, October 23, 2006

Madonna and baby David ...............

What a week.....this has been raging in the press and there has been much comment on the InterCountry Adoption message board that I use - with lots of points of view ...as well as many column inches, TV footage and hours of radio phone ins...( including one that I took part in ! called Vanessa Feltz to get things off my chest!) ...I believe she has done some thigns right and Many more things wrong...but one thing it has donw is raised the issue of InterCOuntry adoption....

Below is an article from the Scotsman written by someone on our message board and is a great piece on the whole thing....

Re Waiting - well we still are....Referrals are coming thorugh in the next week and rumours have it that it will take papers logged in up to August 23 / 24th....( we are 31st ) as soon as we hear anything I will update the site....take a look at the article and let me know what you think?



Love knows no borders
THE SUNDAY ESSAY
BARBARA FRASER
WHEN the news emerged that Madonna was the latest megastar to adopt from overseas my heart sank. As a parent of a daughter from China, adopted two years ago, I knew our very ordinary family life would be reflected and distorted through a celebrity lens. Intercountry adoption (ICA), at its simplest, is one way to create a family. It is also a complex lesson in humanity. At one level I am grateful to Madonna as, despite all the moralising that has gone on about her wealth, lifestyle and career, there have also been real efforts to explore the formal ICA system in the UK.
Becoming a parent in 2004 has absolutely eclipsed any achievement, personal or professional, of my previous 40 years. Being responsible for guiding a young life to be the best it can be is immense and humbling. Most parents will say the same. But knowing that the child you love without measure has already lost the primal love of a birthmother, culture and country, is a burden specific to intercountry adoptive parents.
This, I'm sure, will be in Madonna's mind. David Banda, the Malawian baby she has adopted, is now a child who will lack nothing materially but who will also receive (I hope) what his life in Africa lacked - a family to enfold him and bring him love.
Madonna adopted through the American system. My experience was here in the UK, where ICA is a long, hard slog that insists that your motivations, emotional baggage and capacity to parent are scrutinised in exhausting detail. The system, devolved to local authorities, is maddeningly inconsistent. Some families are told that ICA cannot be carried out in their area, some need to wait up to a year before the initial interviews can take place and timescales, while now regulated by law, are an elusive target. It seems to be a common experience that all families will initially be asked to consider domestic adoption, as local authorities have - understandably - these cases as a priority. We ICA parents come way, way down the priority scale, and we pay for the privilege - unlike domestic adoption.
My husband David and I started the adoption process in 2001 and adopted our daughter, Ailidh, in September 2004. Choosing to adopt from China was a 'kismet moment' that occurred to us almost simultaneously when we we hundreds of miles apart, but inspired by the same newspaper article. The knowledge that tiny babies in China were abandoned because of their sex, roused me as a feminist. As timid as I was regarding most politics I thought I could actually make a difference to one life.
The process, including airfares and accommodation in China, cost about £10,000. The Foreign Office got its share, and under the Adoption and Children Bill currently before the Scottish Parliament, the Executive is also lining up to charge an £800 processing fee.
Annually, just 4% of Scottish adoptions are intercountry ones. That means about 12 or so. In a year, the UK manages about 300 compared with France's 5,000 or Norway's 3,000. Why? Intercountry adoption is espoused by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Hague Convention, of which China is now a full signatory. Attempting to adopt from overseas is not an illegal exercise, or an immoral one, although we are often made to feel it is.
Our daughter is now three. From the moment she was placed in our arms at 13 months, she has been told she was adopted. Her story is the same as that of thousands of Chinese baby girls. She was left at just three days old outside a hospital in a large city in southern China. She had no information with her and was placed with a care facility that looks after the elderly and those with special needs as well as abandoned infants.
As with all such children a 'finding advert' was placed in the regional newspaper providing the date she was found, where, a brief physical description ("rare hair") and a small photograph. On the day her entry appeared the paper carried another 200 similar ads. When she was six months old she was placed for international adoption and her file sent to the China Centre for Adoption Affairs, the Beijing-based government organisation that co-ordinates all of China's international adoptions.
The Chinese system allocates one child (or very occasionally twins) to each application. The waiting family here receives information about this one child and needs to agree to proceed. Both parents must travel to China to meet their child, and the paperwork in that country will take about 10 days to complete.
At the formal handover parents must meet with the orphanage director, or a provincial civil affairs official. The director wants to know that these babies will be loved, treated as your own and educated and cared for with every comfort you can offer. It felt as solemn an oath as a marriage vow.
Adopting from China has forged for us an inextricable bond with that country. In Edinburgh we attend cultural festivals or celebrate them at home; we are learning Mandarin. We remain in touch with our China guides and exchange presents for their small daughter; we sponsor the foster care of a girl with autism who will never be eligible for adoption and we still give to charities. I have taken on the Scotland organiser role with Children Adopted from China (CACH) and through it we hold gatherings for Chinese New Year, Christmas and midyear for all the families in Scotland who have adopted from China. It is not enough, but we try.
We are now also going through the process to adopt again from China. We and our daughter so want her to have a little sister from China - and as her nursery friends get little brothers and sisters she tells them that "my sister is in China".
Our daughter's destiny will be her own, and buoyed, I hope, by knowing that our love for her is unconditional. As any parent would say.
And Madonna? I cannot believe that anyone could bring a child into their hearts and not try to make a world for them too. It might be the making of her. It was of me.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

buenos dias de Gran canaria ..........



waiting is getting harder and the people in the same group as us - all waiting are getting impatitent and despondent....so we went off for a holiday - We have been in gran canaria for a week watching amazing sunrises over the Sand Dunes and lazing by the pool all day reading endless books - knowing that the next holiday we take will be a very different one !

Last night was Moon festival and it was so clear here it wasamazing just to sit in the br by the pool and watch the moon as it shifted, knowing that in China there would have been lots of people watching - maybe even Nelly´s mother....
anyway back to the pool for the last day ....