Bulgaria or Bust

Tomorrow's our day. We'll be leaving for Bulgaria on Saturday morning at 6am and flying in on Sunday at 1pm (5am central time). 

Thoughts we're having as we prepare to leave tomorrow:

 

- We are 96% excited and 4% terrified. 

- I can't believe we will meet our daughter in four days. The magnitude of that is not lost on me. 

- Don't forget the passports.
- I hope Pitch Perfect is playing on the plane. 
- I hope the boys are good for the grandparents.

- We're going to try not to offend the locals. 

- Does Bulgaria have ice cream?

- I hope we have the timing right and the wifi capabilities to Facetime with the boys a lot. 

We absolutely value your prayers. You've carried us this far... don't quit on us now! : ) 

Can't wait to be reporting from Bulgaria. 

Nicole

 

A Little Sister

They seem so normal. 

The boys have a little sister. 

We wanted to wait until we were 100% sure she was ours before we broke the news. 

One morning before school, I held photos of her face down and close to my chest. I asked them, "Who do we pray for every night before bed?" Realizing that our list is quite long and I wasn't getting my message across, I switched tactics. 

"You know that God answers prayers, right?" 

::a lots of head nodding::

I flipped around the photos excitedly and shoved them in their faces. "Who do you think this is?" 

"Our sister?!" Ben asked tentatively. 

They both got huge smiles on their faces and spent about two minutes shuffling through the photos we have. And that was it. They promptly went back to the Pokemon they were watching on TV before I asked them to pause it. Anticlimactic. 

Ben stayed silent even at school until after the weekend was over. On Monday, Ben came home from school and said that he told his teacher and she asked if he could bring pictures the next day. 

The next day after school he reported with enthusiasm that the teacher had him tell the class about his sister, show the photos and talk about where she was from, what her name is and when she was going to come home. After he was done, she got out a map and showed the class where Bulgaria is.

God bless teachers.

We are so grateful to Mrs. Reim for allowing Ben to talk about it and for using it as a learning tool for the class.

It was different after that day. I really think it became more real for him when he got to share in his own words what is happening. Now he talks about his sister and asks questions about what life will be like after she's here. 

Evan still has no clue. All he knows is that this summer he doesn't have to take naps anymore and he get's to move in with Ben. They are so excited to share a room...I give that excitement about three weeks.   

30 days

It's a common statement to say that time is going so fast. And it is. But something tells me this month will be different. Actually, the next seven months will probably be quite different.

One month from today we meet Emily Anche for the first time and I'm wondering how fast a month can possibly go by. This past week we filled out about 10 forms for our agency, booked our flights to Bulgaria leaving on May 10 and sent our I-800 to the U.S. government with Emily's information so from the moment she steps on U.S. soil this fall, she will be a U.S. citizen. 

Several people have asked me what it was like to get THE call. 

First of all, I wasn't expecting it. If you had talked to me in the last several weeks and asked me how the adoption process was going, I likely would have given you my canned answer..."Our agency says 2014 is our year, but I just don't see how that's possible. The numbers show we'll be waiting at least another year, if not two"...yadda, yadda, yadda. 

Guess I should have trusted the agency. 

Naturally when I got the call, Rob was out of state. Ben was at school and I had taken the day off to be with Evan. He and I were at the Elks park on Washington St. and I had struck up a conversation with another mom that was there. My phone rang and saw it was our caseworker and even when there is zippo progress with your adoption, everyone knows you never silence a call from your case worker. I answered it and we made small talk about the beautiful weather and she shocked me with the news I was least expecting. She told me that she had received the referral information of a beautiful little girl that the Bulgarian government had matched us with. She told me she was about to turn two and that she was wearing a really sweet pink dress in the photo. 

I started sobbing. The lady I was talking to started staring. 

I started sobbing harder. I could tell the lady thought someone had died and was wondering if she should come put her arm around me.  

We had finally gotten our referral. 

That was the last thing I heard. 

Seriously. 

Like 10 minutes later Rob would ask
me what she said and I would have to tell him I had no idea. I didn't hear anything, all I knew is I had to get home because her photo was waiting for me on the computer. 

This is Evan at the park that day. Pretty sure my hands were shaking when I took this photo. Little did he know this was the event that secured his position as the middle child. 

It's THAT Post About THAT Call

The way I figure it, we've waited about 900 days to be able to share...

We got our REFERRAL!!

You guys,  she is beautiful and she is ours. Lots of adoptive parents told me that we would know when we found our daughter and they were right. From the second I laid eyes on her, I knew that she was a Peske. Even when we weren't sure what our international pediatrician was going to say about her medical information, we knew she was ours.

Her name is Anche (ann-ch-ae), but we'll call her Emily Anche Peske. She turned two on April 2 and she has the biggest brown eyes. We have a video of her and Rob swears she doesn't blink the entire length of the video. AND she has dark curly hair. If there was ever a "sign" that she was ours, that would be it. Imagine that...a little Bulgarian with naturally curly hair.

Unfortunately, we can show her photo to people in person all we want, but we cannot post them online (blog, facebook, etc.) until after we pass court, which is several months away.

On May 11 we'll travel to Bulgaria for a week for our first trip. After we accept our referral in person, we come home and wait 4-6 months to go through the steps we need to be able to go on our pick up trip (U.S. approval, visa, court, etc.). So it's looking like we'll head back to Bulgaria sometime in October to take our daughter out of the orphanage FOREVER. With a little luck, we should have our little Emily home for her first Christmas. God is so good. He has been faithful and his timing is perfect.

Little Emily is in Burgas, Bulgaria on the Black Sea. 

Waiting Patiently

It's June! That means we are officially one year into our two year wait for our referral.

Last February we had a little scare when the whole Bulgarian government resigned on the same day in the midst of the people (of the poorest country in the European Union) protesting high heating costs. Because the head of the Ministry of Justice (that houses international adoptions) was also one of the people who resigned, this caused mass panic in the Bulgarian adoption world where people expected this would set adoptions back by at least eight months (us included).

I have conflicting messaging on what has resulted since the interim person has taken over. One thing we know is that international adoptions did not STOP totally, so that is good. If you ask our agency, they would say that things have definitely slowed (hard to imagine they could move sloooooooower). However, if you go by the traffic and activity on our Bulgarian community board, you would think things were speeding up a little. So we do what we always do...pray for the best, but be prepared for the worst. Bulgarian elections were a couple of weeks ago and the new deputy minister has yet to be appointed so the regular referral meetings have not started back up yet. We pray that the new person has a passion  and places a priority on uniting orphans with their families.

We also found out recently that Bulgaria is moving more towards foster care vs. orphanage care. In fact, word is that one of the orphanages actually shut down because all the children were being housed locally. This is very good for the children of Bulgaria.

Many people have asked us about the Russia adoption shut-down and if this affects us. The good news is that we have no reason to believe that Bulgaria will have the same fate as Russia. Please continue to pray that Russia stops using their most vulnerable children as collateral.

Many people also ask us about our next steps. So the good news is that after we receive our referral, things will move very quickly. We will likely travel on our first trip less than a month after we accept our referral. After our first trip it will be another 4-6 months before we can go back to pick her up and bring her home forever. Friends, the hardest part is yet to come. We are preparing our hearts already.

So that's what's happening here. We are not staring at our phones yet, but by Christmas I'm guessing that will change. Christmas is the low end of the estimate on the timeline they gave us.

 What we need now more than anything is for people to pray.  Pray for our daughters who are waiting to be matched with us. Pray for the government. Pray for the families (many in Bismarck) who are in limbo like we are.