One Year's View

As I was going through my desk looking for something this morning at work, I came across my weekly planner from last year. I don’t know why I keep this kind of stuff, call me sentimental. Or a hoarder, but sentimental has a better ring to it. As I flipped through it, I began to reminisce about some of the events and reminders I had put in it from the year before. I came across Labor Day 2013 and immediately got a knot in my throat. Exactly one year ago, I was busy packing for our big vacation to Las Vegas, a trip we had been planning for months. It feels now like it was years ago and yesterday, all at the same time. We had just finished our first round of infertility treatments the week before, and my fertility doctor was SO SURE it was going to be successful because I had successfully ovulated not one, but FOUR eggs (do I sound like a chicken or what?) with the help of minimal fertility drugs. My problem had never been getting pregnant anyway, it was the staying pregnant that seemed to be stumping even the best fertility doctors in Texas. I was taking the treatments simply to try and develop a better egg. I remember my doctor calling me that week and asking if I was sure I wanted to go forward with the remainder of the treatments because the chances of me having multiples was so high, but of course we said yes…I had always wanted multiples anyway! So as I packed for our trip to Vegas, I was giddy thinking about the pregnancy tests I had thrown into my suitcase, and how I couldn’t wait to celebrate seeing that positive pregnancy test while on our vacation. Fast forward two days into our trip, the day it was time to take the test. The day I had been waiting for all month.

It was a big fat negative.

I knew because I had seen positive tests before, and this was not one of those. I couldn’t believe it, I was in complete shock. Hadn’t my fertility doctor just told me I was surely going to get pregnant on the first round, and probably with multiples?? I remember crumbling in a heap onto the floor of my beautiful hotel bathroom, unable to even think clearly. At that moment, I felt what every woman who struggles with infertility feels month after month. It was devastating.

When I finally pulled myself together, Erik convinced me to go with him to eat breakfast at Vegas’ branch of Serendipity 3 (you know, from the movie Serendipity, which I’ve always loved), because he knew I had wanted to go there the last two times we had been in NYC and the line had been too long. So I went, and promptly ordered a Bloody Mary. Because that may be the only positive of finding out you aren’t pregnant, being able to drink a Bloody Mary for breakfast. And as we sat there and drank our Bloody Marys, I put my sunglasses on and let the tears come. They didn’t stop the entire two hours we stayed at that restaurant, and I didn’t even care. We both cried as we shared our disappointments about our failed fertility cycle and about all of the failed pregnancies before that. We second-guessed our decision to spend thousands of dollars on fertility treatments that didn’t even work. We wondered where God was in all of our trying to have the children we thought He had for us. We prayed that He would comfort us and give us peace in our not understanding.

Fast forward just one year, and here I am again, packing for yet another Labor Day getaway, this time to celebrate our “Babymoon.” You know, that one last trip you take as a couple before the baby comes and it gets a little harder to get away for a long weekend together. This time, I am packing maternity clothes instead of pregnancy tests and planning to eat breakfast at the flagship Serendipity 3 in NYC, where I will gladly skip the Bloody Mary and order a frozen hot chocolate instead. Isn’t it wild what a year can bring? The space between then and now didn’t necessarily get easier, but we got stronger. I went through one more failed fertility cycle before we decided to give the whole “trying to get pregnant” thing a break, then I miraculously got pregnant the very next month, only to miscarry again. That’s when we decided to get serious about our adoption journey, and the rest is history, as you know.

I am sharing all of this to say, whatever it is you are hoping for, dreaming for, praying for…whether it is a baby or husband/wife or a job or anything else, don’t lose hope for those dreams. It may take a little longer than you planned or expected, but God is able to do some amazing things in our hearts during those seasons of waiting if we will let Him. And when those things you’ve been hoping for do happen, it will be so much sweeter and richer than you could have imagined! Ask God what He has for you during your waiting season. I can say that He taught me a lot of things during my season of waiting, some of which I was fortunate to have grasped and some of which I am sure I missed. I wish I could go back and tell that girl in a puddle on the floor in her hotel room in Vegas that she won’t always feel like that- that there is so much more coming for her family and not to lose hope. But since I can’t, hopefully I can infuse some hope into whoever is reading this that might need it-- that IT WONT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THIS. Hold on to the hope that God has put inside of you for whatever dreams He’s given you. It may look differently than you expected, or take you on a different route than you planned for your life, but God never withholds good from His children unless He has better to give them. My life in this season is proof of that, and yours will be too.

If you are struggling with a loss of hope for any of your dreams and need some encouragement or someone to talk to who has been there, please feel free to email me at loristeenken@gmail.com. I know that infertility and miscarriage specifically have been such silent topics for women for a long time, and I so desire to change that. I want there to be space for women to share their heartbreak and disappointments the way I was able to share mine with those close to me. So reach out, and know you aren’t alone in this. And thank you to those who already have shared with me as I’ve started this blog, I am constantly interceding for you and your dreams to come to pass!

We have a "DTE"....and a Due Date!

Well, we have some BIG updates…but first on the adoption front- we made our deadline of getting our Dossier finished by June! We had some unexpected set-backs towards the end (not to mention a couple of months of all-day morning sickness to enjoy at the same time) but I was determined to get that package sent by the end of June. We finally received the last document we were waiting on early last week, so last Thursday, a couple of friends met me at the post office and prayed over the package as we sent it on its way! I didn’t really understand when we first started the process that we don’t actually send the documents to Ethiopia ourselves- our agency takes care of that for us (thanks to a nice little courier fee we have to pay to get it there safely), which was actually a huge relief to know. I personally don’t trust myself to send very important documents all the way across the world. So this week, our agency is reviewing everything one last time, and then taking our Dossier to the Department of State and the Ethiopian Embassy for certification and authentication. They will then courier the final package to Ethiopia, which is set to arrive the next week in Ethiopia, so our official “DTE” (Date-To-Ethiopia) will be July 4, 2014. What a fun DTE!

The most important thing about having a DTE is that we finally get our name on the official waitlist. The wait time has been steadily increasing, and the current wait time for a healthy (relative term in Africa) infant/toddler is now around three years. It could be shorter for us due to the fact that we are requesting siblings, which aren’t requested as often as single children, but we are mentally preparing ourselves to wait the full three years- I mean, what is three years when you get the rest of your life with these precious children?! I feel like my patience and ability to be at peace in “waiting” has been tested, and tested, and tested some more over the past couple of years…and y’all, it has been HARD. But for me, I’ve come to realize it’s more about perseverance to not give up on the dreams and promises God has given me, regardless of whether I see them coming to fruition anytime soon or not. I could write a whole post on that topic alone, and I think I will soon, but for now, I want to focus on the JOY of being done with such a huge part of the adoption process!

And speaking of JOY and dreams, we also found out in April that there will be yet another little Steenken joining our family, set to arrive this year! We literally found out I was pregnant the very same day that we sent our paperwork to USCIS to be approved (something tells me that was more than a coincidence!). It has been so hard to keep it a secret for so long, but we wanted to make sure the pregnancy was going well and the baby was healthy due to my past experiences with pregnancies. But this pregnancy has felt SO different in so many ways- so HOPEFUL (and so full of my head in the toilet, which my doctor has assured me over and over again is totally a “good sign!”). I ended my first trimester last week and got the go-ahead from the doctor to shout it from the rooftops…we have a perfectly healthy baby set to arrive at Christmas of this year! I hope to write out more of my thoughts about our experiences on this two-year journey of so desperately wanting children, but again, for now I just want to delight in the faithfulness of God in our lives through this little miracle baby joining us in December! I know so many of you have not only prayed for our adoption, but have also been praying for us to be able to have biological children. God has heard every prayer, and He is so faithful. Thank you from the deepest place in my heart for contending for us in prayer as we’ve shared our journey in all of this. It really does take a village, and I am so glad to be in this one.

 

 

“Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what had been spoken to her by the Lord” –Luke 1:45

WE ARE APPROVED!

I have to apologize for not getting to this update sooner, we have had major computer issues in our house lately, but several visits to the Apple store later, we are back in business with some great news to report! We received our approval letter from USCIS in the mail last week- which means we could technically accept a referral for a child or children immediately. (Oh how I wish it worked that way! Since we are going through an agency, we still have some more steps to go through and then quite a long wait list) We were expecting it to take a little longer to receive the approval letter, so we still have a couple of documents we are waiting on…but once those are in, all of our paperwork will be off to Ethiopia! I can’t we are finally to this final stage…the paperwork process was no cake walk, but we’ve had a lot of favor in getting it done so quickly (thanks to all of your prayers during this part of it all!) We are more than ready to be on the wait list (which will happen once the Ethiopian government receives our paperwork and processes it through their system), and it’s crazy exciting to think that it could happen THIS month. Thank you for your continued prayers for us in this journey; they are being answered in a real, tangible way!

a big day!

I really cannot believe April is almost over…where has this month gone?? Does anyone else feel that way lately? I was hoping to have a great adoption update long before now, but better late than never I guess. We FINALLY received a draft of our home study a couple of weeks ago for us to review before our agency could finalize it. Well of course I had it reviewed and sent back to our agency within one hour of receiving it via email (that’s gotta be some kind of record), and we then patiently waited to hear back that the final copy was on its way to us. Two weeks later, after many of our documents that had previously been approved all of the sudden were not sufficient and had to be re-drafted and re-approved, we finally got the email saying the final Home Study was on its way to us. That was on Saturday, and we received the package this morning! I’ve had all of our other documents signed and ready to send to USCIS (US Immigration Dept.) for almost a month now, we were just waiting to receive the Home Study to include in the package, so once it came in this morning, I was able to just slip it in the package and off it went! It feels SO good to have that sent off- now we wait some more to receive our approval letter, which is the last thing we need before we can send the rest of our paperwork (our Dossier) over to Ethiopia. There are only a couple of other items we lack for the Dossier besides the US approval letter, and those should be done within the next week or two, so we literally are just waiting on the US government to approve our application at this point. Our agency told us that it can take *up to* 3 months for USCIS to process our approval, but we are praying that our application makes it into the right hands and that it happens MUCH quicker than that! Please pray with us for favor and speed during this part of the process, and if you (or someone you know) have a testimony of receiving the I-600A approval in record-time, we would love to know about it, as testimonies build our faith that it can be done for us also!

In other news, we have been steadily raising money for our adoption for the past few months, and the financial support we have been given has been overwhelming! I hosted a Noonday Collection trunk show last weekend, which was so fun! 10% of everything sold that week for our show was donated to our adoption fund, which was a huge blessing as well. We also had a garage sale back in March and our friends here in San Antonio donated a TON of stuff for us to sell- and we made over $1,000 in one day! That was particularly huge for us, because that package we just sent off to USCIS today required an application fee very close to that amount, and the garage sale was able to completely cover that cost. God has been so faithful to us in this journey so far, which has been a huge reminder to me that we are on the right path. Thank you to everyone who has been interceding for us in prayer as well during this time, we are really feeling it! 

a season of grace

I feel like GRACE has been a really common theme in my life lately. I have had more opportunities to show grace to people this month than I would have cared to, honestly.  Unintentionally hurtful comments, hold-ups with paperwork, and changes within our agency…I guess in all fairness, I was warned that adoption would not be an easy road. God has been working on my heart through it all and teaching me the art of grace, an area in which I apparently needed quite a bit of practice (He’s also been pouring it out on me, which has been pretty amazing!)

We are so close to being finished with the home study part of the process, which is basically approval by our agency and by Texas to be an adoptive parent. This part involved several face to face visits with a social worker from our agency, including a home inspection, and multiple interviews about how we were raised, how we plan to parent, our strengths and weaknesses in marriage, and our ideas on adoption/ raising a child of a different race. Like a really intense job interview that lasts for days. It also involved a lot of paperwork from outside sources, sources that I cannot control or manipulate to get documents completed on time, and that has required a lot of grace and patience on our end as well. Just when I think my grace tank cannot be depleted any more, something else pops up that requires me to squeeze just a little bit more out. Thank you, Lord, for refilling my tank when you know I’m going need it!

As if the home study process itself wasn’t stressful enough, our home study coordinator (who we absolutely LOVE) ended up needing to resign in the middle of it! She had already completed most of our visits for the report when she decided to step down, so she agreed to continue to work with us to at least get our report written up. As frustrating as it is to have to now wait longer for a new person (who doesn’t know anything about us) to finalize the report when we have done everything in our power to speed the process along, I am reminded of the grace our home study coordinator showed us in staying on longer just to help us out, and it makes it easier to extend that grace to the next person we will be working with to get it finalized. {Side note: we are praying that our home study coordinator will be able to stay on contract with our agency so we can continue to work with her personally, so you can add that to your prayer list for us!}

Once our home study report gets finalized, then the first round of paperwork can be sent off to the US immigration department (USCIS), which will hopefully approve us to bring an internationally adopted child back into the US whenever we receive a referral. Once we receive the approval from USCIS, we are then ready to ship all of our remaining paperwork (which is actually the bulk of the paperwork we’ve been working on the past few months) over to Ethiopia and officially be placed on the waiting list! Woohoo! In the meantime, we have a few more documents to collect and finalize, and we are basically at the mercy of our agency to get our home study finalized soon. As I mentioned in a previous post, our goal is to have our paperwork to Ethiopia by early June, before the rainy season begins. During the rainy season in ET, the government basically shuts down due to the lack of drivable roads, etc. so we would like to have our paperwork delivered before that happens. {Please pray with us that our agency will finalize our home study quickly, and that USCIS will have a quick turnaround time for our I-600A application so that we can make it to ET by June!}

I know I have been unusually bad at answering emails, returning calls, and being a good friend in general that past couple of months, but I promise it won’t last forever, and to continue with my theme of grace, we so appreciate the outpouring of grace we’ve been given by everyone during this season!  We have been blown away at the generosity and support from our friends over the past couple of months, feeling like we are in this with SO MANY PEOPLE! I can’t imagine walking this road alone and I am overcome with gratitude for the people God has put in our lives to support us in this season…we are already seeing how amazing adoption is, and we haven’t even seen our children yet!

the paperchase

After reading so many awesome, supportive comments, texts, and messages from you guys following my first post, I immediately wondered if I was in way over my head with this blog (and also very grateful to have y’all along for the ride!)  I am excellent at beginning projects…not so much with the follow-through. I am determined for this blog to be an exception to my procrastinating tendencies.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the adoption process, I should explain what we’ve done and gone through so far before I can get to where we are currently. The first step in adoption is to pick an agency. This largely depends on whether you are going to do domestic or international adoption. We choose to do international adoption because we felt like that was where the Lord was leading us, so we began to research agencies that had a good reputation in the countries that we qualified for (qualifications include: ages of each adoptive parent, length of marriage, kids already in home, available ages and health status of children available for adoption). We knew we wanted to adopt from Africa, and we knew we qualified for Ethiopia, so that was our starting point. The agency we chose, America World Adoption Association, is one of the most reputable agencies in Ethiopia. We knew of several organizations on the ground in Ethiopia, and they all encouraged our decision to go with AWAA. We originally applied and were accepted into the Ethiopia program in the fall, but in a crazy turn of events, immediately after being accepted, Ethiopia threatened to shut down all adoptions in the country (making it impossible for anyone to move forward with an adoption). AWAA held a three-day fast for Ethiopia in December and encouraged all of the families in the program to participate and pray that Ethiopia would stay open to allow the millions of orphans in Ethiopia to be adopted into loving families. We did so, and in late January, the Ethiopian government issued their decision to allow adoptions to continue.

As we prayed about Ethiopia during those two (very stressful) months, we asked God to make it clear to us that Ethiopia was the country we were supposed to be adopting from. He confirmed it to us through dreams, prophetic words, scripture, and supernatural peace…it was crazy awesome to see Him speaking to us so clearly, despite the seemingly negative circumstances at the time. When we received the email that Ethiopia would not be closing, but instead, focusing on building a more ethical process within the country, we KNEW that it was time to move forward and get the ball rolling. So we paid our first big payment, and got assigned a home study coordinator. Thus began the “paperchase” stage.

Let me just say, I have always prided myself in being good at paperwork. It took me only one week to apply for the Texas Bar Exam. (that’s impressive, by the way). (I also procrastinated for months before the deadline approached, so it was technically my fault that I only had a limited amount of time). My point here is that I thought the paperchase stage of the adoption would be a breeze, since I had mastered the art of applying for various things over the years. To anyone who has ever applied to take the bar exam,--specifically the one in Texas which requires a ridiculous amount of paperwork--the adoption process makes applying for the Bar look like a walk in the park! The estimated time frame for the paperchase stage is said to take between 4-6 months. That includes completing several Home Study interviews, in-home meetings, getting approved by the Federal government to bring an orphan into the US, and sending basically every document you’ve ever collected in your life (each of which has to be notarized) to the Ethiopian government so they can decide if you will be an acceptable parent. So we are about 60% of the way through with all of that, which has taken us just over month and a half. Our goal is to have all of our paperwork to Ethiopia by June (the approval from the US government can take up to 90 days), at which point we will be considered officially in-line to receive a referral for a child.

There are approximately 4.6 MILLION orphans in Ethiopia alone, so the wait-time to receive a referral is not in any way due to a lack of orphans. It is more due to governmental issues in Ethiopia, and the fact that so many of the orphans come to the orphanages with little to no background information. A lot of the children’s parents are either dead or they were abandoned at a very early age with no record of where they came from. This causes major issues for effectively classifying these children as orphans (so that they are eligible for adoption and immigration into the US), and the background investigations on many of these children can take months or years.

So once our paperwork gets to Ethiopia, we wait. Wait to hear news of a referral of a child or sibling group that matches our request (which is pretty broad), which is estimated to take a couple of years at least. We are praying that the wait-time decreases in the near future as some new policies are implemented in the country, but above all, we know that God knows exactly when our children are supposed to be adopted…our trust is in His timing above all else. (and yes, it was really hard for this control freak to really believe that last statement, but I finally do!)

If you would like to know how to pray for us during this stage, we would appreciate prayers for continued energy to complete all of the paperwork in the coming weeks, and for favor with the federal government as our application is reviewed and that it will be processed QUICKLY!!

Xoxo,
Lori

a good place to start

I have to be honest with you…I’ve wanted to make this little story of ours public for some time, but I haven’t known where to begin. To start a blog about adoption and our life in general felt daunting to me- when there are so many great, well-written, hilarious blogs these days, what do I have to add to the mix? I most definitely do not have all of the answers to adoption (or any answers at all, really), but since we all have to start somewhere, this seems like as good of a place as any to let the world on in. Maybe our story will one day encourage someone else to start their own journey...to write their own story.

Our story actually began before Erik and I got married. As we were dating, I would bring up the subject of adoption fairly regularly. Mostly because I wanted to make sure E was on board with adoption before we got too serious, since it has always been on my heart to adopt. Apparently, it had always been on his too. We knew when we got married that we would definitely adopt at some point, maybe once we had two or three biological kids in middle and/or high school, and for sure not until we had more financial resources to put into an adoption.

I can just see God laughing about that little plan of ours back then. What a different path we would end up walking in the years to come.  

Three years and four heartbreaking miscarriages later, here we are, doing what God put in our hearts to do so many years ago, just a lot sooner than we ever thought. God has so sweetly carried us through the past two very painful years, knowing long before we did what a beautiful future He had planned for us. He is so faithful!

I have no doubt I will share the first few chapters of our story in more detail at some point, but for now I want to focus on this exciting part in our story- the beginning stages of our adoption journey! In the weeks to come, I hope to explain the part of the adoption process we’ve already flown through, and lay out what is to come for those of you who are following along with us, or want to know what the process is like if you are personally considering adoption. I am also blogging for my sweet kiddos-to-come, so that they can one day read about our exciting adventure to becoming a family!

So this is us. Two crazy kids, determined to fulfill God's call on our life by adopting a precious child (hopefully, siblings!) from Ethiopia. The wait-time is predicted to be long, and the international adoption system is not exactly stable or inexpensive. These facts truly do not phase us. We just know that we know that God is in this, and He that began a good work in and through us will carry it to full completion. I cant wait to see what that looks like, and how He will grow us in the process.

xoxo,

Lori