Garrett's Christmas Present

I just finished the quilt top for Garrett's quilt. Here is a picture.

Now I just have to get a snuggly backing material and send it off to the long arm quilter.

Merry Christmas, baby, wherever you are. Mama loves you.

Psychology of a Quilt

My floors need to be swept and there are dishes in the sink. Anyone familiar with my housekeeping habits would know that this can only mean one of two things... either I just picked up a great new book or I've started a new quilt. Happily, in this case, it means that Garrett's baby quilt is out of storage and back on my ironing board, albeit in pieces.

Each quilt I've had the pleasure of sewing is a one of a kind creation. I've never repeated a pattern, because a quilt, to me, is like a letter. It's a love note from me to the recepient and I could never simply make duplicates any more than I could photocopy a note to one friend and send it to another.

When Tim and I were dating, I made him a velvet polar bear quilt set against a satinly midnight sky. When I was expecting Calvin, I made a "Wind in the Willows" themed quilt that invited him to adventure down a river past a castle to the purple mountains in the distance. One Christmas, I made Caroline a "flying geese" star quilt using a wedgewood blue bird pattern that I still love. When we were waiting for Carson, I made her a modern twist on the 'log cabin' quilt with playful blues and pinks and warm creams. (All of the rectangles wrapping around squares made it look like a hug to me.) When we found out that Avery was on the way, I made a quilt so pink that my long-arm quilter nicknamed it the "cotton candy quilt." It took me forever to finish a "Paris in springtime" quilt I made for the kids at the Ronald McDonald house who needed to be able to imagine themselves somewhere else.

It usually takes me as long to design a quilt as it does to make it, because I need to find a pattern and palate that feel just right. Not that I'm always successful. As I've never had a formal lesson, some quilts just don't turn out as I intended and I when I step back from them I can't shake feeling of the frustration. I want to stamp my foot and say, "that is not what I meant at all!" Still other quilts never get finished because I forget what it was I was trying to say and I can see no point in working on them if I can't remember why it was the pattern inspired me in the first place.

Garrett's quilt has been no exception. I puzzled over patterns and toyed with themes. I felt vaguely terrified at the prospect of making a quilt for someone who I loved so much but who had a story the beginning of which I knew nothing about. What if I got it all wrong? I spent hours scanning images of the Tien Shen Mountains in Kazakhstan looking for a vista that might inspire Garrett's quilt. But only when I looked at the other end of the quilting spectrum did I find my hook. In direct contrast to Calvin's quilt, Garrett's is one of the most traditional quilts I've ever made. I chose a pattern that mothers and grandmothers have been sewing for a century. The only modern twist comes from my palate, a lovely grouping of baby blue, celery, white, and coral, nearly all designed by my favorite fabric designer Anna Griffin. But, even though I knew I had found the right quilt for my baby, until now I couldn't articulate why Garrett's quilt had to be so traditional, while his brother's quilt is the ulitmate in free form. But now I figured it out.

When I sewed Calvin's "Wind in the Willows" quilt I was wishing him among, other things, a life in which he felt secure enough to seek adventure. Calvin would never doubt that he had a home behind him, so I sewed him a view from that home out into the wonders of the world that awaited him. Garrett, however, has started his life so far from home that I am stitching him a view back into the hearth. I'm sewing my far-born child a past. I'm telling him that all of those most basic pleasures of having a loving family and a stable home are his just as much as any child who received his family in a more traditional manner. When I give it to him, I will be saying "You are mine now and you always will be."

Ridiculously introspective but absolutely true.

I may never be able to make my kids understand how deeply and fiercely I love them, but I will wrap them up every night in blanket created just for that purpose.

Anyway, I love, love, love, how this quilt is coming along. Although I'm still working on it, here is a sneak peak. Just imagine it with a couple of borders and satin binding. Paka!

Green Light!

Huge News!
Less than two weeks after reconciling ourselves to the reality that our dossier wasn't going to be released from the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) for 2-6 months, we found out that our dossier had, in fact, already been released from the MFA! What?!?!?!
So, what exactly does that mean, you ask?
Well, it means that within the next couple of weeks, the hard working people of the Kazakhstani Ministry of Education (where they sent our dossier next) will assign us a region. Then we will know where in Kazakhstan, our little one is living!!! Then we will just wait for our invitation to travel!
Wow!
We're getting really close now guys!
Wow!

No Early Christmas

Although we still have so much to be thankful for, there is no longer any chance that we will be spending the holidays in Kazakhstan with our new little love. We've just been notified that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is now taking a minimum of at least four months to process dossiers and sometimes as much as six to eight months. This is up from an average of four to six weeks, when our dossier arrived in Kaz. Oh, the wild world of international adoption! The upside is that our dossier has been in Kazakhstan for almost three months already, so we have at least one more month (probably closer to two or three months) to wait before we hear any word on when we might travel. So I'm putting my gorgeous new stroller safely in the garage, because it looks like I won't be using it for a while and I'm off to tell Calvin, who only wants to talk about being a "big brother" to "baby Garrett," that we'll have to wait a while more. I know that we'll bring our baby home when the time is right, but this does feel like a punch in the gut. Love to you all. Paka. Becca

Thank You!

I just wanted to say a quick but very heartfelt "thank you" to all our wonderful family and friends for the beautiful baby shower this evening. It was great seeing everyone and really getting a chance to celebrate our new little love. I want to send an extra special bit of love to my wonderful sister (excited aunty) Caroline for giving the party. Everything was so beautiful, and put together with such care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all you hard work, Car. I appreicate all of the love you put into tonight.
And I can't say thank you enough to each of you for the amazing big brother quilt you made for Calvin! It is so beautiful and obviously crafted with such love. Calvin is sleeping snuggled up tight in it right now. He was so excited when I gave it to him. We must have looked over and explained each of the squares three times before he let me put him to bed. He was really interested in knowing who made which square. I think it is safe to say that he loves every bit of it.
Finally, thank you for Calvin and Garrett's sweeeeeet new ride. What a stroller! Wow! I am still reeling! Honestly, that thing is so cool, I may just have to stroll it around the house until Garrett arrives. I won't be able to wait!
I think I officially have all of the baby accessories... now I just need the baby!
Come on, honey, call you mother!

Still Waiting...From Tim

Becca and I are still waiting...could be any day now! We are finishing up several other misc. items including 1. Selling our catering company (closes escrow Nov 17th!) 2. Celebrating Halloween (only 3 days to go.....) and going to Disneyland with Calvin (the day after Halloween!). So....we have our hands full but still check utube every day for new adoption videos, research new Kazakhstani info and continue to hope that our baby comes soon....Lots of love to you all, especially anyone checking in on this blog daily (Caroline :) and we hope to have good news on all fronts soon! Cheers! - Tim

Waiting? What Waiting?

I can't believe I'm writing this post in early September, but here goes... OUR DOSSIER IS IN KAZAKHSTAN!!! Whoa! I honestly can't believe it. Our agency has been telling us for months that things are slowing down, that Kazakhstan is tightening the reins, that we should expect to wait. But no! The wonderful people at the NY Consulate must have known how terrible we are at waiting because our dossier moved through at lightning speed, a full 2 months faster than we expected!
So here is how it will go down from here - Our dossier is in Kazakhstan at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It'll stay there for 6-8 weeks and then move on to the Ministry of Education. I'm expecting about the same wait there. And, if I understand things correctly (and I'm not sure I do), some time along the way we will get our region assignment. After that, we wait for a Letter of Invitation to travel. Then we go! That's right, within the next couple of months, we will know, with a little more precision, where in the world our child is and then we'll go get him! Can you believe it?!!! O.K. I'll stop using exclaimation points... after this last little victory dance!!!! Yea!!!
Hang on baby, we're coming!
Love to you all,
Becca
P.S. - Oh, and here is another wonderful thing about getting our dossier to Kazakhstan - this means that no other changes in the law can effect us. From here on our there will be no new rules!

Fun with Homestudies!

It's official. I tempted the gods in my last post by claiming that "all I could do now was wait." Apparently that's not so! As of yesterday the Kazakhstani embassy has thrown us yet another curve ball. They've decided that they will only accept dossiers with homestudies conducted by Hague Accredited agencies. Don't worry, you don't have to know what that means. All you have to know is that the agency that conducted our homestudy back in February, doesn't have the little piece of paper that the Kazakhstani government wants to see and unless I find a way to get it, come September 15th, the consulate will reject our dossier!!!
Panic!!!
So now I find myself in that all to familiar position of scrambling like mad to cover all the bases as quickly as possible. I can't get ahold of my coordinator at WPA, who is probably swamped with anxious calls. Also, the contact at my homestudy agency is taking a well earned vacation this week. However, being short on official information/instructions has never stopped me before. In the world of international adoption, it doesn't pay to sit around on your keister! SO...I've called about sixteen new homestudy agencies this morning and left rambling messages for more people than I can count...and... I think I've figured it out.
Relief.
So let's all give a big cheer for Hague Accredited Partners for Adoption!!! They have agreed to update our homestudy with their seal of approval.
Fingers crossed, I'll be able to put a bookend on this one before the month is through.
Wish us luck, again.
Paka.
Becca

New York, New York...And Invisible Pregnancy Angst

Sing with me now-
"If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere. It's up to you... New York, New York!"

Yup, we are out of translation and our precious bundle of paperwork has safely landed on the desk of a hard working official at the Kazakhstani Consulate in the big apple.

And now... we wait.

And wait.

And Wait.

AND WAIT.

Until we can't stand any more waiting and find ourselves loving stroking the baby pajamas at Target and spending the evenings checking and rechecking the e-mail to see if maybe by some happy accident our dossier got sent out 3 months early. O.K. It won't happen, I know that. But, I'm definitely starting to get edgy. Here the rub. I miss my baby and I don't even know if he's been born yet. Isn't that weird? Not knowing if your child has been born? It is. It is so weird. And I'm finding that I want to talk about him, like he already exists, like he's already mine and that we just have to meet to make it final, which is true, in a way, but it's the immediacy of the connection that gets me. In a way, it is so much like being pregnant, because I think about him all the time, just like I did when I was pregnant with Cal. But being pregnant was easier in that respect because I had a physical connection to match the emotional one. This time I don't have the luxury of rubbing a gigantic belly to tell my little one that I love him. I just have to wait and know that I'm doing everything possible to get to him as soon as I can. I have to remind myself that from the moment he's mine, I'll love him every second for the rest of his life.. and I have to try to believe that's enough.

The other frustrating aspect of this invisible pregnancy of mine, is that even though I want to shout it from the rooftops, no one knows I'm having a baby. I hate that. I want everyone to know, to coo, to fawn, to ask questions about this amazing little person I haven't yet met... but they don't. In all fairness, I can't possibly expect the cashier at Safeway to celebrate my growing family, but can't help but feel a touch of sadness and maybe even bitterness that people closer to my life than that can't seem to remember that we've got a baby on the way. Don't worry, I'm not talking about any of you. Those oblivious, but possible well-meaning people would never think to check this blog... Maybe I should start wearing one of those fake "pregnancy bellies." My love to all of you. Paka.

Translation Please!

No, Tim and I haven't mastered the Russian language... but... drum roll please... we did FINISH OUR DOSSIER! That's right, folks, we are officially "in translation." It feels like a real milestone in our adoption journey and, boy, did it take a lot of effort to get here. Today was a gueling day of paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. First, we corrected the one glitch in our notarized document... a fact for which we owe Marty a big honorable mention! (Thanks, Marty, you're the best.) Then we headed off to state capital to have everything apostilled by the secretary of state. We sorted and stapled. We gathered all my carefully organized paperwork into several very confusing piles. We re-sorted them and handed them over. And we held our breath. Tim and Calvin hit the train musuem while I waited (yes, I'll admit, I couldn't bear to leave my precious dossier), then forty-five minutes and one large check later, we had pretty gold stickers on all of our paperwork. Calvin found this part very interested and I was momentarily terrified that he would affix tigger stickers to all our documents. When we got home I headed over to Kinkos and burnt through over 500 copies to make our five complete dossier sets. Then I sent them off to the great unknown to be translated into Russian and sent to Kazakhstan.
We were told that we would be approximately 2 months in translation. Translation time depends on what kind of child you are requesting and since we want a child under one year old, we are in for the longer end of the translation spectrum.
The crazy thing for me is that, from here on out, we have done everything we can to bring our little one home. We have rushed around, bothering the people we love for recommendations and last minute babysitting gigs. We have notarized, apostilled, photocopied, and faxed, and fed-ex'd. But that's all come to an end. Until the moment we accept our invitation to travel, we are done and all we can do is wait.
Wish us luck. We are terrible at waiting.
Love to you all.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

I'd like to say a special thank you to all the hard working people at the good ole' Department of Homeland Security. That's right everyone, our I-171H is here! Hurray!
'What?' you say....
Keep up, people. It's the last piece of our dossier paperwork. It wasn't supposed to arrive for another month...but it's here! Yea!
So now, I've just got to finish up my notarizations (sorry, Marty), double check with WPA that we did everying right, and head over to the Secretary of State's office to get those pretty gold seals on everything. Fingers crossed I'll get it all done by early next week!
That's the update, my friends. I'm going to go back to dancing around the kitchen now.
Paka Paka.

ya nye go-vo-RYOO pah ROO-ski

That's right. I don't speak Russian... but I'd like to!

Becca's Little Birthday Present

Tim just found this article on how Kazakhstan will be celebrating my birthday. According to Chinanews, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev will run a 250m stretch of the torch relay after the Beijing Olympic flame arrives in Almaty, Kazakhstan on April 2, 2008. Neat, huh.

Why the Rush?

So looking at the timeline we've created, some of you might wonder... what's the hurry? Well, besides the obvious reason that we want to get our child home as soon as possible, there is another. That reason has everything to do with notarization and our friends at the Kazakhstani Embassy in New York. Here's the lowdown. We've got to get our dossier (paperwork) to the Kazakhstani Embassy before any one of the documents in the package is more than 6 months old. This doesn't sound too hard, until you start to understand all the hoops that have to be jumped through. For example, one of the documents in our dossier is a form called an 1-171H, which we receive from the USCIS ( the united states department of citizenship and immigration services). We can't get this document until we have a completed I-600A from the same agency. Currently the wait time to have your I-600A processed is running right around three months, BUT the USCIS can't even start processing our I-600A until we have a completed, approved homestudy report submitted to them. However, we can't finish our homestudy until we have documents like medical evaluations and income verifications completed, each of which is notarized. So, since we have started getting documents notarized, we are now in a mad rush to try to get our homestudy done, so that we can get our I-600A done, so that we can get our 1-171H done, so that we can have our dossier translated into Russian and submitted to the Kazakhstani Embassy before the notarization we just got expires and needs to be redone! Whew. And now you know.

Why Adopt?

Many of you will be surprised to know that Tim and I have talked about adopting since we started dating in college. To us, this isn't a "second best" option. It's different - but just as beautiful, natural, and exciting as having a baby biologically. We didn't expect to adopt so soon, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the timing was right and that we should seize this amazing opportunity before it passed us by... that is, before we chickened out. Yeah, adopting is scary, but so is childbirth! Loving anyone is a risky proposition. I guess it just comes down to the fact that adopting feels so much more natural to us than going "high tech" with fertility procedures. In fact, I can honestly say that we feel grateful for the struggles of the past because it has led us to this amazing journey to find our next child, a child who's arrival we are anticipating with the same joy that brought Calvin into our lives.

Welcome!

It's official. Our happy little family of three will be growing. The Snyders are adopting from Kazakstan! Wow. Tim and I will be parents again and Calvin is finally going to be a big brother!We are so excited to be starting what will undoubtedly be an amazing journey to bring our child home and we are so glad that through this blog all our friends and family can come along for the ride. Welcome! I'll be updating this blog whenever we take a new step in our adoption. There probably won't be much to say in the beginning, but this site will be a great way for us to connect with all of you when we are living in Kazakhstan (gulp) for the two months it will take to meet our child and finalize the adoption. When that happens, we'll post as many pictures as we can, so that you all can get to know the newest Snyder before he or she comes home. Wish us luck, guys, and we'l keep you posted.
Love to you all,
Becca