An update on my heart condition

I don't have any news. As I shared the home study starts next week. That's exciting. I just have been struggling a bit with my emotions. We decided not to share the news with Dave's family until we can do it face to face which will be in December. I imagined a huge announcement and a million friends and family over joyed with us about this whole adoption. It's been anticlimactic to say the least. A lot of people know but not everyone. I think we'll start to share with our small group and my ladies Bible study as now we're getting into where we'll need prayer. But I am reluctant for some reason. God laid adoption on our hearts and most people don't have the same passion about it that we do. I am trying to prepare myself for a lot of "whys" and a lack of enthusiasm. I am praying that somewhere through out this journey we'll run into someone who is SO stinkin' excited for us that they read this blog religiously and ask us about the journey on a regular basis. May God bless my heart with that. I have been feeling a little lonely in this whole thing for some reason. Don't get me wrong, Dave is super excited about it but I am doing everything. I make the phone calls, fill out the paper work etc etc. He's working full time and taking correspondence classes. He has no time to dedicate to the adoption stuff right now. Which is ok, cause I can get it done. But I find myself thinking about it all the time knowing Dave (and everyone else in my life) has other things consuming their thoughts.

Anyway, there's my heart right now. Please pray for me.

Home Study begins on Oct. 8th

The lady who worked for the local Bethany branch moved and I assume no one has filled her spot. We were excited to have a local contact with Bethany and that's part of the reason we chose them. So, it's a bit disappointing that we can't work with Deone. Anyway, We got a call today from a social worker. She was contacted by Bethany but does not work for Bethany. She seemed very nice on the phone which was a relief. For some reason I had a picture in my head of what social workers would be like if they weren't working for a Christian company. I think Kendra will be good though (from what I felt through our phone call conversation). She said the state requires she have four meetings with us. Two will be with us as a couple and the other two meetings will be one on ones with only Dave or myself and Kendra. We set up the first meeting for Oct. 8th. I am excited and nervous. It'll be so nice to get it moving though.

Oh,it's not set in stone yet but we most likely will be changing our child's age preference to 1 year or younger instead of 2 or under. We heard that 4 families recently got referrals for 4 baby boys all under 5 months. I asked about the wait time and was told that it doesn't seem the wait for younger kids is any longer.

Nothing new

I just thought I would drop in for a quick second. We are still waiting on a reference to get sent back before Bonnie can send everything to the local social worker. After that we can start the home study. I hope this is within the next couple weeks. I'm anxious.

Liam is starting to understand

So, I've been talking with Liam a lot about different colors of skin. We got a bunch of books from the library like The Colors of Us and Please, Baby, Please. Liam loves these books. We asked him if he wanted a new brother or sister and he said 'yes'. I asked him if he wanted a brown baby and again he said, 'yes'. So yesterday we had a couple from church over for dinner. They didn't know yet we were adopting and Dave asked Liam, "Do you want a new brother or sister?" And he responded with a huge smile and said, "A brown Baby!" He ran and found his Please, Baby, Please book and showed the couple the baby on the cover and said, "That's a brown baby!"

It was so cute! I think he's really understanding and excited! He can quote the whole book and we've only had it a couple days.
My camera died so I couldn't get him reading the whole book but you can catch him saying, "Not on your head", "Keep off the wall", "Share that ball" "Don't be so slow"

Starting the Home Study soon

We are starting our home study in Oct. WOOHOO!! Bonnie thinks we could have it all done by the end of Nov.

This all gets a bit confusing so instead of putting it into my own words, here's the email:

The completed, approved home study report is sent to Adoption Alliance for approval (a week) and then with the packet to USCIS. I understand the USCIS process in Colorado is several months. Once approved by USCIS, the state seals need to be ordered (a two week process?) - and then the dossier can be mailed to me to review (I always try to do that the day it is received, sometimes it is 2 days), then sent to our National office for review (done within a few days), they send to the Ethiopian Consulate in Washington D.C. (two weeks?) and then it is mailed to Ethiopia.

So, if my calculations are right we could be done and waiting for our baby's referral sometime early 2009 (maybe by spring).

You MUST watch this!!

Due to the security of the Ethiopian orphanage I needed to take down the link to the video I mentioned in this post. However, if you are still interested in watching it (it's seriously beautiful!) email me and I can send you the link. I just can't put it on the Internet.

This made me cry with such joy. I literally was sitting here sobbing as I watched this video. It is an American family in Ethiopia (where we're going!) picking up their baby boy and meeting him for the very first time. It's powerful!!

Such exciting news!

So, Ethiopia is a fairly new program for Bethany Christian Services. I think they've only been doing it for close to a year. Anyway, we just got this email which I thought was SOO exciting!!

Hi All!!

Have you read the Ethiopia Blog?? http://www.bethany.org/blogs/ethiopiablog.nsf If you have, you would see that we received four referrals last week!! To say that we are thrilled for the families and children is an understatement. Four healthy baby boys, all under 5 months old were matched for their forever families. We pray for their health and care as they are in the Bethany transition home awaiting their adoption processing.

Another note of celebration is that we've had 8 children join their forever families (6 families), and one more forever family will be joined this week! What a joy it has been to see the program continue to blossom and children be blessed!


Thank you Father for Your blessings for the children and families we are able to serve in our Ethiopia Program.
Alison Adema
Bethany Christian Services
Program Coordinator for:
Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Korea, Philippines

Loving a person you've never met

I was thinking the other day about being able to love our new child as much and the same way as I love the two boys I carried and gave birth to. It's so hard to know how it will be possible but I know God will give me the love I need to do it. I know without a doubt that this new child will be one of us. An Oldenkamp. This child will be loved and adored. I want to cry with joy every time I think about going to Ethiopia and meeting our little boy or girl for the first time. It makes me over whelmed with emotion. I try to imagine what the first meeting will be like and how old our little one will be. I imagine bringing him or her home to meet the boys and wonder what that will be like.

We have a friend who painted a picture of Liam as a baby and she's now doing one of Gabriel. I asked her if she could paint one of our new baby and she said she's never painted black skin but would love to try. It will be a beautiful painting. I just can't wait to know what this little boy/girl will look like.

a NY Times Article

So I was reading this article on the NY Times site. It was called "Overcoming Adoption Racial Barriers".


The following little paragraph broke my heart. I know we will see some of this and we have to prepare ourselves. It just makes me sad that kids have to go through

Judy Stigger, a counselor at the Cradle (an agency in Chicago) and herself a white adoptive mother of two black children, now adults, makes the issues tangible to prospective parents by relating personal stories. She tells about the time when her son, then a teenager, reached into her purse at a McDonald’s and a clerk called security; and the time when her daughter began crying while looking through congratulatory cards sent by family and friends when they took her home. “Was I supposed to have been white?” her daughter, then in the third grade, asked. Ms. Stigger had never noticed that the children on all of the cards were white.

Four Things About Adoption

I found this on a different adoption blog and thought it was really neat. The lady who wrote it has adopted 4 kids from Ethiopia and two from Korea!


Four things about adoption

Four things I thought about adoption when I was a child--
>I imagined it might be cool to be adopted by someone really rich (you know, in those moments when my mom wouldn't spring for those Calvins I had my eye on)
>I imagined what I'd do if someone left a baby on my doorstep
>I couldn't understand how anyone would ever be able to relinquish a child
>I thought it might be neat to adopt a child myself someday

Four things I've learned since then--
>That adoption issues are incredibly complex
>That most birth mothers have their children's best interests at heart and are doing their best with terrible circumstances
>That there are huge numbers of kids in the world waiting, many of whom who will never have a family
>That the privilege of adoption has been an incredible blessing to my family

Four silly things people have said to me about adoption--
>How much did they cost?
>Do you have any real kids?
>Didn't their real mom want them?
>Are they sisters?

Four things that are hard about adoption--
>Waiting
>Waiting
>Realizing that many people would have been able to parent their own biological children if only they'd had the right support at the right time.
>Facing your child's grief and loss issues, and feeling sad when you can't make all their sadness go away.

Four ways my adopted children have surprised me--
>With how soon they began to ask adoption-related questions
>With their resilience in the face of huge upheaval in their lives
>With their similarity to me in various ways
>With the way they have completely and utterly captured my heart

Four things I wish everyone knew about adoption--
>That getting educated about adoption issues is way more important in the long run than worrying about the paperwork.
>That there are millions of awesome kids in the world just waiting for families
>That the funding will come if you just jump in and do it
>That parenting adopted kids is just as miraculous and wonderful as parenting kids born to you.

Application is on it's way!

Woohoo! Dave mailed our application off today. We are officially financially committed. I am so excited things are moving.

Moving on?

So, I called Bonnie today to ask a few questions. The insurance issues deffinately don't sound like as big of a deal now that I talked to her. They just want something in our adoption file saying that once the baby is with us he/she will be covered. I know CHP+ (the government program) will work fine because our eligibility increases the larger our family. So once we are a family of 5 we we still qualify. We're still at least going to put me on Dave's insurance and then most likely leave the boys on CHP+. So that's a relief.

Bonnie has some other things to get together and mail us as a part of this beginning paper work but she said we can mail everything we have done now so she can start processing stuff. This should speed up the whole thing instead of us waiting till we have every little thing together.

It's exciting to know we're getting so close to moving on to the next thing. Dave and I will start our online training classes and we don't have to worry about the CPR and 1st aid until the end of the home study. But I was happy to here we didn't have to get those things done as part of the application but more just as a part of the home study as a whole.