Get To work!

Enough with the slow days of summer. Put down the fishin' poles and deflate the floaties, kids. Its off to work you go!

Ah, the joys of adoption and immigration. Truly we have reason to celebrate every box that gets checked off on the long list of hoops to jump through to bring two Haitian children into our home and make them legally members of our family and of our country.

I write this only to highlight some of the absurd we deal with in trying to get everything sorted out and boxes checked. Patience is a virtue, and I'd like to say Patrick and I have harbored such in the process, but that would be an outright dirty lie.

Since entering the country at the end of January, we've been trying to get the kids hooked up with medical insurance--first Medicaid to cover them until they were adopted and could be placed on our Global Ministries plan. The State of Colorado made them eligible for state medicaid as refugees coming into the country which sounded like a blessing as we started receiving fat hospital bills from Valancia's brief stay and evaluation. However as we've discovered with many government agencies, communication and coordination between entities is not a well-oiled machine. Rusty. Squeaky. Broken. For months, Patrick has been doing a juggling act between various offices in effort to get the children into the system, and he has hit one road block after another. As a physician, the experience has given me valuable insight into what the nation's poor and uninsured have to go through, the challenges to be faced navigating such dense systems.

Most recently those in charge determined our kids needed social security numbers to get on any retroactive assistance programs that might cover hospital bills. Ok. So after waiting for adoptions to be finalized, Patrick headed with all necessary paperwork to the SSI office. He met with a very nice woman who sat and entered one document after another into our kids' files, minutes ticked into hours. When Patrick handed over the last page and could see light at the end of the tunnel, the process almost complete, an alarm dinged on the worker's computer prompting for a copy of the kids'... get this... not even lying... WORK VISAS. Yes, apparently regardless of age, all people coming into the country need a work permit in order to qualify for a social security number REGARDLESS if they are adopted or if still sporting Huggies. Of course citizenship will erase all this silliness, but that is still to happen at an undefined time. So now we have to harass Homeland Security for work permits for our kids. I mean really, it IS about time they start pulling their weight around here. They are just consumers really, eating, drinking and soiling a staggering amount of diapers... so time to start contributing to the family fund already! Why didn't I think of this before? But skill set? What on earth can they do??? Make messes for vacuum salesmen? Do diaper leakage testing? Taste-test Gerber baby food? Their resume's are sort of pathetic.

On a happier note, the news reported this week that the House and Senate have each passed versions of the Immigration Bill for the children coming in on Humanitarian Parole. One more House vote is needed to approve the Senate's revised version of the bill which should happen this September. The kids could start getting their citizenship processed as early as this fall! Of course how quickly the law will be put into action remains to be seen, but great news nonetheless. THANKS TO ALL who wrote and called their Congressmen and Senators advocating for this bill and for the children it represents. In Legislative time, its incredible how fast it all has been processed.

Truthfully the news--while amazingly good--also left us questioning a bit, wondering if we should have been more patient, if we should have pushed a little harder to extend an already generous home stay. But we comfort ourselves knowing we had to make a decision for financial, security, sanity reasons. Our future is always ours for the molding. Amazing that the wait might be shortened and freedom to go and do as a family unit is closer than we expected!

So as we groan about getting the kids work permits, we celebrate a legislative move that puts us a lot closer to the finish line!