This weekend I will be 28 weeks pregnant! I really never knew if I would ever carry a baby this long. I had another scan today and he still has a huge head, long legs, long arms, and even a bit of hair on his head! It’s incredible to see how healthy he is after losing four babies before him. So many questions will never be answered, but we are forever grateful for the health of THIS one, SON THREE.

Speaking of sons, we did get a bit of an adoption update that is quite ironic. (Having said this, I do not think Son Two is a viable match at all anymore, so we are looking at a new match in Haiti altogether.) After 2.5 years in process, Haiti has once again extended a certain deadline which now seems to mean we are promised a referral for a child by July 1st. The current catch, the way I understand it, is we need to complete our 15 day bonding trip and file a certain form IN HAITI before July 1st. So…as we are due with Son Three mid-July and Haiti has risk for the zika virus (among many other viruses such as malaria, typhoid, and chikungunya), it’s not exactly safe to travel before we deliver.

Yes, after 2.5 years of waiting, it looks like we will have to turn down our first opportunity at a referral in Haiti. If you’ve been following this blog, you are well aware our path to have kids has not been the least bit transparent. Here are our Haiti considerations in a nut shell:

• Decline referral and wait for new referral. This would mean we’d have to file a new government form (I-800 instead of I-600). We fear this would cause our case to slow down (even more!) because the Haitian government would be concentrating on approving the I-600 cases first. This could slow down our process, literally, years. We’ve heard it might slow down the process about two years. This is an ADDITIONAL two years on top of the two years or so we expect to wait after our initial referral and bonding trip. Sounds crazy until you get familiar with Haitian adoption! Timelines of any kind cannot be trusted, though.
• Accept referral if governments would allow us to travel after Son Three is born. This would mean leaving our newborn infant with grandparents, foregoing precious bonding time with him in exchange for bonding with our Haitian child that won’t come home for another approximately two years, and most likely quitting breastfeeding because of forementioned zika virus concerns I would not want to transmit back to our biological son.

So, neither option sounds stellar to us if you can imagine. We finally have one baby who is healthy and looks like he is coming home and it seems crazy not to slow down and celebrate that. But, from the perspective of adoptive parents who have been waiting years for a referral, it is so hard to consider turning one down if it is at all possible to move forward. Our hearts are invested heavily in Haiti, too.

It is unclear to us what decision to make. One good thing, though, is that we’ve learned a bit about patience and lack of control the past several years! We know we will have to wait and see whether Haiti sticks to their July 1st deadline. We also will have to see if Son Three, indeed, comes home healthy. We’ll have to check in with our hearts come July. What does intuition tell us? What is our deepest longing? Either way, it looks like we are getting one step closer to having our family complete, and we couldn’t be more grateful for that.