Why China, Financials and other questions

We have been lucky enough to have some really good support for our adoption.  Not everyone is supportive, but most people who care about us are, or they are at least trying.  Not everyone understands what we are doing, but we have a lot of people in our lives who understand and a lot more who are learning through us.  Maybe no one they know has adopted internationally, so they are along for the ride, but are curious as to what we are doing and what everything means.  I have made a few local adoptive friends and a lot more through internet adoption groups that I belong to.  David and I have avoided a lot of questions that I hear other adoptive friends have to answer, but I am going to answer some of those questions here, in case you were wondering or maybe even considering adopting some day. 

Why international adoption and not "buy American"?

That "buy American" quote was actually from a friend of ours.  I don't think he would be offended by my using his words.  When we were approached about adopting an older boy who was here in the states, I really had to think and pray about it and examine my own heart and motives.  Those who have known us for a while know that we longed to grow our family for many years.  That was mostly driven by me, but David also felt something was missing, especially when we were actively trying and couldn't grow our family.  To make a long story short, we actively tried to grow our family through IVF and domestic adoption. In both cases, we thought we were growing our family, but we never came home with a baby.  It was expensive and heart wrenching.  As we abandoned the idea of having another biological child and began to seek out a child through adoption, we really wanted to help a child, but we wanted a younger child.  I love my older boys.  They are a ton of fun, but I wanted one more little one. 

People ask us if we thought about foster care.  Yes, we did.  We went to information meetings and considered starting foster care placement training, but the statistics we were given did not meet the needs we had for our family.  We were not willing to hurt our children with a child placed in our home and later removed.  After trying to build our family and knowing we had babies in heaven, we could not lose another child at this time.  This was especially true of our youngest son, and really, me.  There is risk to anything, but we needed to know we would end up with a permanent child to add to our family at the end of the process. 

So, why China?

When we had dear family friends that approached us about caring for our children while we traveled internationally to adopt, we opened the book to international adoption.  I researched many programs.  We chose China because we could get a young child and because it was a solid, reputable program.  The children were reasonably well cared for both prenatally and as orphans.  The fact that we could also get a girl began to start dreams about pink things in our house for the first time.  Our journey to our daughter in China has not been easy, but it has been right.  God has blessed us each and every step of the way.  We KNOW that this is where we are supposed to be.  We know that it might not be an easy homecoming to bring home an older baby (approximately 20-22 months by the time we get home) with special needs (cleft lip/palate) but we have never felt so right in this whole journey.  This is right and our daughter is waiting for us. 

Why special needs?

China has two programs for adoption, non special needs (NSN) and special needs (waiting children). The NSN program has a wait of over 6 years.  This was just not an option for us with our children's age.  We would have chosen another country if we were looking for NSN.  Our oldest son is on the autism spectrum.  He is very high functioning, but we worked hard to help him unlock his potential.  We felt we had become acquainted with the special needs resources in our community and we knew the work required and how to seek help.  David and I both had what would be considered special needs in China.  David was born with club feet and I was born with cross eyes and amblyopia (lazy eye).  What would our lives have been like if we had been born in China, instead of America?  The waiting children program was the only program we looked at for China and it is where we found Caitlyn.  Caitlyn has cleft lip (which has been fixed) and cleft palate.  She will also have some developmental delays due to poor nutrition (There are some failure to thrive issues) and orphanage delays. 

Isn't it really expensive?

Yes.  David and I don't normally talk about our finances, except in general terms, but I will give a little more information here in case anyone is considering adoption.  Adopting from China will cost about $32,000, depending on travel costs and some other variables.  (Some agencies are a little cheaper and some are more expensive. Ours was up front about all costs, including five years of post adoption reports & in-country expenses- including guides, which we appreciated and have included.) We had already paid several thousand dollars for a failed domestic adoption, plus we had paid for infertility treatments.  This has been a stretch for us.  We have made hard choices over the last year.  We had a smaller Christmas than we could have had.  We have cut back on the kids outside activities for a short period of time.  But it also hasn't been impossible.  In the last few years, I have started working more hours and have been babysitting and we both have incredibly supportive employers.  David has had a good year at work and we have paid off some major bills this last year which has freed up some cash each month.  Both our cars are paid off.  When we don't have doctor bills and car repairs, we have been able to move money in to the adoption savings account each month.  We have had some generous friends and family members. It has been humbling to ask for help in the form of fundraisers, but God has blessed our efforts.  We sold out of our fundraising bracelets in a few weeks.  We are doing a facebook auction in January and have several friends who are donating new items or services to that.  

Why fundraise? I didn't fundraise to have my kids!

I know, right?  Awkward!!  Here's the deal.  We hate fundraising.  David and I are pretty independent people.  We wanted to do this all on our own, but we couldn't. We are close and we have certainly tried, but we needed some help.  We had a garage sale and I am doing babysitting.  Those have really helped, but we needed to do something to raise the $5500 mandatory donation to the orphanage that Caitlyn is in. As I've mentioned before, this is a required donation to the children left behind.  In the orphanage we are adopting from, there are ten floors of orphans, so there is most certainly a need.  We have supported friends, church members and others we don't even know, to adopt, to go in to ministry and to go on mission trips and we had many of those people and others ask us what we were going to do to raise money.  It is a pretty normal thing in the international adoption world.  Not everyone has to do it, but many do. We hope that we do not offend anyone.  That is our fear, that we would make someone think poorly of us or that we are making bad decisions or not providing for our family appropriately.  If we offend you in any way, please try to understand.  Please know our hearts are just to get our baby home and to help those left behind, nothing more.  To those who have helped us or helped others to bring their baby home, thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart. 

Where can I look at adoption?

Adoption isn't right for everyone, but we have done a lot of research to get to this point.  If you are even considering growing your family through adoption, here are some people we trust. 

You can always contact the Department of family services in your state for foster care options.  

If you are looking at Domestic Adoption, Courtney Lott at Faithful Adoption Consultants is wonderful. 

If you are possibly interested in adopting an older child, our friend Murray Chanow at the Adoption Coalition of Texas is great.  He works a lot with Wendy's Wonderful Kids, the Dave Thomas for adoption organization.

Finally, for adoption from China or Haiti, our agency, CCAI, has been great.  There are many reasons I chose them and I would be glad to discuss it with you at any time. 

OOT, out of translation

Our dossier in China has been translated as of Christmas day. That means we should be LOA (our official Letter of Acceptance) in about 30 days. Then 9-15 weeks until we can go get our little girl. I know it doesn't seem like much, but it was what this mommy's heart needed!! 

17 months old today

Today Caitlyn is 17 months old!!  I wish I could post a picture or tell you a little something about her, but I can not.  And frankly, that stinks!!  Okay, not really what you came here to hear, but it is true.  I have a hard time telling people how I am feeling about that, because I am thrilled to be "pregnant".  That's kind of what I am and that's kind of how people around me think of me.  No, I don't have a big old belly, well at least not one that I can blame on a baby.  But I am expecting.  

The weird thing though, and the part that I can't quite get my mind around, is that she continues to grow up without us.  Did they celebrate her in any way today?  Did they love on her?  Did they even notice that today was kind of a special day?  I mean, truth be told, did I notice my birth childrens' 17 month old birthdays?  Maybe, but maybe not.  They were loved and held and valued everyday, so I don't know if I did anything special when they turned 1 year and 5 months old.  With Cole I was about to pop with Connor and with Connor, I was overwhelmed with Cole, so maybe I didn't do anything special for them either.  But still, I am sad.  Is she walking? talking? crawling? laughing? Even more importantly, eating? Being loved? Is she warm? healthy?  UGH!!!  I'm so blessed by knowing that she is coming, but I want her to be here, not there. 

Merry Christmas, 2012

Christmas Eve without Caitlyn

I'm having a hard time putting in to words how I feel today.  I am happy and excited for the boys, but very emotional to be so far from my little girl.  This song says it perfectly. 

Third Day's Merry Christmas

Enjoy some pictures of our anticipation.

Moved to foster care

I have been dying to share and since my baby girl's picture is on their web site, I guess it is safe to say that my baby has had her first surgery (cleft lip) and has been moved to foster care with Eagles Wings 5, in the baby house.  This is such a good move for her.  We have sponsored her, but they are looking for more sponsors for her and two other new children. Off to school and I'll share more later!!

To sponsor, or just read more about their program, you can go to Eagles Wings 5.

Fundraising, The Apparent Project

 

First let me say that fundraising for adoption is hard and humbling.  We are are trying to put together the money to bring Caitlyn home through babysitting (call me if you are local and need help this holiday season), saving, garage sales, etc.  We are SO thankful to those who have helped us, prayed for us and loved us to this point and who will continue to support us over the next few months.


Now we are asking our friends, church and community to help us with the mandatory donation of $5500 to help the children left behind at Caitlyn's orphanage in China.  This is a state run orphanage of ten floors in a heavily polluted, very poor area of China. They, quite literally, do not have heat, enough food to eat, enough clothing to share, enough cribs for the babies, etc. Yet this is where our Caitlyn, for the first two months of her life, was syringe fed by a willing angel, because she would not eat from a bottle due to her large cleft lip and palate.  They could have left her to perish, as many orphans with cleft lip and palate do, but they chose to save her.  We are so thankful.  


So even if we didn't have to (this is a mandatory donation, as part of the adoption process) we would want to donate to this orphanage that saved our daughter and so many more.  They know her.  We do not yet.  We love her, but do not know her.  We want to help them care for all those orphans that do not yet know a mother's love. 


Soooo, for this gift giving season, we are partnering with another great organization, The Apparent Project.  The Apparent Project is a not for profit organization in Haiti, that my friend Valerie introduced me to.  They are wonderful.  They hire local people and teach them a craft and pay them double minimum wage, so that they can break the cycle of poverty. (The minimum wage in Haiti, like so many other countries, is just enough to survive.  It is not enough to ever break the cycle of needing help.)  


We are selling bracelets as a holiday fundraiser that The Apparent Project artisans have made.  Part of the money from each sale will go to our adoption and part will go to the Apparent Project.  To learn more about the Apparent Project, go to http://apparentproject.org/mission.html.  


The picture above and below are examples of the beautiful bracelets we are selling.

I will have these available throughout the holiday season.  They are $8 a piece and each one comes with a tag that tells a little about the Haitian artisan that made the bracelet.  Colors vary.  You can see what I have or tell me some basic colors you are looking for.  These will make great teacher gifts, stocking stuffers, etc.  If you are local, I can get them to you.  If you are long distance, just add the actual shipping price. 


Thanks so much for considering helping us and this great ministry at the same time!!  

Pre-approval

We got pre-approval today!!! 

Announcing our little girl, Caitlyn Noel. 

 

Caitlyn is a name we have had for about 12 years now.  We were just waiting for a girl and we had to negotiate a bit on the spelling, but this goes with our current "C" theme.  Noel is special because it is David's gradfather's name, Leon, backwards.  Leon never seemed to fit anywhere, but Noel fits perfectly and it will always mean something special to us.

 

We will also be working part of her current Chinese name into her name but are not supposed to post her Chinese name and are waiting to see what part of it she is called by. Unlike a lot of names assigned by orphanages, hers actually has a sweet meaning and we are excited to figure out how to honor where she is coming from in some way. 

 

So without further delay, Meet our Caitlyn!

Letter of Intent

We have received a referral and submitted our letter of intent (LOI).   I wish I could post some pictures, but we have to wait for PA, pre-approval.  Sometimes it arrives in a few days, sometimes a few weeks. I can tell you about her though!!!

 

So on Monday, I was at swim team practice with Connor. As we were driving home, I realized I had somehow missed a call. When I realized it was from CO., where our agency is located, I wondered if it really could be a referral.  I called back and spoke with the waiting child department and they told me I had a referral.  I was so excited.  My normal reaction to anything emotional is to cry, but I was driving and so I just screamed and got really giddy.  Connor was really excited.  He learned his new little sister's Chinese name right away during the call and he can say it better than any of us!  Our sweet little girl is 14 months old. She was born on July 28, 2011.  She would be the age of my baby class this year, so every Tuesday and Thursday until we get her, I can watch the babies and have some idea of what she should be doing developmentally.  

 

Her special need is that she has an unrepaired bilateral cleft lip and palate. It is incomplete on the left (meaning she has a little gum line and even a couple little teeth) and complete on the right (meaning it is completely open in to her sinus cavity.) The surprising and good news is that she still looks like a really healthy little peanut despite this. She almost has a little chub to her cheeks and she has bring pink healthy lips and clear eyes.  This thrills us to no end. It was sobering to talk to our local cleft team at Childrens' Hopsital in Atlanta and hear that a lot of cleft children in China orphanages do not make it to their first birthday.  So we know she is a strong little fighter. She only weighed 14 pounds at a year, so she is still small, but hopefully very healthy.  It is very possible that her lip will be fixed before we get her, but it hasn't been done yet.  In the states, this is a correction that is done at about 3 months, so it is long overdue.  Her palate will not be done before we bring her home.  This will be our first surgery for her, happening as soon as 2 months after she comes home.  She will have several surgeries ahead of her to close her lip, soft palate, hard palate, create a gum line and fix her nose.  She will also have a lot of speech therapy and dental procedures in her future, but it is a completely fixable special need. What would cause her to be an outcast in China will be unnoticeable in several years. 

 

Unfortunately her file did not tell us a lot more, so we talked to our doctors and put together the best care plan we could with the information we have and we submitted our letter of intent to make her a part of our family!!!!  Our information shows that our little girl lives in the main part of the ophanage, but we are hoping that we will find out she is actually in foster care.  Given her healthy look, this would not be surprising and would be a much better scenario.

 

Everyone's next question is when do we get her?  Well, surprisingly probably another 6 months.  This may be the hardest part.  We will wait for our PA and then we can feel more secure that this really will happen.  But we still have to wait for a lot to happen after that.  The next big step after PA is LOA.  This is China's letter of acceptance, approving us to adopt this exact and special little child.  This will probably happen about 60-100 days after we receive our PA.  Once we get that we spend the next approximate 12 weeks organizing all the China details with the US details, getting visas and then finally, at the very end, making travel arrangements.  We won't know exact dates and therefore be able to plan travel until days to a couple weeks before travel.  Very scary for this control freak mommy!!  :)

 

Pictures coming as soon as possible!!

 

 

Update 1/26/12, It does not appear that our little girl is in the main foster care center connected with her orphanage, Eagles' Wings.

LID

We received an update today that our file was logged in to the Chinese system on Wednesday.  So we have "officially" been waiting for a referral for 3 days! :)

DTC

We are DTC!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (yes, that's me shouting!!)

As a reminder, DTC means that our dossier was sent to China today. I also had a great talk with the director of our waiting child department this week and found out that as far as they are concerned, we are eligible for a referral now, since generally the time between DTC and log in-LID (the official date you are eligible) is generally such a short period of time.

Time to celebrate :)

Dossier critical review

People ask us all the time where we are in the adoption process and what all these terms and abbreviations mean. This picture diagrams the process. 

We are between step 6 and 7 of 15, just waiting for our agency to approve the dossier we submitted and send it to China. (The dossier is composed of all the documents we spent months putting together, then notarizing, then county certifying, then state certifying and finally certified by the Chinese Consulate.) Now that the Atlanta office of CCAI (our agency) has done a critical review of our dossier and found everything to be complete, they will send it to Colorado, where they are headquartered.  Finally, hopefully in a few days, but more likely next week, it will be sent to China.  This very important step is known as DTC--Dossier to China.  Once the dossier is received in China and they log it in to the system, we are given a LID--Log in Date.  This date is what makes us eligible to be matched to our little girl, which is what happens between steps 7 and 8, so it's a pretty important step.

It has been a long two weeks waiting for our dossier to progress through the stages at our agency, but it has finally finished critical review and will be sent from the Atlanta office to the head office in Colorado today.  When I say it has been a long two weeks, I will admit that I have been doing a bit of obsessing.  Like all the moms in the Chinese adoptive process, I want to get to the next step as soon as possible because each step gets me closer to getting my little girl home to her family where she belongs.  But this step is a really big step and there is an unavoidable hurdle in my progress.  The Chinese Childrens Welfare (CCCWA) closes from September 29-October 7 for a holiday.  That means nothing is done that week.  I really hoped that our dossier would be in China when they were closed for the holiday.  At the beginning of September dossiers that went to the Atlanta office were sent within a couple days to the Colorado office and were DTC a few days after that.  So when I submitted our dossier on September 12, it seemed a real possibility, but I guess it was not meant to be.  

That may sound very dismissive, "it was not meant to be".  Despite the fact that I admit to obsessing a bit, stressing a bit, getting a little sad with this delay and a little frustrated, I truly believe that we will be exactly at the point we need to be at when our daughter's file is ready.  From the time of our LID, it could be days, weeks or months before we get a referral.  I am hoping for days, but the reality is that it will probably be months.  I hoped to know who our little girl was by this Christmas, eventhough I knew we wouldn't be approved to go get her until next Spring, at the earliest.  Now from all the indications, we might not know who she is by Christmas.  That makes me sad, I have to admit.  But I truly believe that must just mean her file won't be ready yet.  Her file will be ready, or we will somehow be directed to her, when the time is right.  So beside the fact that my human nature says that time is passing and we are getting older and our boys are getting older and we are ready and waiting for her, we will continue to wait until it is time.  

Feel free to kindly remind me I said that if I start obsessing again in the near future. 

(9/28/12 update: Due to the holiday, we have confirmed that our dossier will sit in the Colorado CCAI office and will not be mailed to China until 10/5/12.)

On Wednesday, September 12, we relinquished our complete dossier to our agency.  We hope we are DTC (dossier to China) within the next week, but that is probably pretty wishful thinking. Two weeks maybe?

This is an I800A, or I797, an Application for determination of suitability to adopt a child from a convention county. This would be a most precious piece of paper.  This paper gives us permission to adopt one child of either gender, 0-4 years old, healthy or who may have mild or severe medical needs from the Peoples Republic of China.  Immigration has a 90 day window to do this and ours only took 32 days!!  Yipee!!

I800A fingerprints

We have a receipt date for our I800A request of 7/19/12, but our appointment was not scheduled until today.  

 

We finally got our notices two weeks ago and I have wanted to walk in since then, as sometimes they will let you walk in early to be fingerprinted as long as you have the notice.  Unfortunately, the Atlanta USCIS office has not always let people walk in early, so on the chance that David would arrange his schedule to go down, only to be sent away, we did not try to go early.  

 

We arrived at 11:15 for our 12:00 appointment and had to wait in a line outside to get through Security.  David was not thrilled that he was not allowed to have his cell phone with him, but he did okay without it!!  :)  After the initial line, things moved quickly and we were out by 12:00.  David and I both had to have a couple fingers redone.  The agents were pretty formal, but once David's agent started to tease him about being too tense, my agent yelled across the room to the other agent that his wife was tense too.  They started teasing us both and we all loosened up a bit and were able to get the fingerprints done right. 

 

Now we just wait for the approval.  Could be up to 2 more months to still be in their 90 day window, but they have been getting approved pretty quickly lately, so I would love to get approval in a week or two.  Then all our dossier paperwork will go to get county certified, state certified and then to the Chinese consulate in Houston.  I can't believe we are finally getting close to DTC (Dossier to China.)

Home Study approved!!

What's new?  Well, it feels like a whole lot of nothing, but in fact, a lot of important steps are taking place.  We just received a call that our home study has been approved!!  Yeah!!  It has been done for a while, but we had to wait on my passport and our social worker was then on vacation.  She called about 15 minutes ago and said she is overnighting it to our agency tomorrow morning. 

 

I am actually heading to our agency tomorrow to get a bunch of our documents notarized.  Unfortunately I will probably miss the home study, but I have been told they should be able to notarize it and mail it to me and I should get it next week.  Then I will take all those documents to be county certified, then state certified, then send them all to the Chinese Consulate in Houston.  We already have the Chinese stamp on all of our birth certificates and our marriage license.  Those had to go someplace else, but are back safely.  After we get everything back from Houston, my end of our paperwork for the dossier will be finished and we wait.  

Somewhere in this process, our agency sends our request for I800A off and then in the next few weeks we will get an appointment to go get fingerprinted downtown, sometimes there is a long wait just for the appointment.  Then we wait for them to approve them and send us the approval.  Finally our dossier will be complete, but will still need translated.  

It's hard to know that it is early July and I have done all I can do on my end,  yet it will probably still be late fall before we have a log in date in China.  Still hoping to get a referral by the end of the year.  Only God knows, but we know he is in complete control and will somehow lead us right to our sweet little girl. All we have to do is wait...... and wait!!  :)

quick update

The sweet little girl we inquired about is already being reviewed by another family and there is a waiting list for her file.  It appears she will not be ours, but we are happy that she will not be an orphan for long!!

PS.  In early July I confirmed that this sweet little girl had found her forever family.  I'm so happy for her!!

Inquiring about a special focus little girl

We are inquiring about another little girl on our agency's special focus list.

http://www.chinesechildren.org/WaitingChild/Album_ChildProfile_Details.aspx?ChildID=10399

She has cleft lip/ cleft palate, but has obviously had the lip surgically corrected.  It is also listed that she has developmental delays, so we are interested to know what those are.  She is a little older than we were originally looking at, as she would probably be 4 by the time she came home to us, but we are interested and so we will see what they say.  We will only be allowed to review the file if no one else has inquired about her.  If others have inquired, they will get to review her file first.  Who knows?!?!

Special focus child and a little background

So yesterday we inquired about a special focus child. I never expected to inquire about a child because it means the child has more extensive needs, but I saw a child and wanted to know more. She was right around a year old and did not have a right hand. Her birth family abandoned her at 5 days old. Her history said that she was not yet crawling (not at all unusual for orphan care) and had some developmental delays. We were interested to know what type of developmental delays she had. The good news is that the little girl found her forever family last Friday but the bad news is that she is not ours.

In this journey we will not get a referral for a child until we have a LID. LID is the date our dossier is logged in to China. We have to complete our dossier (a long process that I talked about yesterday), complete our fingerprints and have them approved, have our dossier sent to China and then sometime after that we will have a LID. We are hoping to have a 2012 referral, but it could be sometime early next year. We will wait for a child that matches the special needs we feel we could accommodate in our family. Sometimes it happens right after your LID, sometimes it is many months later .  The good news for these children, but the bad news for us, is that waits are getting longer. Waiting families are more willing to take minor special needs so the good news is that there is less of a wait for these children to get to a forever family, but longer waits for families. The bad news is that children with more extensive needs wait a very long time. Once a child has not been matched and has waited for a certain period of time, they become a special focus child. You can request to review the file of a special focus child at any time in the process.

Recent updates

We have a ton going on in our adoption process, but none of it is that exciting.  I am working like mad on our dossier paperwork.  For those unfamiliar with the international adoption process, the dossier is comprised of all of our birth certificates, marriage license, employment verifications, physicals, vaccination records, budgets, passports and several other things that I am forgetting at the moment.  After I get certified copies of these documents, then they have to go back to the secretary of the state they came from and they have to be authenticated.  Then all the docs have to be sent to a US consulate...... oh and they can't be just any US consulate or the same US Consulate.  Each state is in a different US Consulate region, so Ohio docs have to go to one US Consulate, Georgia docs to another, etc.  And every place you send something charges a small fee (generally $15-$20) plus the cost for sending it certified, receipt requested and sending a return envelope, receipt requested.  Plus for the Consulates, you have to pay for a courier because they can't be mailed.  They have to be walked in, in person.  Then after ALL that, they have to be notarized and approved by the state of GA before our agency then approves them, translates them and sends them to China.  It is incredibly overwhelming, but it is what it is and I am trying to work through it all as quickly as possible.  I understand now why they say the dossier process can take up to 4-6 months.  After we get all our docs through this process, then we apply for our 1-800A, which is the application to adopt a child from a Convention Country.  When that is received and processed, we get our invitation to go downtown ATL and be fingerprinted. WOW, did you get all that? I can't believe that it is starting to make sense to me.  :)

The good news though is that we have had all of our home study appointments and our home study has been tentatively approved, pending the receipt of all the required documents that are part of the dossier.

An article about having a second child in China

This article talks about having a second child in China

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20111224/D9RQSRN00.html

Accepted to adopt from China

We have been accepted in to the Waiting Child program by CCAI- 

Chinese Children Adoption International!!!

What does that mean?  

Well, I attached the website, so you can get some details.

CCAI Waiting Children

But basically it means that we have decided to adopt a toddler or preschooler from China.  The child will have some sort of special need.  Since it will probably take about 18-24 months before we have our sweet girl home, we figure our baby girl could be being born right now.  She will grow up in an orphanage and maybe spend a little time in a foster home, if she is really a lucky girl.

Why did we choose China and this program?

To be honest, we originally said that we would not pursue an international adoption due to the extensive travel. It is hard to go to another country to adopt when you have children at home.  Most countries require 30 days in country and a lot of countries require more than one trip.  Our friends, Sandy and Jeff, volunteered to help my mom with the care of our boys, which opened the door a couple months ago for us to begin thinking about international adoption.

China requires a shorter stay than most countries.  We would be home in one trip of 14-17 days.  In the case we receive travel approval at a time of year when it would be very difficult for David to travel, I can bring a friend or family member with me.  (We are really praying this is not the case as David is a much better traveler than I am and we really want to do this together, but it at least gives us a safety net, if needed.)

When we originally looked at China, it was due to the security of the program and the moderate travel schedule.  To adopt a healthy child would take 5-6 years, so we looked at the waiting child program and my heart was stirred.

For a little background, David was born with club feet, I was born with amblyopia and Cole has autism.  If we were born in China, rather than America, we would have been less desirable and any of us might have been abandoned.  To think about my sweet Cole growing up in an orphanage because he was not wanted broke my heart.  You might say, but you didn't know Cole had issues until he was almost 2, but in China, that often doesn't matter.  With the one child law, and a society without social security, having a healthy boy is your retirement plan.  People often abandon girls right away in the hope that the next child will be a boy.  But sometimes children are not abandoned until a healthier child or a boy comes along.  Most times people can not afford the fine, at least a full year's salary often as much as 4-9 times the family's yearly salary, depending on the province and the whim of the local family planning official, to have a second child.  In other cases, as the child grows, they can not afford the fine and the medical expenses.  This does not mean these children are not loved.  (This has been hard for me to get my mind around.)

Often times parents will go to great measures to hide pregnancies to avoid being forced in to abortion if it is their second child and they will abandon their children far away from their homes, to avoid being caught, but in very public areas, to insure the child is found and cared for.  A special needs child does not have much hope for a future in China.  They are often hidden and are generally unschooled.  They look forward to a life of poverty and often begging.  Parents know that growing up in an orphanage is awful, but they have great hope of the child being eventually adopted and given a better life.  We decided that we can give a child that better life.  We are not rich, by any means, but we are blessed and with our insurance, resources and love, we can give an abandoned child much more than they had the hope for in their country.

After MUCH prayer, we feel this is where God is calling us and where our third child is.  It will be a long road and we will not have our child for a long time, but we are ready and on our way.  We start orientation this Friday, 4/27/12.

The end to that

Well, just a brief update.  The domestic situation that seemed like it might happen, did not.  It was a hard end due to the way it happened, but after a week, we are at peace.  Despite some terribly bruised emotions and maybe a little anger for the way it all happened, we know that God is in charge.  Who knows what God has in store for us, but we are at peace to see. God is good, ALL THE TIME!!  We are committed to praying for the birth mom and dad and the child that will be born soon, but it was not meant to be our child.

An email that opened the door to a possible domestic adoption

I want to say more about the possible domestic adoption possibility we have, without giving too much information, for legal reasons and for the privacy of everyone involved.

David had such a great year at his company, that he won a trip to his company's president's club. He has won every year that he has been in sales (a little bragging on one's hubby never hurt anyone) but this year the winners got to take their spouses. (Also due to my hubby pushing his bosses to let them take spouses!! Love that guy!!) This year the president's club was at Captiva Island.

So on the morning of March 24, we were hanging in our hotel room. We had a little time before we were supposed to meet our friends to go to the pool and decided to kill some time and check emails. I had an email from a sweet friend (K) that asked us where we were in the adoption process. She had a friend (C) that had adopted two of her four children and that friend was approached by a neighbor about a possible adoption situation. The neighbor was the mom of a teen expectant father, and the family was pursuing adoption for the baby. C was not interested in growing her family any further, but remembered that K had told her about us.

We gave our information to K and approved the family to call us. Then K delivered her third child, only hours after that, so we didn't hear back for a few days. (I guess that third one comes fast.) On Wednesday, I spoke with K's friend, C, and found out more about the family. On Thursday, I spoke with the mom of the expectant father. Over the weekend, we had several conversations and texts with the expectant parents and now we wait. They expect to make their final decision by the end of the second week of April. The expectant mother is due May 6.

At this point, it does not seem that this will be a match for us, although it certainly felt like it for a while. We are trying to put ourselves in the position that if we get a call, we can jump through the legal hoops that we need to, to take the referral, while at the same time, not get our hopes up.

This adoption thing is all about hurry up and wait!!

Introduction to adoption

For those who didn't know, we are hoping to grow our family through adoption.

As a little background, we have always faced fertility issues, but have been blessed with two wonderful boys and several babies in heaven. We have more love to give, but after our last miscarriage, of twins in the summer of 2010, we knew we were done. After a short while, we started playing with the idea of adoption. I felt that our family was not complete and although David tended to agree, the cost and process was completely overwhelming. For the next year I did a ton of research and in the spring of 2011, we decided to move forward with adoption. At Christmas, we sent letters to everyone we knew, hoping for a private referral. Due to our age, we gave ourselves a year.

In March 2012, we decided to pursue an international adoption, while still being open to domestic adoption.