Finally...

Hi Everyone! I've been meaning to start a blog about our adoption journey to China since last November when our dossier was sent to China. Well, the holidays - both Thanksgiving and Christmas came a long and we got extremely busy! Don't really have an excuse for all of January and the majority of February. But I finally sat down and did it. So here's the current story!

In February of 2006 we began the process of adopting from China. We chose to use Children's Hope International for our adoption. We had heard many great stories about them and knew that they are to our knowledge the largest agency in the US doing adoptions from China. Our questions were always answered within 24 hours as per CHI's policy. We never felt reluctant to call and we definitely talked to Vonda our adoption coordinator a lot!!!! We were fingerprinted on May 30th, my birthday in Memphis and even made a trip to Graceland. However, our homestudy agency here in Little Rock forgot to send our homestudy! We found this out in July when we still hadn't received our I-171H back. So finally in September after another 8 weeks of waiting we received our I-171H. We ended up waiting twice as long as we should have - a total of 16 weeks! We were very disappointed in this setback as we know that our paperwork would've been on it's way to China at the end of August or early September if this had not happened. But, Lane has always told me to look at it this way, there's a reason that this happened - it wasn't our time yet. I'm still not completely convinced. But as most of my family and good friends know, I have never been patient!

It took us about 3 1/2 weeks to get all of our documents notarized, authenticated by the states they came from (Arkansas, Indiana, Wyoming & Nevada). Then they had to go to Washington D.C. to receive final approval from the U.S. Department of State and the Chinese Consolate. We hired a courier who does this and it was so worth it! We found out that we had a document missing the week we were hoping to have our dossier sent to China. So very quickly we had to get that taken care of! How frustrating!

So finally on November 3, 2006 our dossier made it's way from St. Louis to Beijing, China. I'm not quite sure how long it took, but I'm almost certain it was there by Monday. Then it took the China team just about 2 weeks or so to translate all of our paperwork from English into Chinese. I can't even imagine what it looks like written in Chinese! After it was translated, the agency's China team delivered it to the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs). It took the CCAA 3 weeeks to log in our dossier into their system. We found out right around Eriks 3rd birthday that we were LID (log-in date) on the 13th! It was such a relief, but now the 15 to 16 month wait began. So not looking forward to it!

However on a brighter note, we are praying that we get the chance to adopt a waiting child. We have been trying to adopt a waiting child since March of last year, however so are so many other families working with our agency. And the CCAA only sends our agency waiting children's files every 3 to 4 months. We are currently waiting for CHI to receive it's next batch of waiting children. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to be selected to view a file!

So that's where we are at now. We're 2 months into the 15 to 16 month waiting game!!! It's hard to believe it's already been 2 months, but it's still a reality that we could have to wait another 13 to 14 months! Luckily our agency has a wonderful message board where we can communicate with other waiting families, families who have received their referrals and families that have come home from China with their children. It is such a Godsend when you think you'll have to wait an eternity. Plus we are meeting families with children from China in the local area who will help us with the wait!

I realize as I was going to sign off, that many of you are probably wondering why we have to wait so long, right? There are so many families that are wanting to adopt from China and not enough paper ready children to place for adoption. The CCAA has a limited number of resources and people to take care of this. And from what we have read in various places as well as been told by CHI, the CCAA send the paperwork to each orphanage and when they get around to it, is when they get around to it. And not all orphanages in China place children from adoption. I don't really understand this as there are so many children that will grow up without a mother or a father. China will be enforcing some new adoption policies as of May 1, 2007 and we are not affected as our paperwork is already there. This is to slow down the number of families trying to adopt from China as the workload is completely overwhelming for the CCAA right now.

So that's it for right now. I will try to post updates at least once a month if there are any. At the least to let everyone know how we are doing. We are part of the FCC (Families with Children from China) Central Arkansas chapter and they have a monthly meeting for Waiting Families so we can always share that! I just want to get to the part where I can go shopping!! You have no idea how hard it is to see little girl clothes and I can't buy them! I know my time will come.