Please join us in this amazing journey we have set out on to provide an innocent little girl with a loving, caring home, and in turn she will fill our hearts with so much joy and love we will not be able to thank her enough.
Drew and I have always considered international adoption, but really started investigating seriously this past spring. Once we did the research, we just knew in our heart of hearts that this was the right decision for us. We have chosen an agency called Chinese Children Adoption International based out of Colorado with offices right here in Florida. Our experiences with them have been absolutely wonderful and they have made the process as painless as I guess it can be.
We hope to have your thoughts and prayers as we set out on this long and tedious journey to bring our daughter home. We have not yet settled on the name, but her middle name will be determined by her Chinese given name. For those of you unfamiliar with the adoption process, I will give a brief summary. You fill out some paperwork, then some more paperwork, then a little more paperwork, somewhere in between all the flying papers, you meet with a Social Worker who evaluates you and your family (since birth), then documents are sent out for Certification at the Secretary of State, then for Authentication at the appropriate Peoples Republic of China Consulate. Now since we were born and married in Kentucky, but have resided in Florida for so long, this was a bunch of different steps for different documents. In adoption terms, all this is called the "Paperchase". At the end of this daunting task, all final documents compiled are called a "Dossier". These are sent to our agency in Colorado for translation and review, then they send them off to China. Somewhere in the month after it arrives in China we will receive what is called a "Log-In Date". This is the big stuff...now the wait begins. The current wait time for Log-In to Referral (referral is your child match when you get a picture, medical history, etc.), is approximately 11-14 months. I do not want to be too anxious so we are honestly expecting a 14-16 month wait which should put us around Christmas time 2007. Of course since this is government red tape, these timelines may decrease at any time shortening our wait time but for now it is how it is.
Once we receive our referral for our daughter, travel should follow roughly 6-10 weeks after. We will be traveling with other families from different states in the US, possibly 10-20 families, that have received their referrals the same time as us. We figure the more the better for moral support.
">How do we know our child is a girl? China being a Communist country has a lot of political things going on that is quite hard to comprehend. One of them being the 1 child per family law. Each family may have only 1 child and the preferred child is a boy. Boys will grow up to take over the land, carry the family name, etc. Thousands and thousands of baby girls are abandoned each year due to this rule. This is how we know our baby will be a girl. The current "healthy" infant age to adopt now is 7-12 months old.
Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we muddle through the ups and downs of the "waiting". We will try to keep busy in preparation of what is to come. Somewhere way across the ocean, a little girl may be growing in a mommy's tummy right now that will be our little girl (kind of a strange concept), but nonetheless, God will keep an eye on that little one and he will choose the daughter that was meant for us.
