Process

Sometimes when you are in the adoption process things begin to feel surreal. Right now with our main dossier in country & our homeland security approval coming very soon, most of my CRAZY running around is over. Now we are almost to the point of sitting back and waiting...waiting on that phone call that will turn our world upside down. With the way our children's country moves, we will probably go in the first of March. So between now & then, we raise our money and we wait...

I remember the wait and the frantic phone call December 31 2005....Yvonne "hello" Agency "we need you to leave for China by 5th" OMG!!!! I had to get a VISA for travel from Washington DC's Chinese Embassy & arrange my flight OVER New Years Holiday! I do not know how it all came together to this very day, it's a blur with just little pieces here & there...what a crazy 6 days! But it all came together! And on Jan 8th (Jan 7th here and that added to some confusion) I sat in a cold orphanage & waited. Waited for a lady to come in the door and hand me Shad. What a moment forever emblazoned on my mind.

With Steve, Sam & Shad those first few moments are like little videos in my brain. With all three, all I can remember of those moments are them! I don't know who handed them to me or even what they looked like, ALL I focused on was that child! So as with childbirth, adoption is 100% the same, you don't see nothing but the child! And it's shocking! I know when I was pregnant both times I was shocked to see a real baby:) I guess I thought ET was in there moving around or something. Well with adoption it is shocking to see that little person that you've fallen in love with from a picture, in real life! It is breathtaking!

So right now I'm in the stretch where it seems unreal. Will I really get to that child? This time around we have many more worries , both for the country and the changes that seem to come without warning and for the children's health & well being. We know more this time and it is scary...lots can go wrong just like in a pregnancy.

Things have moved at such speed for our adoption, that it is truly unreal. It certainly helped that we'd done an adoption before, already had a Social Worker who'd worked with us and had done home studies & post placement reports on us. But honestly I just did everything humanly possibly to speed things along. If it could be hand walked through I took it. I didn't give any allowances for human error or wasted time and that does help! Pretty sure we had so many paperwork errors that I'm responsible for killing a small forest! We had a friend of Jon's who is a notary that helped us so much, redoing everything and always being available for us! God provided for us.

So as committed as we are in our hearts, we are trying to hold back a little emotionally. We've seen other families lose their child(ren) due to other folks adopting that child or changes in that government's adoption laws ( they didn't affect us this time) The country we are adopting from does not allow the family to pre select a child and have that child held for them. China is different you don't have that concern. Of course it doesn't seem that children in institutions or with the various special needs our two have are really affected by that. They've both been waiting since they were 1 year old, so chances are no one else will come for them. The ones who seem to get adopted out like that are ones who have minor special needs & who are still in orphanages. So in one small way we are lucky. "So while it is not likely we'll have complications, it's still a scary thing that lurks in the back of my mind!

So we are just holding on, doing (or have done) everything we can do & praying that all goes well! Please continue to pray for our babies!!!!