Our Adoption Journey

2008-02-15T09:29:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we received an "On Deck" e-mail from our Agency! After long months of waiting and discouragement at the continued extended wait times, we are finally getting very excited. I doubt out LID will come up in the March referrals, but we're hopeful that April or May will bring our news. The tunnel now has a bright light at the end!

2008-01-18T18:06:00.001-05:00

It's just over two years now that our paperwork was logged in at the CCAA (January 13, 2006). As of today the CCAA has referred children through December 19, 2005. Based on the last few months referrals of getting through just 5 or 6 days per month, it may yet be several months before we see our referral. We are so looking forward to it!

In November and December our family had the opportunity to participate in a music missions trip to Bordeaux, France. Below is a picture we took as we travelled to the coast for some sightseeing. It was a terrific experience, and you can read the details on our blog at musicalheirs.blogspot.com.

2007-08-06T12:46:00.000-04:00

On Friday, August 3, the CCAA announced it had placed children with families whose documents had been completed before November 21, 2005. Just 7 weeks of documents until ours is completed!

Those 7 weeks may possibly drag into 7 months of time, unless the CCAA is able to speed up the process, which is currently 1 week per month.

Based on that, our family is traveling to Paris and Bordeaux, France, the week of Thanksgiving and following, as part of a missions group to use choral music as a means of reaching French nationals. This will be our first missions trip as an entire family, and we are looking forward to it.

2007-07-06T14:38:00.000-04:00

Today the CCAA posted placement of children whose dossiers had been received by November 14. Eight weeks of referrals to go until we know who our girls are! At the current rate of one week of referrals per month, it could possibly be another eight months before our referral. But things could change just as quickly in the opposite direction, and we could see our referral earlier. God has that timing thing all set up...we're just ready to see it!

2007-06-26T15:32:00.000-04:00

18 months ago today, our paperwork arrived in China. As of today, referrals have been given out to parents with a LID of November 7. Our LID is January 13. Unfortunately, it looks like our referral is still several months away, perhaps into 2008. Only God knows what the journey He has in store for us looks like, and we are anxiously awaiting the roadmap!

2007-03-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

Today is one week short of 13 months since our LID in China. The CCAA has placed children in the hands of those LID is October 24, 2005 or before. When we started this journey, the wait time was 8-10 months. Now it seems to be 16-18 months. The CCAA is placing about 2 weeks of dossiers every month, so it will most likely be late this summer before we receive our referral and get to travel to China. But God is in control of it all, and we will just wait for His timing.

2006-01-25T14:34:00.000-05:00

LID!

We received our LogIn Date today -- January 13, 2006. The Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) web site says they have completed reviewing all dossiers submitted through June, 2005, and sent referrals for those through May 13, 2005. So now the long wait begins!

2006-01-21T13:19:00.000-05:00

We first began considering adoption from China in the mid-1990s, after we saw a documentary on the Chinese policy of only one child. We had our first biological child in 1985, and as our family grew in size, we continued to think about it. Four children later, with our oldest in college and our youngest in sixth grade, we felt God leading us to adopt a child, and attended an adoption seminar in April of 2005. We prayed about it, and had our children do the same. Finally, in May of 2005, our whole family, including Hannah, Jonas, Mallory, and Kaylin, made the prayerful decision that we should adopt from China.

We applied to America World Adoption Agency, the same one used by Mary Beth and Steven Curtis Chapman to adopt their three Chinese children. We received our acceptance letter from AWAA on June 8, 2005. Then the long "paper chase" began, including criminal records checks, fingerprinting, and other detailed records, all of which needed to be notarized. A Home Study had to be requested and completed. This process, begun earnestly in late June, took until October 12, which was when our Home Study was completed and sent to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, from which we needed to receive our final piece of paper -- the long awaited Form I-171H, which finally arrived in our hands on December 5, 2005.

Now the final part of the paperchase began -- getting all our notarized documents authenticated by the NC State Department, the US State Department, and the Chinese Embassy. Instead of "fedexing" all these documents around, I and my good friend, John Wilkie, took December 12 and 13 to drive these documents from Weddington to Raleigh, NC, and then on to Washington, DC. I must say, despite what views you may have on some of government agencies, these three were very easy to work with, and very speedy in handling the authentication process. It took 30 minutes to get our documents authenticated in Raleigh and Washington, and about 3 minutes to drop them off with the Chinese representatives. So on Dec. 13, John and I left our precious 13 documents with the Chinese Embassy, which takes 4 days to authenticate (unless you want to pay an additional $30 per document rush charge).

On Monday, Dec. 19, our documents arrived in Weddington from the Chinese Embassy! We now had everything together to send to AWAA, who then puts together our Dossier to send to China. I fedexed our documents to AWAA on Dec. 20, and our Dossier was sent on December 23 (our Dossier To China (DTC) date), and was delivered there on December 26. Now we are waiting to hear our actual Log In Date -- LID -- the date the Chinese actually begin to work through our documentation. We are in AWAA Group 246.

Occasionally during the last few months we've bantered back and forth about names, but haven't settled on any as of yet. We plan to pick out a new first name, and then use a Chinese name for the middle name. Many times the children in the Chinese orphanages are named for the location or surroundings they are found in, and then given the last name of the orphanage, or the orphanage director. We still have several months to go before we'll travel over to China to pick up our new girls -- we expect to travel in very late summer.