Welcome to our blog! This is where we will share with you our adoption journey. Ready to get started?
Here is a quick model of what the adoption journey is like: Get ready, get set, wait!
That's it. That's where we are. We're waiting...for the next year and a half (at least).
At the moment, we are estimating that we will not receive a referral until the winter of '08 or beginning of '09.
We are spending our waiting time learning about what it means to have an adopted child, a bi-racial family, and praying for our future baby (most likely a girl) and the Chinese family who will be choosing adoption for their child. Anytime a family chooses to terminate their parental rights, it is a painful and difficult decision. However, God promises he will give us beauty for our ashes. So that's how we pray for the family in China who has a tough road ahead.
Following is a time line of how things have unfolded so far.
11/11/06, Mailed our application to Holt International--our agency.
12/10/06, Learned that China was changing their marriage requirements (that we do not meet being married less than two years). In order to 'get in' under the old requirements we had to have our application to Holt by March 1 and it had to be in China by May 1. We made the Holt deadline by a few days and the China deadline by a month.
2/22 - 2/23/07, Spent a couple of days in Chicago at the Chinese Consulate getting our paperwork authenticated. We could have shipped our documents to the CC, but that would have taken too much time; so we drove them there. The CC puts stamps on the paperwork basically stating that these are indeed official U.S. documents so the folks in China know that we're on the up and up. They're pretty serious about who they give their babies to. The photo to the right is from the planetarium looking back toward the city.
2/23/07, Shipped our dossier to Holt headquarters in Oregon for review. The photo is from the UPS store in Romeoville, IL where we stopped to copy and ship our documents.
3/2/07, Our dossier was shipped to China.
3/28/07, Our dossier was logged in by the CCAA which essentially means they have received it and it's part of their records.
Our waiting period of 19 - 20 months (as of this writing) begins from the day our dossier was shipped to China, that is March 2, 2007. Doing the math, that's about Nov '08 assuming the time line doesn't continue to expand. Right now, it gets longer every month. So we'll have to see how everything shakes out.
