Adoption Journey

So....how did we get started on this journey to adopt our daughter from China. Here is a bit of the history (in future posts I will let you know about some of the specifics of this very long process) Mark and I met in 1990 and started dating in 1993 (that in and of itself is a great story, which I will save for another day) We got married on September 23, 1995 and began our journey together as a family. As the years went by, we realized that having a child was apparently not going to be as easy as we thought it would be. Our quest for a baby took us to an infertility clinic in PA. After many procedures and a lot of medication, it was clear that if we wanted to grow our family, it would have to be through adoption.



In early 2005 we attended an informational meeting at Bethany Christian Services about international adoption. Right away we were drawn to China. Nancy's dad had lived in China for 7 years, and always had tales of how great the chinese are. There were also some financial considerations for going with China. So we started was is affectionately called the paper chasing. We had to get original birth certificates, marriage certificates and other documents. Of course, everything had to be authenticated and state sealed--so it is a long process. We also began our homestudy. This included each of us writing a biography of our life so far, 3 home visits, physicals and finger prints by both homeland security and the DE state police (we are happy to report--that although getting fingerprinted is not Nancy's forte--both Mark and Nancy have squeaky clean records!) We finally had all of our paper work together by the end of June, 2006. This is where it gets fun.



Nancy had to take all of our documents to Dover to get them state sealed. I almost had a panic attack when two of our documents came back with new staples and the old marks glaring me in the face--you are not allowed to have any stray marks anywhere on any document. Our social work assured us that the people in Grand Rapids (Bethany's home office location) could work wonders, so we packed it up and sent it to GR. This was on July 5th.



After it arrived in GR, the China team looked it over and then sent it out for authentication and translation. We found out that our Dossier was headed to China on August 8th, 2006. We then had to wait(so what is new) for our Log-In-Date--the date everything was checked in to the CCAA (Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs). We finally heard that our LID was August 30,2006. The next step in our wait was about to begin.

To be continued........

It looks like they made it to March 6, 06 for referrals this month--at least it is another 4 days down! We will take what we can get. In the mean time, I will be enjoying a snow day tomorrow (Lord willing). Enjoying a snow day means putting my living room and dining room back together since they were both painted last week. It was a great opportunity to clean thing out. Both rooms look fresh and new--it is a great feeling!