Getting closer...

Yes, it's a picture of a kitty... our Francesca. I didn't have time to snap something that would be appropriate to the post and I had this image just languishing in a folder! Little Miss thing here was lounging on the radiator cover and giving me the evil kitty eye.. so I snapped a couple of shots of the cuff.

So here is the latest.... our home study update and all the necessary associated paperwork has been brought together, stamped, stapled, certified and coming to think of it we should have taken it to be blessed! Anyway, it has been signed, packaged up and sent off to the land of Immigration.

So now we wait for them to give us the thumbs up... and cash the huge check we gave them to review what has already been reviewed and approved by half the known universe! 

From here on out it's trying to plan for a trip that will happen sometime soon... but we don't really know when. Nothing like knowing you will be leaving your country, traveling to and staying in China for approximately 14 days and having no idea when that will actually happen!!!!

We have a ton to do... finances, work on the house, trying to learn some Mandarin... our heads our still spinning. At the moment, and I'll stick to the simple stuff, we are planning her room... right now we're on the gutting and starting fresh stage! Getting out the furniture, ripping up the old carpeting...  It looks like we may refinish the hardwood floors in her room and as for the theme, well, it's still developing! 

In the meantime we have been moved along at the agency.. now we are in the hands of the travel team... it's kinda exciting, and scary!

The emails are urgent sounding and we find it hard to make sense of them because they have the tone that our leaving is just around the corner

and while I suppose that's true, it's very difficult to make sense of travel planning when our paperwork has really just reached the hands of our immigration department and they could have it for up to 90 days.... 

well, that's all for this post... more soon! I think...  

Then she was ours…. sort of...

In the midst of all of this, before our home study update was quite complete, we received the long awaited, long hoped for, letter from China… the Letter Seeking Confirmation! That’s China’s way of saying, we approve you and if you still want this little one, she’s yours. So we signed that glorious document, sent it to Kim at Great Wall and by last Friday it was on it’s way back to China! Officially, Wu Bei Jiao, will be our daughter!!!!! Wait for the thud… ah yes, there it is… the sound of me hitting the floor.  :-) 

Cue Kendra laughing at me while trying not to pass out herself. 

Kendra and I have been in a fog about the news. It doesn’t seem real at all. When we started the blog I was literally sick to my stomach because it just did not seem real. Also because I felt like we weren’t allowed to tell people this news yet! Kim at Great Wall assured me that it was officially ok for us to post blogs, ask for more pics of her, write to her, send her care packages! We can send her things! Amazing. Just amazing.

So Christy is getting our final paperwork together, certifying a handful of copies and then we get to send that all to …. sigh…. our government. The I800a. It goes to our immigration department, well, it goes to their p.o. box. Then someone there sends us a letter that they received our form. Then it goes somewhere else and someone there reviews everything… if they like us, and all the grammar is correct, and the spelling is right, and the form is just exactly how they like it, and it’s the second blue moon of the year of the comet, they will approve us and send it all back to us stamped approved. Then we file the I800, get an appointment to get yet another set of digital fingerprints and then Kim can get us the appointment with the Consulate and get our dates…. deep breath…. 

to travel to China!!!!

How long does all that take? Good question. We don’t know! Once the paperwork goes to immigration they can take anywhere from 30 to 90 days to review and approve us. If they find a problem and we have to fix or change anything, it will take even longer. Kim and Christy went over the paperwork a dozen or more times to make sure there were no problems so we are pretty confident that everything is on par. So honestly we could travel anywhere from (the highly optimistic) April to September! Basically, we’re back to waiting. Now however, we need to focus on the house, finances, learning Mandarin, thinking about how we can learn to make her favorite meals, reading more on attachment issues, and for me, just understanding what a 4yr old will even look like waddling around in our home every day! So this is a very different kind of waiting. In fact we suspect that no matter how long it takes before we eventually travel, it will seem like the time raced by!

Madness I tell you! MADNESS!!!!!!

Cue the music, unleash the hounds! Now begins the mad rush for documents, forms, paperwork, updates and updates and updates, etc and so on!

We submit our Letter of Intent and a Care Plan to Great Wall which was forwarded to China. 

Contact the home study agency to do our update - cue the sound of screeching brakes and glass - they did not pursue hague Certification! OH NO! Wait - Great Wall (our savior Kim) tells us the local agency can do the update under the umbrella and supervision of Great Wall.  They pull our records from the storage facility (!) and assign us a new case worker and we’re off to the races. New case worker (our original case worker has left the agency and moved home to Wisconsin!!) comes out to our home - several visits, more fingerprints, more background checks (federal, local) more write ups, more background, more financial info, more of everything, all in a mad rush. Then we have to complete our hours of Hague certified training. Online and bleary eyed for hours...

Several weeks later later we receive the confirmation from China that our Letter of Intent was accepted by the CCAA! They move our dossier up for review! We have just leapfrogged roughly 18 months ahead and we are now one step closer! 

More rushing. Then more waiting. Rinse and repeat. 

Christy, our new case worker, not being familiar with international adoption had her hands full with us! She was a trooper though and put up with my text-ing her all the time and sending her frantic emails. She did get a kick out of my rambling and babbling at her on the phone though. She drove her supervisor crazy on our behalf and then with the help of the amazing gals at Great Wall, especially our referral counselor Kim, kept us on track and got our paperwork pulled together and our new write up moving forward.

Poor Kendra has been working nights thru this whole thing and having to leave a lot of this follow up to me so she was a nervous wreck!!! When I got overwhelmed she would slap me around and somehow, it would seem, we survived to get just a bit closer to Jiao-Jiao.

So in the meantime we were going crazy and Great Wall kept telling us not to worry, that she would most likely be ours. We were terrified to share the news with anyone and still could not help doubting and waiting for the other shoe to drop! We could not focus on what would need to be done if we got her because we were so focused on just trying to make it to that point…   and then……..

Murphy's Law

In true Murphy’s Law fashion, within weeks of finally giving in to the reality of the wait for a child, we saw a little face on the Waiting Child list. Her issues… minor and manageable! She was a bit older than I suspected Kendra would be agreeable to and I was unsure about jumping right into a child that was walking, talking, supercharged, and non-english speaking! When Keni saw her though,  she immediately wanted to know more. So once again we ventured into the unknown! 

Great Wall sent us a few small pictures and her background info was more substantial than is typical... 

Wu Bei Jiao. Birth date in April, living with a foster family, cleft lip and palate, eats well, ties her own shoes, likes to dress pretty, is outgoing, etc, etc! We received a whole folder of documents via email that had more info on her than we expected.
We did our research and made inquiries and decided, to move forward.

Where are we, NOW?

So fast forward a whole bunch more and the landscape looks like this... all of the ‘Stork Reports’ from Great Wall (children being matched with adoptive families) were showing referral times in excess of (and the number keeps growing) 36 months! Yes, 36 months. Why? The popularity of the program, the sheer volume of applications to be reviewed, the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs - www.china-ccaa.org) was overwhelmed, and then the Hague Treaty came into play, etc. By far the biggest determining factor was really that the sheer ratio of applications to available children had grown way out of proportion.

Now based on our application and certain criteria, we could have been matched with a child as young as 8 months of age. If we had stayed the course. If however, we did stay the course it would be about another 18 months (give or take a few months) before we were matched with a child. This is based on the fact that the referral times were continuing to grow and our log in date put us way down the line. The log in date being the official date our dossier (that dictionary sized load of official paperwork that was in essence, our life and our hope for a child) was received in China. So we started looking at the Waiting Child Lists.

Since Kendra is a pediatric RN, and this is already a scratch and dent household, adopting a child with some medical issues seemed, inevitable! It truly breaks your heart to read those Waiting Child Lists though. Some of the conditions are staggering. To say it’s painful is a gross understatement. Kendra being a nurse and having focused her work on special needs children for quite some time, helped us to determine what we could and could not handle with these kids. So many of the children on the Waiting Child list had such severe issues…

So we kept watching the lists and finally, truly, settled into The Big Wait. 

A little history…

This all started a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… well not quite,
but close! We had been talking about the possibility of adoption for a while off and on.

Then one day while in our driveway shoveling after a heavy snow, we suddenly took the big leap to commit to the idea. Yes, we pretty much decided in our driveway

while huffing, puffing and lugging a ton of snow down our long, narrow driveway!

Then we pushed it around further over omelettes and pancakes at the Perkins restaurant around the corner. Yes, we are really odd sometimes.

So we did more research and went to information sessions with several agencies…

in the end we decided on adopting from China and with Great Wall China Adoption agency(www.gwca.org). GWCA is in Texas, but, they specialize in adoption from China (hence the name). We liked China for many reasons and some of the bigger reasons being that they had one of the best programs for adoption as far as we could see and Kendra had been thinking about adopting a little girl.

Fast forward, fast foward…. find a local home study agency, home study visits begin, a mountain of paperwork, physicals, background checks (both federal and local), references, digital fingerprints, more paperwork, more background checks, interviews with the social worker, what did we eat 4 weeks ago for lunch, can we balance a ball and chew gum, the social worker visits our home and needs the full tour of the house - top to bottom, stem to stern (did you get a wholesale discount on the paint on your walls? good, you have indoor plumbing… you’d be surprised!) More interviews -
this time with each of us individually. Throw in a fistful of checks and on and on. 

Then, the big wait. 

Initially, all reports came back in our favor. The home study agency gave us the thumbs up, the adoption agency gave us the thumbs up and we even did a kind of
pre-approval and that came back positive. Now, we just had to wait…. and wait…. and wait some more. Meanwhile our fingerprints, background checks, and a ton of other expensive and cumbersome bits of paperwork and miscellaneous minutia had
all begun to expire… and we continued to wait. Not to mention people who knew we were adopting kept asking about how things were going and when we would have our little girl and after a while we felt like they all thought we were making up the whole scenario.  After a while, we started to doubt the whole thing ourselves. If not for the stack of paperwork the size of a collegiate dictionary we might have thought we did imagine the whole thing… you know, oxygen deprivation from lugging all that snow.

thus begins, The Big Wait….

by the way, that actually was the view from our driveway on that crazy day!

Say Hello to Bei Jiao

This is the first post in the blog dedicated to Wu Bei Jiao. 

For those of you who know us, you are already aware that we have been in the long, long, LONG, process of adopting a little girl from China. Well, it looks like the day that we thought would never come, will be here before we know what happened!

Bei Jiao will be 4 yrs old in April and was born with a cleft lip and palate. As you might be able to see from the picture, her lip is repaired but we will have her palate (roof of her little mouth) repaired when she comes to her forever home with us here in the U.S.

There is so much to share with you since this 'junket' (LOL!) began almost 2 yrs ago but for now we thought we would just get the ball rolling since today, our LSC ( letter seeking confirmation) 

finally came from China (from China to Great Wall Adoption in Texas
and then to us!) and that single piece of paper makes all of this very real and very official.

She's really going to be our daughter!

More coming soon so please visit with us often... we really do have so much to tell all of you!