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!