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……..