I started our blog on April 10, 2008, and wrote the following entries over the course of time during our wait for referral for our baby girl.
Posted by Jan
As I write this for my baby girl, we have a LID of January 5th, 2006.
At this time, we not know if you were born yesterday, today or tomorrow. We do not know what you look like. We do not know your place of birth - except that it is somewhere in China. We do not know when we will meet you, however, we do know that we already love you more than you will ever know.
We look forward to the day we will be given to each other - the day we become a family. We cannot wait to share with you the many things life has to offer you. We know that you will have fears, and, we hope that you will find comfort in our arms.
In your short life, you have already lost so much. So begins your healing process - a new beginning, a new life, and a bonding process.
We've been toying with the idea of creating a family website since the end of January 2006, and we opened this idea officially today...at least on paper....since today is the day we were given our Log-In-Date in the China Center of Adoption Affairs. We are now officially "China pregnant/paper pregnant/adoption pregnant" for approximately 2 months. We are now officially "a waiting family", and it feels like we have just received the result of a blood test to confirm a pregnancy - without the pain of a needle stick! Especially, since I would be the one to get stuck! - Not to discount the sometimes painful process of gathering several documents into a dossier - talk about paper labor!
We started our process of adoption in 2002, however, through unforeseen family illness and subsequent loss, we had placed our process on hold. During this time most of our documents and applications had expired, and, most of our dossier had to be redone. Throughout this process, all of our documents have been signed and sealed on several different government levels over a course of time from Notary seals, to County Clerk seals, State seals right up to the Chinese Consulate seals as of November 2005.
We were quite proud to personally hand over to the director of our adoption agency our dossier, which laid bare our lives, financial status and intensive governmental back round checks, as well as, being fingerprinted on a federal level several times which takes a fair amount of faith and seems quite unusual for the average bear!
Just to start - can you imagine contacting a social worker to start a process of a home study to come up with a biography of your lives. It seems so surreal to read about yourselves and your family histories as if you were on the outside looking into your own life. A strange feeling, yet, quite interesting.
Each adoption story is the same, yet at the same time, each story is unique. Some families want to add to their already growing families, others long to have at least one child to complete their family. The latter happens to be our story.
Whatever path each story begins, they all have a common thread - the love of a child.
We've seen many different reactions to "Inter-racial", " International" adoption:
Why China?
How much does it cost?
What a wonderful thing you are doing!
Why can't you adopt from your own country?
We have children that need homes in our own country!
The reactions go on and on. For the most part people are very excited and very happy for us. Whatever the reaction, It does not matter.
What does matter is the happiness, love and support we will share, and how we will grow our own family!
Written with love for my baby girl!
Posted by Jan
