Adoption Update!

Tim got the following email on Christmas Eve:

CONGRATULATIONS, Tim & Suzanne,

Here’s the news you’ve long been waiting for—your dossier was sent to China today (12/23/2008)! J

Here’s what to expect for the next month:

The CCAA will receive your dossier in approximately 3-5 days. Our China Department will contact you by email once your dossier has been received by our representatives in China and hand-delivered to the CCAA.

The CCAA usually logs in dossiers within 4 weeks of their receipt. This Log-In Date is called your LID, the date that you may “count down” to your referral. As the CCAA is the ultimate authority in logging in your dossier, we are unable to estimate your LID. The CCAA should notify us of your LID within the next 8 weeks. We will e-mail you as soon as we have confirmation of your LID and will then give you instructions on how to download your LID Packet. Your LID will also be posted on your personal online Parent Access Network (PAN) page of the CCAI website, www.chinesechildren.org, the instant we are notified of it.

Again, congratulations! If you have any questions about this e-mail, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Congrats on hitting this milestone,
Kim

For those of you not familiar with the above (probably most of you, unless you've also gone through 2 year adoption pregnancy), this is a HUGE milestone.

Basically, in the next 8 weeks we'll get a time frame for when we'll be given our "referral". Referral basically means a "match", where adoptive parents get a picture and information about their babies. WOW! I can't believe after ALL of that paperwork (really!) we're almost officially at the "waiting" period.

Pray that we'll get our baby/ies within 18 month of getting out LID date! That would be super. For now, I'll just keep making booties (okay, I mean hair bows) as an expectant mom of girls (although we won't know if we're getting one or twins -or one- for another 18 months)!

A little miracle.... for those of you who don't know what's going on in China regarding adoption I should tell you about this little miracle. First, China is now considered a "Hague" country. The Hague treaty helps protect adoptive children from being placed into compromising/unfit or abusive homes. That's good, right? Except for the part that it makes international adoption way beyond complicated. As if the increase from 9 months to 2 years wait time wasn't already tuff. Hague families are now waiting a minimum of 3-5 years.

But we are somehow in the clear b/c of one little tiny document (I-600) that we happened to finish a year ago b/c of our original paperwork with Taiwan. Remember that agency that up and shut down in the middle of our adoption while in the US? Turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Today, we made yet another run to the American Consulate to renew this I-600, and the lady told me she'd helped many-a family. She said she was the 'go to' for American families adopting Chinese babies. She knew all the ropes. Here's the shocking part... because of this Hague treaty, we are the ONLY family and the LAST family that will go through her office. From now on everyone else (Hague families) have to go back and forth from BeiJing to Chicago. YIKES!

So if you really made it to the bottom of this post, thanks. Sometimes I really write so I can remember small little details of the hand of God in our lives. They say adoption is like pregnancy, in that everyone has a different "pregnancy" story, but in the end, you'll end up with a baby. I'm humbled to think of all the things that had to align perfectly for these babies to come (we want to adopt a few). Isn't it amazing, this whole adoption process?

Ronald Regan was once asked "which of your children are adopted, and which are your own?" His response?

"I love them so much, I've forgotten."

It is spiritual experiences like this that bond you to a child that you have yet to even meet. This is the first pregnancy where my Husband holds an equal part in the "carrying" of the baby... lol!