So we've been working a lot on our adoption lately, and one of the things I've been reminded of as I spend way too much time on the internet is that everyone who adopts a child internationally seems to have a blog. So I figured we may as well have one, too.
A quick recap for those who are new to our story or have lost track of the plot... In late 2007, after trying for a second child for more than two years with no clear diagnosis and neither of us getting any younger, Tom and I decided to investigate the possibility of growing our family through adoption. I wish I could say that I approached this beautiful option with openness and excitement... but alas, I experienced more than my fair share of reluctance, bitterness and self-pity. At times it was truly pathetic. Thankfully my husband is a better person than I am, and some of his optimism eventually rubbed off. We spent lots of time researching our various options, meeting with an attorney, attending adoption workshops, and eventually decided to pursue an international adoption. After yet more soul-searching and researching, we decided that China would be our country and CCAI (Chinese Children Adoption International) would be our agency.
We began working in earnest on our adoption dossier. (For the uninitiated, a dossier is a file containing all of your important personal documents, plus an adoption home study, physical examination reports, criminal background checks, financial and employment statements, etc. Many of the documents must be notarized. Others - like birth certificates - must be original copies. All documents are then certified by the secretary of state's office of the state from which the document originated, then they must be authenticated by the Chinese consulate's office (in Houston, for those of us living in the Southeast), and last but not least they're all sent to Rome to be blessed by the pope - okay, not quite that bad, but the rest of it is true. The dossier also includes advance approval from the U.S. government to bring an orphan into the United States. This part of the process requires fingerprinting, and the approval conveniently expires every 18 months during your adoption process. Of course, there is a fee for each of these documents and for the various signatures, stamps and seals they receive. Once compiled, the dossier documents are translated into Chinese and sent to China, after which the family is issued a "log-in date" for their dossier. And then the hard part - the waiting - begins. I sometimes joke that when you give birth, the only thing the hospital verifies before you take the baby home is whether you have a car seat. You could live in your car for all they know, as long as you have that baby in a car seat when you leave the hospital. Adoption is a whole different ball game.)
Around the same time that we started working on our dossier, we also submitted what's known as a "medical conditions checklist" to our agency. One of the reasons we chose China is because they have a very well-organized process for placing children who have various medical conditions (generally referred to as "special needs adoption", although many of these children are not what Americans may think of when they hear the term "special needs"). It's called the Waiting Child Program, and there are thousands of children (including lots of boys!) living in orphanages in China simply because they have a medical condition. Many of these conditions would be relatively easy to manage here in the U.S., but are too difficult for families to get treatment for in China. Like the healthy Chinese girls everyone has heard so much about, these children are often abandoned by their birth parents - probably for a variety of reasons, including the lack of access to affordable, quality medical care, China's "one child" policy, and the cultural stigma attached to certain special needs. Approximately 85% of orphans in China have a diagnosed medical condition. We decided that we'd try to adopt a child with a treatable medical condition, and that we would be open to a boy or a girl - which meant we'd probably be matched with a boy, and fairly quickly, since most adoptive parents (in all adoption programs, not just China) prefer girls, and half of the "waiting children" in China are boys.
Well, wouldn't you know, about halfway through our dossier completion, we got a positive pregnancy test on July 4, 2008. (Yes, this happens, but not nearly as often as infertile couples have to endure the well-meaning-but-hurtful advice to "just adopt, then you'll get pregnant". Maybe I'll write more about this in another post - it deserves one of its own.) We called our adoption agency right away, so that they would put our medical conditions checklist aside and not match us with a child. But we decided to continue with our dossier, since we realized it would probably be our last pregnancy and we had become very committed to adopting. Our agency could not have been more gracious, and we completed our dossier a few months later. Our official log-in date was October 31, 2008.
Since then, we have welcomed our 2nd boy (whom we named Samuel, our long-awaited blessing), moved to a new house, and our oldest, Patrick, has started kindergarten - and all the while, our dossier has been sitting in China awaiting its "turn" in the standard (non-special needs) Chinese adoption program (which now has a waiting period of nearly 5 years). We recently re-submitted our medical conditions checklist to our agency's Waiting Child Program, requesting a girl up to 30 months of age. The special needs we are open to include cleft lip/palate (which accounts for 25% of the waiting children placed through our agency), club foot, congenital heart defect, and a variety of other mild to moderate, treatable special needs. We're working on renewing our immigration approval to bring a child into the U.S., which involves updating our home study (since we have both moved and had another child since our first one) and being re-fingerprinted.
We really have no idea what to expect in terms of timing, which is a little like being pregnant without a due date. (Minus the weight gain, the nausea, and the varicose veins, but still...) We hope to be matched sometime this year. Once we are matched with a child, our dossier will move from the standard adoption program to the Waiting Child Program, and we will travel within 4 to 6 months to bring our daughter home.
So that's the inspiration for the name of our blog (with apologies to Wally Lamb, whose book by the same title I have not read - but I bought a copy for Tom as a Christmas gift, and he seems to be enjoying it). Wishin' and hopin' for our little girl, who is somewhere in China waiting to come home...
