Introducing...

... our daughter, Hu San Ping!

                                                              (photo from October 2010)

We received a call from our agency, CCAI, early in the evening of a very crazy day (our oldest was sick with an ear infection, so we'd been to the local "minute clinic" and then to the pharmacy, arriving home after 6 PM and not having started dinner yet - you know how it is...).  In all the mayhem I happened to check the voicemail and there was a message from Judy at CCAI telling us about a child's file they wanted us to consider.  I didn't even finish listening to the entire message - our agency's main office is in Colorado so I knew if I called back quickly enough I'd be able to speak to someone before they left for the day.  I got through to Judy and she told me about Hu San Ping, a little girl born on January 20, 2010, in Henan Province.  Her special need is cleft lip and palate.  Minutes later, an email containing her pictures and basic information appeared in my inbox, and I had my first glimpse of our new little girl.  She was beautiful in spite of the fact that, at the time the photos were taken, she hadn't had any treatment for her cleft.  I called Tom and forwarded the email to him at work.  We both fell in love with her cute smile.

There was a little bit of ambiguity in her medical information, so we consulted with some specialists and asked our agency if they could get us any updates.  The specialists were very helpful, and our awesome agency was able to obtain more recent growth information as well as precious new pictures of her beautifully-repaired cleft lip.  We decided to accept the referral, which involves writing a letter to the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (the main government agency in charge of all China adoptions) detailing what we've learned about her special needs and how we plan to care for her.  A week later, we received our "PA" (pre-approval) from China, which states that they've agreed to move our dossier from the standard adoption program to the special needs program - meaning that we will be allowed to adopt this child.  So now we can post her picture on our blog, send her a care package, and start buying lots of pink things.  :)  We hope to travel in August (maybe sooner!) to bring her home.  It is an indescribable feeling.

Home Study Update

We met with our new social worker, Joan, a couple of weeks ago to complete our home study update.  (A home study is part of the adoption process for all types of adoption, and it involves meeting with a social worker at your home to discuss issues related to adoption, address any particular concerns relevant to your family situation, and to determine through a simple inspection that your home is safe for children and can accommodate your adopted child.)  The funny part about our home study update is that when Joan called to schedule her visit, she said, "I see your husband works for the same law firm as my brother."  So I asked what her brother's name was, and as it turns out he is one of Tom's closest friends and our oldest son's godfather.  Small world.  Joan had to check with our agency whether it was okay for her to do our home study update, considering this coincidental connection, and our agency confirmed that it was fine.  So we agreed to have Joan be our social worker, and it was fun meeting with her.

One of the biggest concerns with adopting a child older than a newborn is the issue of attachment.  There are a lot of opinions on this topic, but most experts and adoptive parents agree that the majority of children adopted after early infancy will struggle with attachment to some degree.  Children who have spent the bulk of their lives in an institution - which will likely be the case for our daughter - will also have growth and developmental delays.  The majority of kids catch up once they're in a family setting, but attachment seems to be the most difficult issue for many families.  The initial adjustment can be very, very challenging, especially when you combine it with the exhaustion brought on by major jet lag and serious sleep issues (common among newly-adopted children) and the needs of your other children.   Joan talked with us at length about what to expect in terms of our daughter's adjustment and how it might impact our family.  The good news is that there is support available for families struggling with post-adoption issues, the state has programs in place for children experiencing developmental delays, and most children become very attached to their families and adjust very well overall - but the whole idea is still rather daunting to say the least.  (Joan said that if she didn't scare us a little, she wasn't doing her job.  Suffice it say, she did her job.)

What's important to keep in mind is that adoption initially means a huge loss for the child.  She's not old enough to understand that being part of a family is so much better in the long run, and that her adoptive parents love her and will not abandon her.  All she can comprehend is that she has lost everyone and everything that is familiar to her, and it's confusing, scary, uncertain and it hurts like hell.  And for all she knows, it might happen again tomorrow.  Or the next day.  Hopefully she will have attached to a particular caregiver in her orphanage - or better yet, in a foster home, which is becoming more common in China.  This would mean a lot of grieving in the beginning, but in the long run it is better for a child to have had an attachment to someone special than a vague familiarity with nobody in particular.  We take for granted all the little interactions we have with our biological children, beginning even before they are born.  Human beings were not designed to be raised in institutions, and whether or not a child is "old enough to remember" the events of her early life, the lack of opportunity to form a strong attachment with a caregiver early in life is a serious wound to a child's spirit.  Not to mention the loss of her birth mother, whose voice she knew before she was born and who cared for her - at least for a time - prior to her being placed in the orphanage.        

I once listened to an audio presentation given by a priest, who quoted a parishioner of his - a mother of many children - on the topic of gratitude.  The quote was, "If you want gratitude, buy a dog."  As the mother of two children and the owner of one dog, I can tell you that this statement is true.  Our newly adopted child undoubtedly will have strong feelings about the strange-looking foreigners who have kidnapped her (i.e., us), but those feelings probably won't include a sense of gratitude.  We'll have to encourage her to trust us by keeping her close, responding to her needs, being her sole caregivers for awhile, encouraging eye contact and skin-to-skin snuggling, feeding her without fighting over food, keeping a consistent routine without fighting over sleeping arrangements, and helping her to understand what it means to be part of a family.  From trust comes love, but it takes time.          

Our new blog

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...