Where we are in the Journey...

We "officially" began our adoption journey on September 21, 2010 when we were accepted by our agency, Journeys of the Heart, to begin the process of a China Special Needs adoption. We moved as quickly as we could through the paperwork steps that needed to be done and had our part finished before Thanksgiving 2010. At that point it became a waiting game: waiting for our homestudy to be written and approved, waiting for immigration fingerprinting, waiting for documents for our dossier to get authenticated, etc. Then, at about 8:30pm on February 21, 2011, we got a very unexpected and exciting phone call from our agency. The Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) had released an updated special needs children list and our agency was able to match us with a little girl! We did not even have our dossier logged in with the Chinese government yet but somehow we were able to be matched with the agreement that our dossier will be completed and in China within 6 months. We were thrilled with this great news and know that our God was the one that allowed this match to happen at an earlier than ever imagined timeframe! Our daughter is just beautiful and looks so healthy and strong in her pictures. We had an adoptive medicine pediatrician look over her medical records as well and his opinion was to "Go get her!" She has a pretty severe cleft lip and palate that will require some surgeries to correct, but other than that, she seems to be developing well and is a strong little girl. Some days are so tough to just be stuck in waiting mode! We are waiting for our letter of clearance from Homeland Security to come and expect that to arrive in about a week (we hope!). At that point, we will need to go downtown Chicago again to get it authenticated at the Secretary of State and Chinese Consulate offices. Then they will send it on to our agency who will be able to send our complete dossier to China. Once CCAA translates our dossier and it gets approved we will be offcially registered with the government and able to officially sign our letter of intent to adopt and get travel dates. We are praying for August travel, but the "expected time frame" based on what steps we still have to go through set us to travel in September or October. The waiting is getting tough...especially as we get to look at her picture every day and pray for her by name...but can't go get her! That is the short version of our journey thus far. We hope to do our best at keeping this blog updated with the most recent news as we find out more about when we get to go on our journey to become a family of five!