The reason we adopt...

This post was made on another family's blog and is a great way to express "why we adopt":

....The people that make up The Nativity Story are all very different and very crucial to the coming of Christ. Mary, Joseph, Zachariah, Elizabeth, John, the Three Wisemen, the lowly shepards...even King Herrod! I am in amazement that God sent his son to earth in the form of a baby! And what about the humble people chosen for the ENORMOUS task of raising Christ into a man!

That is what struck my heart the most....Out of all of the people in the nativity story, Joseph was one of my favorites! He rose above prejudice from others against his unwed, pregnant, soon to be wife. He made the choice to not only marry Mary but to raise Jesus as his own son.

Isn't that the choice so many of us have made with our adoptions? We have chosen to take a child, birthed by someone we probably will never know...and raise it as our own. The essence of adoption is, to the core, a spiritual decision. In order for God to adopt all of us as his own children, Joseph had to adopt Jesus as his son here on earth.

To adopt a child is to love a child in your heart instead of your womb. To know that you know, that the child you are adopting has been chosen for you and your family by God...just as biological children are chosen. Our adopted child is destined to fulfill a glorious purpose, as we all are! Those of us parenting any children, adopted or not, have the same awesome responsibility as Mary and Joseph were given...to raise our children to glorify God!

So, just like Joseph, and following God's example, we are perservering through this challange of adoption! Not that we thought otherwise, but it has been such an uphill battle! I am thankful for the example shown in both of these stories...and I am especially aware of it this time of year. The birth of Jesus! The adoption of Jesus by Joseph...the chance for our salvation through the adoption into Gods family...

Wishing you all many blessing in the New Year! ~ Tracy

Our PA arrived this morning!!!

We have been pre-approved to adopt Fu RuTian TBKA Angel RuTian!!! Now we wait for our full Referal Acceptance letter, which will make it official! This could be a couple month wait.

Have a very Merry Christmas and wishing you many blessing in 2009!

God Bless!

No news yet...

No news yet, I hope that as good news that no other families have submitted a letter of intent to adopt her. According to averages, we hope to have a pre-approval by Tuesday but could be longer - so at this point we are still waiting! Keep praying she'll have a forever family one way or another. Will update you when we know more. Blessing to you all!

Our Thanksgiving was even more precious after this...

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and took time to be thankful for all the wonderful things in your life. We didn't do a lot, sat around, played some games with the kids and ate a nice fillet dinner. In the midst of the day I received notice that I had been approved for access to a Yahoo group for families who have or are adopting from the same orphanage our lil Angel is currently living. I immediately jumped on to see what great information they had to offer and one of the recent posts was of a family who was there picking up their child. While they were there, on November 5th, they had a chance to visit the orphanage and took many photos of the children there. Well low and behold I went a flipped through them and found a photo with Angel being held by one of the caregivers!!! Not only do we now get to see how she currently looks, because the photos from her adoption file are about 6 months old, it also shows the side of her face we have not been able to see in the photos we have. This is important because of the birthmark, we were unsure how much of that part of the cheek it covers.

I have e-mailed this updated photo to the specialist and he e-mailed back that he'd try to give us a call today or tomorrow to discuss his suggestion for removing the nevus/birthmark.

So you can see our day was wonderful with her precious face added to it.

Many blessing to you all!

Our EA has been sent!!!!

And the excitement builds. After spending about 2 hours scanning in and e-mailing our coordinator about half of our dossier documents, she just e-mailed us letting us know that it all has been electronically sent to China. This is a big step but trying not to get overly excited yet, we have to receive a pre-approval from the CCAA first, then we have every right to be outright thrilled because she is then ours!!!! So contrinue to pray that we hear back from them sometime in the next 2 weeks with this great news. Then I can post her on our blog!

Keep the prayers coming that this little girl will have a forever family soon!

Letter of Intent heading to China soon!!!!

Check out our sonogram, isn't she beautiful?

We completed all the needed paperwork and Rehabilitation and Nurture Plan (Letter of intent to adopt) and got it all faxed to our agency contact a few hours ago. The originals will be on their way shortly. Our agency contact, "L", said once she receives our dossier, hopefully by fax and via mail, from our agency here, our documents will be sent electronically to China!!! Her goal is to get it sent before the holiday break beginning Thursday. Please pray that our family is picked to be this little girl's forever family. Now, once again, we wait to hear of a pre-approval and to receive their acceptance letter.

And the excitement grows!!!

Seems to be that I get these call just as I'm picking up from or taking the kids to school. As I was loading the kids into the car to take them to school this morning, AW called stating we have been fully approved to adopt a waiting child and that she would forward us the full medical information and additional 3 pictures or our lil china girl. Needless to say I could not wait to get back to the house and check out all this information. I called Jason on my way back to let him know the information was on the way and that I would forward it on to him so he too could review it. I printed the information out immediately, along with the pictures, read through it and headed off to the gym so I could share this great progression news with a dear friend that was waiting on me...sorry I was a little slow this morning "M" but I know you understood.

So I read through the medical info and what developmental milestone they had on her and about her "finding". I can't share details on here until we have a referral acceptance letter so if you want to know more, you will have to contact us directly.

Anyway, I e-mailed her medical details to a doctor for a medical review and heard back from the doctor within 2 hours, that was amazing to me. So she walked me through all the info and any questions or concerns she had - overall not a whole lot to be overly concerned about. I have also e-mailed the nevus specialist in Chicago and am awaiting his response, though we already received a brief response this morning stating he would love to talk to us upon receiving her full medicals. So we are waiting on that at this point.

This leaves us with some paperwork to do and Jason and I need to go get our passport photos updated and a current picture of the family to scan in and send to the agency. Hopefully we can get all this done this weekend.

Thanks again for all your thoughtful prayers, keep them coming!!!!

Have a great weekend!

A little progress today...

Heard from America World late this morning, they now have all the paperwork they need from us at this point and they are waiting to hear that our social worker approves of us pursuing this child. The agency gal told me we should be hearing from our social worker so she can ask us a few questions about the child's condition.

Finally heard from our social worker as I was picking the kids up from school. She asked me to convey to her the child's medical issue and what research we have done. She said she had no issues with us pursuing a waiting child, she just hadn't heard anything about her. So all is well there. The social worker is going to e-mail the gal at AW and let her know she approves us.

So where do we go from here, into a little bit of a scurried seek and discover from the way it sounds. When I talked to the gal at AW this morning, she said that the little girl is still available at this point. She said once she knew we were approved she could forward us what medical/health information they have and the additional 3 photos they have of her, YAY. I can't wait to see more pictures of her - I'm going to have a hard time waiting till tomorrow. Once we receive the info, we have 48 hours to let the agency know if we are interested in doing a full review of her, meaning we take what info we have to doctors to have them review it. I'm pretty sure we'll go to that extent unless there is something really surprising in there that they didn't put in her mini health status. I have a specialist in Chicago ready to review her info and pictures with regards to the nevus and there is a local pediatrician that is from China that we will take her info to for his review as well. We have 2 weeks to complete the full review, though the ultimate goal is for it to take as little time as possible as there is a chance that another family could be doing the same. Upon the results of the doctors recommendations we have to make a commitment decision, then they can close her file to their clients (she will still be on other agency lists) and we will get a letter of intent to adopt put together and to China. Then again we wait to see if we get an approval letter from them.

Please pray this is all meant to be!

AW agency agreements signed and faxed....

We received two e-mails yesterday from the new/merged agency with their policies and whatnot so I forwarded them all to Jason at work, had him print them, sign them and fax them to me so I could sign and fax them to the agency. So they had all the documents back, signed by us within hours of e-mailing them out. I then e-mailed the director and asked "what is the next step" and she referred me to a online "Waiting Children Application" to fill out and submit so we have all the proper paperwork completed and the person in charge of that list will get in contact with us. I'm crossing my fingers she calls us today, since it has now been 2 weeks since we first saw this little girl on the list and the longer we have to wait to inquire more about her, the better the chance that someone else will already have done so and sent their letter of intent to adopt. Crossing our fingers we get there first.

I e-mailed a highly recommended doctor in Chicago who is familar with the nevus this little girl has. He has agreed to give us his opinion and recommendations as to her treatment once we have more information and pictures that we can forward on to him. So I'm hopeful we will have that soon.

Till I know more, Take care!

The Lord is my shepherd...

Our Lord is sure to keep me in line and let us know that he is watching over us and will provide what we need on his time, not ours. Well the Lord has just made the process a little easier for us. We no longer need to use an outside agency to pursue a child on China's Waiting Children's list. We received a letter from our agency last Thursday stating that they have merged with a larger agency, due to things slowing down all the programs they are involved with. What does this mean for us, well this larger agency, America World Adoption takes part in the shared agency list that the little girl we'd like to pursue is on, YAY!!! So first thing Friday morning I called the agency and spoke with a gal on how we could get going with this. She said she would speak with the director and see if they couldn't get our file expedited from the agency we began with to them so we could start all the paper work to pursue a waiting/special needs child. As of Friday afternoon they didn't quite have all the needed documents formulated for the switch but are hoping to have that together today, we are praying that is the case. We will let you know when we know more.

It's been a while...

Guess it's been a while since I've blogged our progress. I can say things have changed to an extent, we placed our house for sale in April of this year after finding a house we really liked that was only a mile away but on an acre lot. Our house finally sold in August and we moved the first of September. Settling in hasn't been easy, we had some issues with the house the first month or so but most of it seems to be under control now.

We have also changed our route a little with the adoption. As you know, we began this process right about two years ago, submitted our dossier to China and received a log in date of 3/22/07. Therefore, we have been waiting for over a year an a half already and from the looks of it, it doesn't appear as though we are closer to the beginning than we are to the end.

Well, shortly after the move Jason and I decided to begin looking into other alternatives. So we have researched about every country out there that does international adoptions, viewed waiting children's lists that some agencies have list online and even looked into the domestic foster-adopt program. Despite all that's out there we just couldn't find another fit for what we are looking for, program reliability and the length of the process. So back to the Internet I went again in search of waiting children lists. Low and behold I stumbled accross an agency that is here in the Midwest that has a waiting children's list that you can get temporary access to if you contact them, so that is just what I did last Wednesday. By Thursday morning I had the log in info and I jumped on. At the time they had about 90 children on their waiting list, about half of them girls. I read through many of them and was beginning to think we weren't going to find a child with minor, correctable concerns. Finally, half way through the list I saw a gorgeous little girl that is in China (yay), is 18 months old and has a rather large birthmark on her face but appears not to have any other health concerns. I immediately contacted the agency about her to learn more about her and find out how we go about adopting her if she is still available.

On Friday I received an e-mail that she is still available, meaning no one is/was inquiring about her or has sent in a letter of intent to adopt yet. I wish I could say we know more by now but we have yet to hear from the social worker we were told would be back in her office today from some time off. Needless to say I am anxious and eager to hear more. I left a message for the social worker today but of course that was after she had left the office early today - ugh. So I am crossing my fingers that we will hear from her tomorrow.

I think that updates us to the current, I'll update when I know more.

Take care!