Category: Adoption

We received a call about a match from our agency this afternoon. We sent off our “letter of intent” and we hope for China to give us pre-approval in a week or so. From there we can share more details, but we just think she is the cutest thing ever!!

It’s just amazing that 6 months to the day that we decided to adopt again we have a match. This route is a little different than with Nadia so we will probably not travel until Januray 2011. My heart hurts that our future child will have to be in an institution for another 4 months, but I know that God is watching over her and loves her more than we can imagine.

I will share that they say she is fond of music (they said the same about Nadia and is that ever true) and that she isn’t picky about food and eats everything. As my excitement overwhelms me those are the 2 things that stick out.

Thanks for all the people who have prayed for us and joined us on this journey.

I should have posted this sooner, but our documents were logged into China on 8.25.2010. Doesn’t change anything on our end, but it’s nice to know all those valuable papers arrived safe and sound.

4.5 months of paperwork, interviews, medical exams and parenting classes looks like.

We are happy to announce that our dossier passed inspection from our agency and left for China today! WOO HOO! And the wait begins.

This time around we are in the special medical needs line, which is very different than the non-special needs line that we were in for Nadia. The SN list comes out about once a month with new children available. The list currently has about 1,000 kids on it and the vast majority are boys. This is also very different from when we adopted Nadia and 90-95% of the adoptions were for girls. We want Nadia to stay the oldest, and most of the girls currently on the list are older than her.

With Nadia’s adoption our paperwork was put in line and then we were matched by a person in China with all the other people who had our log-in date. This time around the matcher for our adoption agency will find a child on the SN list that she thinks would be a good fit for our family and contact on us. From there we would send our Letter of Intent (LOI) to China. If they accept that then they will give us Pre-Approval (PA). That generally takes about a week. Once we have that we would be able to make an announcement and show the child’s photo.

The next step after that is is to wait, wait, wait for our Letter of Acceptance (LOA). The LOA can take up to 80 days to arrive. Once we get that from China we will be jumping for joy and waiting on one more hurdle – our Travel Approval (TA).

Once the TA arrives we all apply for Visas and get ready to travel. From the way the timeline is moving today we would be looking at 4 months from Pre-Approval to Travel Approval. When we got Nadia’s referral it was about 7 weeks total from the day we saw her photo until we were on a plane to China. And I thought that 7 weeks was the longest of my life. 4 months is going to feel like an eternity, but God is good and we know that it will all work out as it should. And just to make sure no one misunderstands, that four months doesn’t start until we are matched with a child. A girl who is a fit for our family could be available for us as soon as next month or not until next year; we really don’t know.

I really hope that helped those of you who have asked about the differences in Nadia’s adoption and this one.