Hey.
I’m still here.
We’ve had a whole lot going on in the last month or so.
We had our final dossier push, which was (as every adoption venture seems to be) filled with drama. Including two wrongly certified documents, driving to far away countries, being stuck in downtown traffic when I need to be at my daughters preschool for pickup, and lots of overnight FedEx bills. Then we had work functions, the holiday travels, two weeks of sick kids, and now the hustle and bustle of getting ready for Christmas.
BUT.
China has our dossier, and we are logged in! Which is kind of a big deal.
(If there are any adoption people tracking dates/timelines, DTC 11/20/15, LID 12/1/15)
We should have made a bigger deal about it; champagne toasts, celebratory dinners and the likes since completing a dossier is a HUGE accomplishment. But we did not. Truth is I guess we are a little jaded, because we’ve been down this road before. Then waited about 6 months. Even though I mentally know this time is different, it still feels surreal until I have a child’s file in my hand.
So we are back in the waiting game. Kind of. China is a bit tricky, because we can get our kiddo one of two ways. One way is by waiting for our agency to give us a file/referral. They have partnerships with specific orphanages in China, that they get files from those and help provide them with funding. This is how most agencies operate. The bummer part about our agency is that almost everyone “in line” ahead of us are also waiting on girls, which will make for a longer wait. When an agency has a file longer than their allotted time, or when a file is very first created, it goes on to China’s shared list. While we can’t search the shared list, our agency can with a specific name/birthdate. There are several advocacy sites that will share files that are getting ready to go back on the shared list, or who have gone back. The hope is that other agencies would be willing to transfer the file, or that our agency could pull the file from searching the shared site. However, some agencies aren’t willing to transfer files (or can’t), and some files seem to kind of disappear, so it can be a messy and heart wrenching process to regularly check the advocacy sites.
Yet we’ve been doing just that. We have already emailed about a few files, mostly to hit dead ends pretty quickly. We don’t really want to switch agencies, because we like ours, and it’s more paperwork/hassle/money that we don’t want to deal with. But some agencies are larger and have more partnerships which equals more files, so we are being prayerful even with that. We are trying to guard our hearts and not get emotions too entangled as we scroll through dozens of special needs orphans files. However it’s nice to feel like I can tangibly do something to be pursuing our daughter instead of just twiddling my thumbs, like we were in Kyrgyzstan.
While I’ve been trying to keep my heart from getting too entangled with one specific child, I can’t keep it from grieving for the orphans as a whole. The lost, and abandoned and homeless. It’s quite the juxtaposition to be buying Christmas presents for my kids in one tab of my browser and looking at faces of the fatherless in another.
We are trying to be wise in the wait. Not wasting time, or longing for a different time. As much as we want our daughter home, we are trying to soak up what, Lord willing, will be our last Christmas as a family of 5. I’ve been nesting, cleaning out the junk and reorganizing closets. We are doing house repairs. We are making plans, and yet remaining flexible and open handed.
We don’t know for sure how long our wait will be, but from what I’ve been tracking, I’m hopeful for a referral before spring. This seems like a realistic hope. From referral most travel (to bring her home) is occurring about 3-4 months later. We are extremely hopeful that we will have a referral by the end of February, and could potentially travel around June. We are open handedly praying for that as well, if you would like to join us. There’s a sweet spot for us, in summer, after baseball, before we need to transition one into elementary school and one into middle school, that we are so very hopeful to travel in. It’s such a tricky place to be thinking about our future daughter and what is best for her, and yet needing to take into consideration our other three kids and what is best for them. I DO NOT want to miss preschool and elementary school graduations. And I DO NOT want to miss the beginning of school and those important transitions. And I simply have to trust all this to the Lord, that He knows my heart, and knows what is best for ALL of us.
So we wait….again.
Very excited for you and our family!