Video of Collins

A couple of weeks ago, we got a sweet, sweet video of Collins from an adoptive mama who visited her orphanage. I cannot stop watching this video clip. Her beautiful smile speaks for itself.

Collins -- 7 months from Emily on Vimeo.

Toward the end, you can hear them calling her CC. Such a precious baby girl!

LOA!

In record time, and very unexpectedly, we got our LOA yesterday! It came only 12 days after our PA, which is crazy fast.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about ...
PA = Pre-approval from China
LOA = official Letter of Approval from China to adopt Collins

We are so excited with how fast things are going. The reason we got our LOA this quickly is that we did all of our waiting before we were matched. Our dossier moved through translation and review during the 6 months we waited for a referral.

We have a series of steps to go through now on the U.S. side of things before we can get our Travel Approval from China. It usually takes about 8 weeks (if no roadbumps) to get TA from this point. So, we are hopeful for December travel ... just like with Lia Kate.

Can't wait to meet our sweet girl in a few months!

Red Threads ... and Road Blocks ... To Collins

My friend Rushton wrote a very memorable post after they were matched with their daughter last year, about all the "stones of remembrances" that God gave them for their daughter ... signs and ways they knew the little girl in the picture was their daughter. The "stones of remembrance" term comes from the Old Testament when Samuel set up a stone to remember where God had moved on their behalf in a miraculous way to defeat the Philistines.

In that same vein, in China, there is an ancient legend about a red thread...
"An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break."  - Ancient Chinese Proverb
 
So, here are the red threads ... the stones of remembrance ... the things that I want to remember about how it was so confirmed that this precious little one was meant to be in our family.

Stone #1:
We started this adoption in July of 2011. Normally, special needs adoptions from China take about 12 months from beginning to end. But not our adoption. The two friends I started this process with are already home with their children! We have hit some paperwork snags along the way and had a long wait for a referral. Our biggest snag was with U.S. Immigration. After waiting 78 long days for our case to get to an officer's desk, we were issued a RFE (request for evidence) because I spent a summer in Washington DC in college and failed to get a background clearance from there. Oops. I was very upset at first because our agency was waiting any day for the files of some precious little ones, any of which I was hoping to adopt. And I needed my papers to be in China so that we would be eligible to get one of their referrals. The minute I got the email about the RFE, I knew those children I had my eye on were not mine. I knew my daughter was out there somewhere, and, despite being sad, I had to trust that this roadblock happened in order that we would find our way to the sweet child meant for us. I immediately applied for a background clearance but DC is not the fastest place to get one from. Thanks to the dogged persistence of my adoption agency, it only took about three and a half weeks to get it. Record time. My social worker Karla emailed me on February 2 saying "I got it!".

Little did I know that on that same day -- February 2 -- halfway around the world, a tiny newborn baby girl came to live in an orphanage in southern China. Soon, that little baby will belong to me.

When I was so desperate to get my paperwork to China, our daughter hadn't even been born yet.  I am praising God for roadblocks.

Stone #2:
Back when we got Lia Kate's referral in 2009, I opened up her file and the very first thing I saw was her birthdate, which is July 31, which is also my birthday, which is also my younger sister's birthday. It was pretty much a done deal from that point on. So, imagine my surprise when Karla calls and tells me about Collins' referral, saying her birthday is also a 31st (different month). On top of that, she shares a birth month with our son, Britton, and my brother who just passed away and lots of other people in both of our families. It's a little thing, but considering that 3 of the 5 in our immediate family will have 31st bdays, it is significant. And I love how both of my Chinese daughters have a 31st birthday, and that their birthdays were part of the confirmation that they were ours.

Stone #3:
This is kind of a silly one, but I don't want to forget it. I rarely dream, but at some point this summer, I had a very real dream about getting our new child. We were in China, and they placed the littlest baby in my arms, not the toddler I was expecting we would get. She was precious with dark hair and beautiful skin and blue eyes. Yes, blue eyes. That part was strange, but the dream was so real and I woke up with my arms aching to hold our next child. It made the wait for a referral that much harder. When we got Collins' referral and saw that she was only 7 months old, I remembered my dream of the tiny baby in my arms. And just last week, as Lia Kate and I were looking at Collins' picture, she said "Mama, when you stand back a little bit, her eyes are blue!" She knew nothing of my dream and I'm not sure what she was thinking, because Collins' eyes are most definitely not blue. But the blue eyes comment meant something to me!

Stone #4:
This is the most significant one of them all. We had decided on the name Caroline Collins for our next child a while back. They are family names and we loved the way they sounded together. After we got our referral and called Danny's parents to tell them about her, his dad said, "I'm going to call her CC". Appropriate, I thought, because it rhymes with the pronunciation of her Chinese name, "SheShe". What I had forgotten about is that in Collins' province they pronounce things differently because they speak Cantonese, not Mandarin. For example, Lia Kate is from the same province and they pronounced her name "Jing Jing" as "Gang Gang." I listened carefully to the video of Collins that a sweet mama who visited the orphanage sent me. And as clear as day, they call her "SeeSee". Yes, CC. The sound of her Chinese name and her forever initials are one and the same. I am absolutely floored by this. She was so meant to be our Caroline Collins.

And it was February 2, when she came to the orphanage that they gave her this name ... the day that our "road block" was finally cleared up and our paperwork could be on its way to China.

Today, I am praising God for road blocks. I just love seeing how it all comes together. Yes, He has done great things for us and we are filled with joy!

We Finally See Her Face!!

I am thrilled to introduce our newest daughter...

Caroline Collins

Our sweet Caroline Collins, whom we will call Collins, is *seven* months old and living in southern China in the same province that Lia Kate is from. We are so in love with our beautiful girl already and we can't wait to travel to bring her home forever.

Here is the story of how we were matched with her...

We have been waiting for 6 months now to be matched with our daughter. Our dossier was logged-in in China on March 1, 2012, and we have just been waiting for files from our adoption agency's new orphanage partnerships to come in. But nothing really moves fast in the adoption world. We thought the files would be here in July, but they weren't. Then, August, but no. Then September rolled around and I was getting anxious. 

On Thursday, September 6, our awesome social worker, Karla, called and said she might have a file for us. She told me a little bit about her. I told her we were definitely interested and I asked how old she was. Karla hesitated and said she needed to check and would get back in touch with me. We were really wanting a young child (under 15 months) because we want some space between our older two and the next one. When she hesitated, I thought she might be older, but we were not going to pass up looking at a file. That afternoon she called back and said she had gotten the file together and was ready to send to me. She told me a little bit about her and then said, "Now, hold on to your socks because she is SEVEN months old!" I was in the car driving two sleepy children to gymnastics, and all I remember saying was, "No way! Holy cow! No way!" over and over. Seven months is *very* young for medical needs adoptions from China. She told me she was emailing me the file right then. I happened to be stuck in a massive traffic jam, so I checked my email and there was the file. I opened it up, saw her sweet face and started screaming. I immediately called Danny and told him I had just seen our daughter's face. This is verbatim what happened when we got Lia Kate's file. Danny is a little more even keel than I am, so he was like "Okay, send me the file." I did. Then I texted our social worker back and said "Oh, Karla. I'm done. She's the one. Hope my husband is on board!".  Just like with Lia Kate, I knew right away. No doubts.

The first picture I saw of Collins.

Danny must have known too because he came home a little bit later with Chinese food and a bottle of prosecco.

We sent her file to be reviewed by the International Adoption doctor who had visited her orphanage in April and did a physical on Collins, and waited for her to call back. Since we were going out of town bright and early the next morning, I spent that night writing a care plan so that our agency could send our Letter of Intent (LOI) as soon as we were ready to officially say yes. I may have gotten about three hours of sleep that night. I was just so giddy and excited. The next day at noon, even though we hadn't talked to the adoption doctor, we decided to go ahead and have our agency send LOI. We knew she was our daughter and there was nothing the doc was going to say that would change our minds.

One week later on September 13, we got our Pre-Approval from China. We have a few more months of paperwork to get through before we can travel. We are hoping to have her in our arms some time in December, but after Christmas/January may be more likely. She will be 10 or 11 months old. I can hardly believe it. Praising God for our sweet girl. She was so, so worth the wait!!!

Adoption Update ... In the Waiting

Today marks three months since our paperwork made it to China and was logged-in to their system! Usually by this point, families with our agency have been matched with a child and are waiting to bring him or her home. We are still waiting to be matched, and I'll tell you why. Back in April, our agency announced that their partnership with the Maoming orphanage had been extended for another year, and that they were just signing contracts to partner with SEVEN more orphanages! This is a different and unique way to do adoptions in China. The common route is to be matched with a child off the Shared List, which is a central registry of children maintained by the governing adoption authority in China and used by most adoption agencies. This is how we were matched with Lia Kate. These orphanage partnerships are different because our agency actually has relationships with the orphanages ... they send teams of medical professionals to go over to these orphanages to do physicals on the children and help the orphanage get the ball rolling to make the children paper-ready ... they offer financial assistance and resources to help with children who need medical or developmental interventions. It is a win for the orphanage because they get extra resources with which to prepare children for international adoption ... a huge win for the children because most of these children would probably have never been available for adoption ... and a win for families like us because we actually get to talk to someone (in our case, local International Adoption doctors and agency workers) who will have first-hand knowledge of the children. The other benefits of adopting a child from one of these partnership programs is that there will be a lot of children coming home from these orphanages to families in our city, so they will grow up together with the shared experience of having been in the same orphanage. This is very different from our adoption with Lia Kate as we only know of one sweet little girl who was in her orphanage at the same time. Needless to say, we have decided to wait to be matched with a child from one of these partnership programs. The orphanages are in Guangdong province and in Chongqing Municipality, so we know that our child is in one of these places. Guangdong province is in southern China and is where Lia Kate is from. In fact, two of the partnership orphanages are very close to Lia Kate's orphanage. Chongqing Municipality is a ginormous city of 32 million people located in central-southwestern China, and we actually have a number of U.S. friends who live there. So adopting from either would be really awesome. The first round of children's files will probably not be ready until August. So, we will just be waiting patiently (or not so) through the long, hot summer before we finally see our little one's face...

We Are DTC!

For the past 8 months, we've been working on a little something behind the scenes. And, finally, we are DTC! So what in the world does that mean? It means "Dossier to China", baby! Yes, we are adopting again, and at the moment, our dossier of all the important documents that took 8 months to collect is on its way to China.

We have known we would be going back to China to adopt another child since we were in China the last time adopting our Lia Kate. We finally decided the time was right to start on paperwork again so here we are. We anticipate being matched in the next few months and then travel in the Fall. We are excited to be on this journey again. It has been a journey already with bumps in the road, paperwork delays and wild goose chases. But it's all so worth it and all in God's timing. And, having done this before, we have mostly been at peace with the twists and turns of this process so far.

So, next up is LID, then we are matched with a child, then we wait for PA, then LOA, then I800, then Art 5, then TA, then CA. Then travel! But we won't get ahead of ourselves (or the acronyms) for now. I'll fill you in on what all that means as we move through the process.


I love this picture of my two monkeys who are so excited to be a big sister and a big brother! And I love their shirts that say "One less orphan in China" created by my China adoption coffee group here in town.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Today is Chinese New Year and I am thinking about our soon-to-be daughter who is somewhere in China. Wondering where she is and what she is doing. What she looks like and who she is with. Wondering when we'll finally see her face ... when we'll hold her in our arms. When we'll once again be a forever family.

We talk about her all the time at our house. Britton and Lia Kate call her "baby sister". Just yesterday, Lia Kate was saying "I have two beds in my room. One is for baby sister. Britton doesn't have two beds in his room. Because baby sister will be in my room." ;o)

Recently our paperwork hit a snag. We were thinking we would be DTC (dossier to China) by Chinese New Year. But it wasn't to be. After waiting 60+ days for our file to be reviewed by USCIS (immigration), my officer issued a RFE (request for evidence). This means my file cannot be approved until she has the requested information. Apparently, my home study mentions that I had a summer internship in DC. Part of the hoops you have to jump through when you're doing an international adoption is that you have to get background clearances for every where you have lived. I did not consider DC a permanent residence because I was only there a very short time. But my home study mentions it when it discusses my background/college experiences. So, my immigration officer can't approve our application until I have a DC clearance. Problem is that DC is not the easiest place to get a background clearance from. They take at least 30 days, and sometimes more than that. So, here we wait.

The way I look at it is that it was not time to meet our daughter. We firmly believe that this obstacle was put in our path to lead us to the right little girl, who was meant to be ours. Having been through this before, I can't imagine not having gotten Lia Kate's file. It worked out so perfectly, and we are trusting it will this time around too.

So, we wait. Rather patiently, I might add. Trusting that God has a plan and looking forward to seeing it unfold.

Until then, we celebrate Chinese New Year and imagine our next daughter, somewhere in China experiencing, perhaps, the only CNY she will ever have in China.