Our Adoption Journey Post #1: Why adoption?

As promised we're going to have a few posts on our adoption journey. We'll take you through why we decided upon adoption, why we chose China, why we chose our agency as well as our trek through the process itself. For this first post, we'll answer the basic question of why expand our family through adoption?

Every since childhood Beth has wanted to adopt a child. She has always believed that it is something that G-d has wanted her to do. For Howard, adoption was never something he had given serious thought to until he met Beth. As our relationship developed and we moved closer to marriage the topic of children was discussed. We both agreed that we wanted more than one child but no more than three. We also agreed that it would be nice to have at least one boy and one girl although Beth really really wanted a girl. The next item to be discussed was how we were going to bring these children into our lives and this is where the topic of adoption came up.

After much discussion we decided to first have biological children and then look into adoption. In 2005 we had our first child, Benjamin. It was a difficult and high risk pregnancy. Beth was sick for 7 months to the point that she was put on anti-nausea medication. At 36+ weeks, Beth developed HELLP syndrome and since her life was at risk they did an emergency induction and Benjamin was born. Luckily, he was relatively healthy (just a short visit to the NICU) and Beth recovered.

Maybe with this first pregnancy G-d was trying to tell us something (like to adopt) but we didn't listen and were pregnant again with #2 in late 2007. The second pregnancy went better that the first but it was not without its problems. There were some complications along the way but nothing too serious. Beth was only nauseous for 5 months this time. When it came time to find out the sex we were hoping for a girl (especially Beth) but it seems G-d had other plans. A few months later Eli was born but not without excitement.

As difficult as pregnancy #1 was, labor & delivery was relatively easy. Eli however, had his own agenda. This delivery was not so easy, actually it was really difficult and we were very close to an emergency C section. Thankfully, it did not come to that and our Eli was born. He was healthy and Beth was exhausted.

At this moment that we understood that if we were going to have any more children it was not going to be biologically as G-d had made it pretty clear that Beth was not meant to get pregnant again. It was then that we decided our next family addition will be through adoption.

Story to be continued in a future post...

Now for the update.

As of 10/13 here's our wait statistics:
Referred through: 3/28/2006
Current wait: 43 months
Projected referral date: 11/13/2012
Projected months remaining to referral: 37

Remember, these are simple projections based on extrapolating the current wait forward. Check out the Rumor Queen (link at top) for more thorough projections

INS approval!

I'm going to start this blog (this is my first ever post to my first ever blog) with some good news! After calling INS yesterday, our assigned officer informed me that she approved our I-800a yesterday and that it was in the mail! This is the second major approval we needed, giving us permission to bring an adopted foreign child into the U.S. The first approval was the home study from the adoption agency (approved in January) and the final will be from CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) whenever they get to it.

The next step is tomorrow when we go to the agency and submit all of our paperwork for the dossier. Assuming they don't find anything wrong (cross your fingers) the dossier is then sent to their HQ for another check, then it gets translated into Chinese, then it goes off for authentication to the Chinese Consulate in the U.S (something like that) and finally off to China. This process will take 4-6 weeks at the end of which our dossier will be logged into CCAA and the waiting can begin. Right now the wait is 36 months but hopefully that will speed up soon.

Anyways, we are very excited to be one step closer to bringing home our daughter.

Will keep posting updates!