Sunday, April 20, 2008

Waiting

The waiting aspect of this adoption has been very hard for me. I am one of those "make things happen" people. Thats a fancy way of saying I am not a patient person. There is no immediate gratification with Adoption. China has a long list of back logged dossiers for families waiting to be matched. Ours is in the pile with about 30,000 others from what I have been told.

A lot of people are curious as to why we would choose to go A: go to China to adopt a baby instead of doing a domestic adoption and B: why we would choose the Special Needs route through China's adoption program.... when we started we had no idea the wait time would grow to 3 years and beyond, it was 12-14 months when we began. We chose China because of the stability of the program and the needs of the children in China. In China for many complex reasons including a "one child per family" policy and a social preference for healthy male children, there are large numbers of abandoned female babies. There are also large numbers of children with medical needs many of which are minor by US standards laquishing in orpahanages waiting for someone to give them a loving home. These children, those with Special Needs are paet of an expitited process because they need medical care that is not easy to come by in China. This called to my heart. The fact that we will not have to wait 3 years or more is a bonus, but frot eh record we have still had a long wait (7 months to get our dossier ready and logged in with China, and a year now since our log in date). But, here is there real deal......we are doing all of this for selfish reasons. Of course we want to provide a loving home for a child in need of one, but we believe we will gain far more from this adoption and the love of a child than we can ever give back. We are not Saints, just ordinary people who want a baby and are blessed enough to have the means to make it happen in a special way.

Here is a link to our agency if you'd like to learn more about China Adoption http://www.chinesechildren.org/ and if you just want to see some prcious children and read thier stories check out this site http://www.myadoptionwebsite.com/chinaadoptionstories.htm

Friday, April 11, 2008


This is us Jimmy, Shay and Zach....

Introduction

Hi everyone, I am creating this blog so that friends and family and others who are in the process of adopting from China can follow our journey to our daughter in China.

I'll begin with an introduction, we are Jimmy and Shay and we reside in SE Tennessee. We have been married for almost 7 years. Jimmy and I both have children from previous marraiges....3 between us, but only 1 living at home, Zach who is 14. We have always wanted to have a child together, won't go into the complicated history, but fertility treatments did not work for us. We have both always had open hearts for the idea of adoption. After a lot of soul searching and research we chose to adopt internationally from China. We began paperchasing in '06 and have a LID (Log in Date with China Adoption Officials) of 4/05/07. When we first began the process the wait times for a heathly infant where 12-14 months. shortly after our dossier was logged in the wait times began to grow to more than 3 years. I won't go in to all the many reason that are believed to have impacted the wait, it is complex and mostly speculation but you can check out a site that I frequent and look through archives if you'd like they talk about it a LOT and are much better at it than I am http://chinaadopttalk.com/

I digress....I felt from the beginning that Jimmy and I could easily handle many of the minor special needs that often make children from China more difficult to place, this would also significantly reduce our wait time. We are so ready to bring a child into our home, it is really tough to wait years, and we are not spring chickens....so we switched to the Waiting Child (special need) Program through our agency last August and are currently awaiting referral. We expect to hear something this summer some time and travel to China before years end to pick up our daughter. We have requested a girl 0 to 18 months in age, and have indcated that we are open to a variety of minor correctible or medically treatable health conditions. That's it for now.....