From the Beginning...

Back in 2000 we attended our first inter-country adoption seminar. We didn't have children at the time and thought this might be the way we wanted to grow our family. Not too long after that I became pregnant and had our first child, a son in May of 2001. Griffin was followed two years later by our first daughter, Elena Grace.

A few years went by and in early 2006 we started talking about adoption again. Talk became action and by June 2006 we found our adoption agency, Great Wall China Adoption (GWCA) and started the process.

I use the term process versus journey, as that is exactly what it is, a full blown, long drawn, intrusive process. Not to scare any prospective adoptive parents away, but it's work. I would say this is the "labor pains" portion of adopting.

There are fees, and government forms, and finger prints and background checks, social worker interviews, home studies, birth certificates, references, etc. that have to be obtained, collected, authenticated, notarized, arranged, reviewed and so on.

We managed to accomplish all this by December and GWCA sent our dossier to China on the 22nd. A couple months later we received our official log-in date (LID) of 2/5/2007 from the China Centre for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). As of this date, the time frames for adopting a healthy baby girl (approximately 10 months old) was about a year and a half, give or take so we figured by the summer of 2008 we should be matched with our daughter.

The summer of 2008 did bring us a beautiful baby girl, Jocelyn, but she came the old fashioned way(and very much by surprise!).

The wait times were growing and were looking more like three to four year now, so we continued to wait. I'd like to say patiently, but that wouldn't be true.

In April of 2009 we attended the East Meets West conference held by our agency, GWCA and I attended a seminar I wasn't even signed up for called "The Waiting Child".

A "Waiting Child" in the terms of Chinese adoption is a child with some level of disability, some mild, some not. GWCA staff had just flown back from Beijing after hosting a three day "rodeo" at an event called Hope Camp at the Beijing Children's Welfare Institute (BCWI) and they had photos of some of the children they had the opportunity to meet.

While watching the slide show I saw this beautiful little baby and even commented to the person sitting next to me how pretty he/she was, but didn't think more about it.

We did however, come home that night and submit a "waiting child" application with our agency just in case this was the way we were to find our child.

In Mid-May GWCA held a webinar with information on the Hope Camp Kids so I decided to attend. Well...there "HE" was again, that beautiful child with the pouty lips that I saw the month before. Staff from our agency met with, held and played with him and offered such sweet descriptions that we asked to see his file.

Needless to say, this is where our journey finally begins, with a few pictures, a brief medical history and hearts filled with love for a boy we've yet to meet, our William Joseph Xiaohu.