Where Are We Now?

After 5 months of working on this, our dossier was complete and sent to China on August 10th.  As you can see on my table, there were so many copies of everything that I needed serious space to organize it!  One complete set of papers was sent to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, which they kept.  The originals got sent to China, the agency (Holt) kept a set, and I have a set here at home.  Needless to say, when those originals went out by FedEx I held my breath until they were logged in in China.  

I have realized that I am an absolutely horrible blogger.  I only did this because so many other adoptive families have done it, and I know it will be really nice to have this all documented so we can look back on it and show our daughter someday.  I can't believe that I have not written an entry since June!  I guess I felt like there was never much to say and just got behind.  Well now it feels like a lot has happened so I am ready to get back to it.  Once we have a match and know who our daughter is, I am sure I will update all of the time!

To summarize all that has happened:  We applied to adopt on March 5th, 2012.  For the next 5 months I worked on our dossier (official set of paperwork required by China for adoption) and now for the past 2 months, we have had nothing to do but wait for a referral.  When we first began this process, I asked a member of the Holt team to give me an estimate on how long she thought it would take for us to get a match once our dossier had been sent to China.  She said about 3 months.  That would be about a month from now, and I had it in my head that we would get matched sooner.  I don't know why, I guess I was being really optimistic.  

About a month ago, I saw a little girl on Holt's website that I fell in love with.  Most of the children that are shown on the photo listing are ones that need extra help in finding their forever families.  They tend to have medical conditions that are more severe, but not always.  This little girl was younger than we had said we wanted.  She had just turned 2 and therefore would still be 2 years old by the time we would travel to China to pick her up.  After about a week of reviewing her file and thinking and praying about it, we told Holt that we wanted to pursue her.  There was also another family that had requested her information from the website and also wanted to pursue her adoption.  When this happens, there is a committee who meets and decides which family (there could be several families involved) will get that child.  They told us that they would make a decision by the end of the week.  My social worker warned me to "guard my heart" since this child may not be matched with us.  I thought I was doing that, and I knew that I would trust God no matter what the committee decided.  We got a call a few days later that they had chosen the other family for this little girl.  I held up for half of the phone conversation but then just started bawling.  I guess I had really opened my heart up to her more than I thought, and it was difficult to go from picturing her in our home and in our family to hearing that she would never be ours.  

My good friend Maygon gave me a necklace shortly after this, which is a pendant with a saying on it.  It says "Faith in God includes faith in His timing."

I love how God provides the love and support that we need, when we need it.  My friends and family have been so amazing, always asking us how it is going and praying for us, giving us words of encouragement when we need it, and loving us through it.  I am so thankful for every one of them!