Want to Challenge Yourself? Try Learning Mandarin!

Since Qinying will have only heard Mandarin in her young lifetime, Eliza and I figured it would be good to try to pick up some basic language skills before venturing out to meet her. Yikes! Mandarin is really hard to learn. The tones are hard to pick up. After our first Rosetta Stone lesson, we sound ridiculous... but we're going to keep trying. Anything we can do to try to connect with Qinying as quickly and smoothly as possible is worth the effort.

So for now, 再见 (goodbye).

All the articles and stories I've read on adoption websites and heard from other adoptive parents tell of the moment they saw their first picture of their child, of how they knew it was their son/daughter. So I naturally had that in my mind as how it was supposed to happen for me when I first saw my daughter.

As I anxiously opened the email from the agency that had her picture, my finger held the little white arrow over the attachment as I prepared myself for my big revelation. I opened it. I looked at it. "Oh, a Chinese baby." She was adorable, she was precious. But no fireworks going off in my head, or instant connection being formed. I was wondering what this meant.

Paul and I decided to take the route of praying about her and thinking about her over the 24 hours we had to make a decision and seeing if any red flags came up in our minds. None did, and as I spent the day going over her medical records with doctors and researching cleft palate programs, staring at her picture between phone calls, a connection slowly started to form. Already I was being a mother, learning about her medical condition and trying to figure out the best way I can help her.

Now it's been a week since we were matched with her, and our bond is growing. It really is excruciating, not having her here with us and having no idea when we can go get her. For now we are trying to make the most of our time with Malia and trusting that God has perfect timing, just as He's always had.

What's in a Name?

So I showed the Chinese characters for "Qin Ying" to a Chinese friend, and he translated it as "fragrance of cherry blossom." It's beautiful. We plan to keep it as a middle name. We're still discussing a first name to give. Any suggestions? :)

Ai Yai Yai

It didn't take long before we hit another snag.

It turns out that the next step is to wait for China to respond to our Letter of Intent to Adopt by sending us a Letter of Acceptance. Nothing else can happen until we receive this. The only problem is we don't know how long it will take to hear from China. It could be 45 days at the fastest. It could also be 6 months... gulp!

So I spoke too soon on the timeline. We have at least 45 days to wait before we can process any further paperwork and then plan the trip to meet Qinying (an additional 2-3 months).

It's harder now to wait. We've seen her picture. We imagine all of the developmental stages we want to be a part of. She's no longer an abstraction. She's a real person.

Sigh... This is going to take patience.

The Long-Awaited Call Has Arrived

It has been more than a month since our dossier was completed and sent in, and we were just in a holding pattern, getting antsy for the phone call from the adoption agency, Holt. Yesterday morning that call finally arrived.

We were informed about a 10-month-old girl from central China named Jiang Qin Ying. My Chinese friend tells me that her name probably means "hardworking" and "excellent." The name was given to her at the orphanage since she was anonymously left at the Child Welfare office's front doorstep, swaddled in a blanket with a bottle as her sole possession. She was approximately 2 days old.

Yesterday Eliza and I spend the evening discussing this moment and our big decision. Is Qin Ying our daughter? I'm going to let Eliza fill in more of the detail, but in brief, the answer is YES!

So the journey continues, now at a much more accelerated and anxiety-producing clip. We appreciate our dear friends and family who have been walking alongside us all along. It's about to get really exciting...

the Waiting Game

It's been a while since we've posted...we've hit that place where we are just waiting for "the call" from the agency saying they have a child for us. We actually got a call in early May for a child referral, but we ended up passing because the little girl they had was a month younger than Malia. After some thought, we had decided it would be complex for their relationship to be so close in age and should probably go with a child who is at least a school year younger.

It's hard to "pass" on a child, as if it were a car in the wrong color, or that dessert you're now too full to have. But we've been trying to heed advice from our social worker that if we're feeling overwhelmed before the child even gets here, that's not a good sign. The agency really does want you to think very carefully about what you feel you can handle and what would work well for your family. They want to set you up to succeed, as far as can be determined at least.

So now we continue to wait. I can't complain. We are not waiting nearly as long as families in the standard China process, which is now taking 3-4 years before you are matched with a child. But after hearing in April that we would be matched in 1-3 months, we had gotten pretty excited and ready for things to happen that quickly.

We are constantly being reminded that God has perfect timing. He knows things we don't, and will bring her to us when the time is right. We do trust that, even though our thoughts continue to drift towards our daughter-to-be, who is somewhere in China even as I write this. We pray for her, that someone is caring for and loving her well.

Child of Promise part 2

Another little pitch for the China Child of Promise option...yesterday our adoption agency, Holt, matched a group of families going through the standard adoption process with China. These families matched had dossiers (paperwork) completed and logged on March 3, 2006! They've waited for over 3 years to get matched. I can't even imagine waiting that long.

I spoke with someone at Holt today and found out that since we are open to a child with cleft lip/palate, our current wait time to get matched is 1-3 months tops. Wow, that took our excitement to another level! Another piece of good news is that we found out that this certificate of citizenship Paul and I have been bemoaning in this blog, is not even needed! The guidebook with all the processes states you need it, but a staff person at Holt told us that there have been a few cases where people lost their certificates and just wrote a letter explaining their situation and included a copy of their U.S. passport and the Chinese government accepted it. Ugh, on one hand all that worry and stress for nothing, but more importantly, we don't have to be held back by it anymore!

So now, because there are so many available children with cleft lip/palate, it looks like we can get matched pretty soon after we get our dossier in. All we are waiting on for that is the approval of our I-800A application (immigration services pertaining to suitability to adopt).

This was just the information I needed to encourage me today. It has been a stressful few months where all I could see was a long paper trail ahead of me. Thank you Lord.