Long Awaited Update

Ok. I Know it has been well over a year since my last update. To be honest at times I let things discourage me and it wasn't uplifting to write about Love's Journey. A lot has happened and while we thought we were starting a journey to adopt Hannah, we are actually adopting Isaac.

The strange thing is that when we chose to adopt from China I really struggled because I felt as if I was choosing to have a daughter. When you give birth to a biological child you can't select boy or girl and I thought by choosing China, we were selecting to have a daughter. Oh the plans of mice and men...

After we submitted our dossier to China we learned more about the waiting child program. At first we thought if you chose to be part of the waiting child program you were presented with a child whose needs you may or may not be able to treat and support. Later we learned that there are many children and you are able to research needs that your family can support and that there are many children whose needs really aren't that special after all. Sadly our paperwork had gone to China as waiting for a non-special-needs child and we were unable to be matched with a child from our agencies waiting child list because our paperwork had been in China for too long after we learned about how the waiting child program worked.

Sometime this past spring China implemented a new type of waiting child program. In this program several different agencies would share a list of children whom they could work to find families for. When matching children with families on this list agencies were able to consider families who were already DTC (documents to China) and LID (logged into China). Since our paperwork had already passed through the review room we were able to find a match very quickly!

Before we decided to look into this new program we spent a lot of time in prayer, researched numerous special needs, spent more time in prayer, read books, prayed, and finally felt peace about submitting a checklist of special needs we felt able to work with as a family. Another God thing that lead us to pursue the special needs list was when Craig ran into his friend Eric. Eric is a doctor who said that he would be happy to look over any files for us.

We sent our checklist to our adoption agency on Thursday, July 24th. On Friday I called to check to make sure they had received the information that they needed so that we could move forward with the special needs program. Erin told me that there was a little boy with cleft palate that she wanted to tell us about, but that the online system was down.

On Wednesday, July 30th she called to tell me about a little boy. I believe this is the same boy she mentioned to me on the 25th, but I am not 100% sure. Erin told me about Zhao Yao Dong and I was excited about what I heard so I told her to lock the file and send his information to us. Once Erin locked the file we had 48 hours to look over his medical information, submit a treatment plan, and make a decision about whether or not to add this little guy to our family.

Our agency tried to submit our Letter of Intent (LOI) on Friday, August 1st, but the website was down and they were not able to submit it for us. It was 10:00 am EST, but in China it was 10:00 pm on Friday night and nobody was there. Our agency submitted everything via fax and sent a letter explaining why they were unable to submit it online. We spent all weekend in prayer and miraculously on Monday, August 4th our his file was still locked and Erin was able to submit our LOI online. We were on our way to adopt Zhao Yao Dong. We will name him Isaac Yao Li Stopyra.

The map of China above shows Guangdong Province which is where Isaac currently lives. Dongguan City is about 30 miles north of Hong Kong. I know I've written a lot. I know you have questions. I'll try to post more later.

:o) Gretchen