Today, Diana of Diana Rambles blogging fame shares with us some of her experience adopting her cutie-pie daughter from China!
Back in 2005 we decided to add to our family via adoption. We explored our options and ultimately decided to adopt from China. There are 2 adoption options with China. One is the traditional program where you send all your paperwork to China and wait in line to get a referral. China matches you with a child and then you are notified via your adoption agency. The other option is going through the waiting child program. Waiting children are kids that might have a special need or are older. You pick out the child and petition China to adopt that child. Both options require basically the same paperwork and fees, but the waiting child program is much faster. Especially as there has been a huge slow down in the traditional program and it now takes years to receive a referral through the traditional program. We ended up waiting 13 months from our LID to get our referral. LID means log in date, and it’s the date that your paperwork is logged into the system in China. Referrals are made in order of LID. When our paperwork got logged in the wait was only 6 months, but it lengthened to 13 months. Which is relatively short to the wait now. China typically sends out referrals once a month.
Anyway, back in 2006 the wait was slowing down and we weren’t sure when our referral would come. The batch of referrals sent at the end of July covered LIDs through July 14, 2005. We were confident that we would be in the next batch which we expected around Sept 1. On Thursday, August 24 someone from our July 05 LID Yahoo group posted that they just got a call telling them that their referral had arrived. There had been no news or rumors of referrals, so everyone was shocked. Everyone was on pins & needles that afternoon waiting for news. We heard that July 22 might be included in the batch and I started to worry. Our LID was July 22, 2005 and I wasn’t sure we’d made the cut-off. I was desperately searching blogs to see if anyone with a July 22 LID has gotten a referral. It wasn’t until the next morning that we found out that referrals did indeed go through July 22 and that we would get the call on Monday. Needless to say, that was a VERY long weekend for us. DH ended up taking Monday off work so that he would be home for the call.
After taking the boys to school on Monday morning, we were very anxious for our phone to ring. And ring it did. We had a few false alarm calls that morning that we have on video. It’s quite entertaining! You can see the video over at my Diana Rambles blog. Finally the call came through a little after noon and we found out that we were matched with a baby girl named Feng Yu Quan from Jiangxi province, which is in southern China. We got a lot of info about our daughter over the phone and about an hour later her photo arrived via email. We were supposed to get the email while we were on the phone, but our agency’s server was very slow. Can you imagine how many times we hit refresh? Here is the first glimpse we got of our sweetie.
The next day a package arrive via Fed-Ex (I don’t think the delivery guy knew he was the stork!) and it included more detailed info about our daughter and these 2 additional photos.
We quickly signed our acceptance and returned it to our agency in Colorado. We traveled to China and were united with our daughter 9 weeks later. Our lives have never been the same since!
You can head on over to my Diana Rambles blog and watch that silly video and see a comparison of our daughter now with that first pic we saw of her on August 28, 2005.
Diana - Her picture is what caught my eye….China babies are so easy for me to spot now.:) I know we have crossed paths before but I do not recall if we ever discussed what SWI your sweetie is from. My daughter was Feng Jiang Hui from Fengxin. I hope you are as head over heels with yours as I am with ours!
thanks for sharing your story and helping to spread the joy of adoption!