Tomorrow we will have been home 6 months! Time has flown by so quickly, but we are enjoying every minute along the way. I was looking back the other day at the first picture we ever saw of Sophie. I don't think I have ever shared it with you all. I will give you all a little background on the events that led up to our receiving the picture....
As most of you know, we started the China adoption process over 4 years ago. At the time, the wait was around 18 months. As we filled out the mounds of paperwork and did all the things necessary to get our dossier to China, the wait began to extend, and China began changing the rules to curb the number of applications they were receiving to adopt their children. Thankfully, we were already logged into China's adoption system, so the changes didn't really affect us directly, as in make us no longer eligible to adopt, but it did increase the time we had to wait until we received our referral of a child and then travel to China to complete the adoption. All of the paperwork, homestudies, and fingerprinting that are required to adopt from China have expiration dates, so as we were waiting, we were having to renew paperwork, be refingerprinted (in case we committed a crime since we were last fingerprinted), have our backgrounds checked, and update our homestudy. The wait was painful, but at least we had these things to keep us busy and remind us of why were waiting.
Last August or September, a friend of our's who had already adopted from China, emailed me to tell me that China had changed its policy and would now allow anyone waiting for a referral to look on another adoption agency's private list for their child. These children were all special needs children, which was great because we had already decided that we were ready to take the special needs route of China adoption. Most of the children have correctable special needs, and if we had had any biological children ourselves, there was no guarantee that our biological children would be born without some form of health issue. After hearing this news, I began joining various Yahoo groups that adoption agencies from around the US started as a means of notifying those interested that they had a new group of pictures of children from China and as a way for adoptive families to "meet" each other and share experiences and to root each other on through this process.
There was one particular group that I joined that had so many people talking about how great the agency was and how helpful their China coordinator was with matching families with their children. Every day or so, someone new would join the group and ask what others thought about the adoption agency and if they were easy to work with, etc. There was always a flood of posts raving about Xiaoqing, the China coordinator, and how great she was and how she would stay up all night long to talk to the people at the CCAA in China about the children, etc. I kind of stuck that in the back of my mind, and continued to look around at various agency lists, never dreaming that we would find Sophie so soon after.
On Monday, September 21, I checked my email and found a post to the Yahoo group from Xiaoqing about a new list of children that had been received. I looked at the list, there were no pictures ~ only a description of each child, and I saw some information on a little girl, Jan, born in August of 2008. I thought, "Wow, she is really young!". We had asked for a child as young as possible, so I thought, "I'm gonna check this one out." I emailed Xiaoqing and asked what I needed to do to see the pictures of Jan, and she immediately emailed me back with a form that needed to be filled out. I quickly filled it out and sent it back to her. In a little while she emailed me back with the following picture attached. I was blown away! I was looking into the sweetest little face. The face that would soon be our daughter.
We love you so much, Sophie! You were definitely worth the wait!
Our first picture of Sophie
Gotcha Day!
First day home
Home 3 months
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