Colby and I have been married for 4 years, this past September 25. We talked about adoption, even international adoption, when we were first married, but we waited, enjoying married life. On occasion, I thought to myself just where would we even start with adoption. Then, one day in mid-January 2005 I saw a small ad in a small box, just below the Billy Graham column, for an information meeting on International adoption. Now, I had been reading the Billy Graham column for the past year or year and a half and had never seen any ad like this before… and have not seen it there again.

In my heart, I know that this was God telling me... "Linda, you've been asking. Now, I am telling you. This is where you start."

The meeting, held by Children's Hope International was scheduled for the next night and Colby and I went to see what IA was about. The meeting had a lot of great information on adoption from several countries. There were also many families present who had completed their own adoption journey with CHI. Since Colby and I had talked about adopting a little girl, we turned to the China program. CHI has been a leader in the China adoptions. We liked what we heard about CHI and how they worked closely with families throughout the entire process and would even have a guide with us the entire time in China. That did it. We never looked back, not even looking at any other agency. Everyone at CHI has been fabulous to us and been just like family to us this whole time.

O.K. Our adoption journey as they say went something like this:

January 2005
Initial information meeting with CHI both Colby and I attended at First Evangel Church. We could not do anything at this point because we needed to be married 1 year to be accepted.

April 2005
I attended this second informational meeting in Memphis, having received an invitation through the mail. I wanted to hear about adoption and CHI again. After this meeting I spoke with Melissa, the Memphis area social worker made available through CHI and Brenda Barker, the director of the Brentwood office. We found that Colby and I could move forward during the summer in preparing our homestudy. We submitted an application to adopt through CHI, but as expected, it was returned from the St. Louis office because of the marriage requirement. We were still allowed to go forward with the homestudy.

September 2005
We completed our homestudy process during the summer and in September our CHI application was approved. Then, we started with the USCIS (U.S. Citizen & Immigration Service) approval or the infamous I-600A application (Petition to Adopt …) and, of course, the fingerprint check.

December 2005
After 12 long weeks of waiting for the UCIS approval and faxes to our U.S. congressman senator, we received the approval we had been awaiting, known as the I-171H (Favorable Determination....). O.K. so it took an extra week because I had the flu in December. When I was well enough to station myself at the computer again, I was drafting letters to my government reps.

Then! Woo Hoo! We received IT, the I-171H! Finally, one lazy Saturday afternoon in December before Christmas, Colby reminded me that I had not told him yet what I wanted for Christmas. My reply, “All I want right at this moment is just my I-171H.” Not five minutes later, Colby returns with the mail and held up an envelope and asked if I was looking for this one particular piece of mail: it was a regular, innocent-looking envelope in the stack of mail…. Well, Christmas came early that day!

I was going to Nashville! - for the next step, the TN state document authentications on our dossier! I drove after work one day and by the time I got to Nashville and found a hotel room (nope, hadn't reserved a room before I left) it was 1:00 a.m. and had been raining the whole drive.

The important thing was after all my documents were authenticated, I took them to the Brentwood office to have Vonda and Amanda review them to be sure all t's were crossed and i's dotted... These things had to be just so when they get to China! The CHI office was just amazing with all the pictures of all the children from around the world that CHI had helped bring home to their families in the U.S. I just knew that our daughter would be on that wall in 6 months....

Did I say that the wait to adopt in China was 6 months! In 2005 it was a 6 month wait.

January 2006
O.K. then after TN State authentication, and after U.S. authentication, and after the Chinese Embassy authentication... I was ready to send docs to the St. Louis office and on to China. CHI made their final reviews and sent our dossier off to China! We were officially of the status D.T.C. "Documents to China" as of January 6, 2006! Woo Hoo!

Well the last week of January and the first few days of February were Spring Festival in China (or what we refer to as Chinese New Year) - a week long holiday! So we waited for our L.I.D. "Logged in Date". This is THE DATE when China has acknowledged receipt of our dossier - not reviewed and approved mind you, but received and logged in. This is a very important milestone though, nonetheless.

February 2006 – L.I.D!
Yeah! We were notified by Vonda that our documents were officially Logged In! We now had the official, and very critical, LID status as of February 9, 2006. In just 6 months, Colby and I would be parents to the most beautiful little girl in the world (literally).
And the wait begins...

December 2006
Fingerprint check approval expires after 15 months, Colby and I make appointment for next set of fingerprints. O.K. now this is the first update we have to go through and it just didn’t seem like 15 months had gone by so quickly, without referral.

February - April 2007
I-171H is about to expire so we begin the homestudy update to submit I-600A extension in March 2007, with USCIS which is approved April 2007 - wow , that was fast.... of course this means it expires that much earlier as we found out just recently. This does not affect China, only USCIS

...and we continue to wait.

China slows down its international adoption program. They try to implement a more robust domestic adoption program and change much of the requirements for international adoption - age, marital status, weight, net worth considerations... These are not retroactive to those of us who are LID, but are put into place for those submitting dossiers to China in May 2007. This does work. The number of families submitting documents to China decrease drastically.

This does not increase the speed of referrals out of China either. The wait is growing and expected to grow longer. We are still waiting at this point.

So when China gets to October 2005 and November 2005 LIDs we begin to realize just what a wait it will be. Apparently October and November were months where China received a record number of family dossiers for adoption. When they get through these months we all think referrals will speed up.

This is not the case. December goes very slowly and January 2006 goes the same.

Summer 2008
We are waiting, but really do expect a referral by the end of the year because they are half way through January and we know that the whole last week of January/ first week of February was the Spring Festival Holiday (Chinese New Year) which means that there were no dossiers logged in. So February LIDs are just around the corner.

We now have to request our I-600A approval extension – for the second time… this means that we have to do another homestudy update, including all the great reports we have to collect that support the homestudy. On the bright side, this is a free one! Yes, a free extension request. But thisone has to be timed just right, because our last update was to expire on October 11.

Then comes the Summer Olympics in Beijing... questions abound as to whether or not there will be any adoption travel or referrals given in August... There are referrals in August the LID cut-off date is January 31.

One of my very favorite writings is the Footprints in the Sand.
 

 Our Referral!
Tuesday, September 2, 2009 – I received the call, in my office, just before 1:00 p.m. I have to admit, after not looking on the groups to see the referral cut-off date on Sun or Monday essentially, I signed on to my Yahoo account on Tuesday morning and saw several people saying that February 9th is actually IN! Wow! Of course, I still didn't really believe it because, every month, the date range in the earliest rumors always include a couple dates that do not actually end up in the batch for that month.

But then, ALL the e-mails were indicating this and someone said that Europe was agreeing that 2/9/06 was in this month's batch! So then the question is did the US get referrals on the same day? We always hear that Europe receives their referrals first and rumors start there. I was not going to call St. Louis! I was going to wait it out, dignified and all. But then, my phone rang... and it was Julia, and it was the referral announcement for Colby’s and my very own daughter! Oh my God in Heaven, Thank you!

She said that they could not send faxes of pictures today because they really were working hard to get the referral materials into the overnight package by the pick up time and that would take all their time! That was O.K., because this package was the MOST IMPORTANT THING in the whole universe.

Julia gave me the key information about our daughter. Her age, get this.... she’s just under 6 months old.... yes that was a surprise to me so I had to repeat it to her.... “She’s six months old?” No, not quite yet... on Saturday, she would be 6 months old... Her birthday was March 6, 2008! Wow! Julia gave me her "height" - 22.8 inches and her weight - 12.8 pounds... She said, "Linda, she is small and she is just beautiful. She really is beautiful. She is also small but she is healthy" O.K. So now, I really want the pictures.... I told her to send the overnight package to me here at my office so we wouldn't have to wait until the end of the day and then have to go and find the facility where our daughter was waiting again....

Then I embarked on creating Colby’s announcement! Thank you Doris for helping me surprise Colby with his fax announcement. I wish I could have been there to see his face.
Well, at this point, I realized that I completely forgot to ask Julia our daughter’s name! I put in the phone call… Julia was very responsive, particularly in light of all the work that was going on in the office that day! Lot’s of activity on Referral Day. She called me back and told me our daughter’s name was ZHUANG Lu Shi. :)
The nursery:
O.K. we are still working on this one. We do have the furniture and Colby put up the chair rail around the room – he did a beautiful job with that! Just waiting for Lucy!