It's A Girl

Our story is very similar to most people who adopt. We tried for many years to get pregnant with no success. Finally we sought out an infertility specialist and after more than a year of various treatments became pregnant. We were very fortunate to have a baby girl, Gabrielle, in January of 1996. Even though we wanted more children, I had a very difficult pregnancy so we decided to wait. A few years went by and we tried again, but we were unsuccessful. When Gabby was six, we decided that we wanted to adopt.

Fostering

We started out by going through our county foster care system. We took the ten week class and only three weeks after graduation had a sibling group of three placed with us. They were wonderful kids and we got along really well with their mother. After only three months they went home. In the next year and a half we would have six more kids come and go. The stay of our last foster child was particularly difficult, so we decided that foster care was not for us and withdrew from the program. We took some time off from the stresses of trying to grow our family and nurtured the family we had. It was a good break that gave us the energy to try to persue the adoption process again. We decided to adopt from China.

The China Adoption Process

In December, 2004 we applied to Children's Hope International, were accepted and began our paperchase. The paperchase is a tedious process requiring a lot of documents; birth certificates, employment letters, police records, financial records, letters from friends and family and health reports. You also need a homestudy which requires at least four visits from a social worker. Once you collect all of this paperwork then you need to have it all notarized. The notarized documents then have to be sent to the state to be certified, proving that the notaries are real. When you get the paperwork back from the state, you then send it on to the Chinese Consulate to be authenticated. When eventually you get all of this paperwork back with all the official signatures and stamps, you send it to your adoption agency to be submitted to China.
It usually takes at least a couple of months to complete this part of the process, but our initial homestudy agency was a dud, only doing one home visit in three months. I didn't know that this was unusual, but CHI checked in with me to ask what was going on. When I told them about the delay on the homestudy, they immediately recommended another agency and we were finally on our way. We sent our dossier to China in October. Our LID (logged in date) is 11/21/05.

The Wait

I think that the hardest part of the whole process is the wait. When we started the process, the wait time from LID to referral was only six to eight months. Each month the wait has grown due to an increase in the amount of people submitting dossiers to adopt from China. The wait for us has been seventeen months so far. I expect that it will be at least another couple of months before we see our first picture of June Li.