Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. To follow up on the last post, Kelly did make it home just in time for Christmas...such an answer to prayer! Brandon and Carson seemed to really enjoy themselves. Brandon was so excited that he couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve. It was 2:30 a.m. when we finally decided to break out the Benadryl. LOL! Poor little guy. I thought he would sleep at least until 8 or 8:30. Nope! He was up and crawling into our bed at 7:40 a.m. on Christmas morning. He was so excited that he couldn't stand himself any longer. He ended up confessing that he had snuck downstairs and peeked into the living room and saw one of his gifts. About two weeks before Christmas, while watching the Polar Express DVD, he proclaimed that he wanted the Polar Express train and he was going to ask Santa for it. That became the one gift that he consistently asked for. So, as you may be able to guess, "Santa" was able to find it on ebay after calling all local stores that sell Lionel trains only to find them sold out. Thank goodness! I would've been heartbroken for him if Santa had not found it. It was such a "big gift" that Santa decided to give it to both Brandon and Carson but I don't think Brandon minds sharing it with his baby brother. It's a really neat train, too. It has a headlight, a whistle, and a smokestack that has real smoke puffing out of it! They were so excited on Christmas morning!

I wanted to take a couple of paragraphs and answer some questions that we have been receiving from friends and family about our adoption. The whole process will take us about 18 to 20 mos to complete. Babies from China are typically around 10 to 13 mos in age when they are brought home, so Abigail won't be an infant but will still be considered a baby. I have had questions asked about the adoption process so I thought I would try to briefly explain it here. The first thing to do is to decide on an adoption agency and apply to their China program. We have just mailed in our application and are currently waiting for a call from our assigned social worker so we can start the home study process. The home study will consist of three visits with our social worker, one in our home and two in her office. Apparently, each visit lasts about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. After we start our home study, it's my impression that we can start gathering documents for our "dossier". This is basically a packet of paperwork that is sent to China. It includes things such as intense background checks, Homeland Security approval, fingerprinting, and various other documents such as copies of our marriage certificate, deed to our house, etc. It is very time-consuming to complete the dossier as it will take us about 4 to 6 months to gather everything up. All of the paperwork also needs to be notarized and also needs to be "stamped" by the US Government.

After the dossier is complete, it is sent by our agency over to China for review (our Date To China or DTC for short). China will then enter all of our information into their central computer (our Log In Date or LID for short) and we will wait for review. When it is time, our dossier will go into review and China will go through the papers with a fine tooth comb and then approve us for adoption. We will then wait for our referral. Our file will then move to the "referral room" where we will be matched with our daughter. Apparently, China examines every little detail about your family and goes to great lengths to match up just the right baby with the right family. Once they match a baby to us, they will send all papers and pictures of her to our agency who will then contact us with the news of our referral. The referrals usually go out at the end of every month with the families being contacted by their agencies around the beginning of each month. They have currently completed referrals for those families whose LIDs (see above) were in April of 2005. So, the current wait time once your dossier is locked into their computer is about 9 months.

So, you can see why the process will take as long as it does. We know without a doubt that we are meant to bring our daughter home from China so that will make the waiting a little easier. Please feel free to leave any comments you wish to make here on the website. All you have to do is click on the word "comments" below any of my posts and this will take you to the page where you type in your comments. We would love to hear from all of you as we would like to know who is visiting the site!!! God bless!!!