Pink or Blue

Most people assume when you adopt from China that you are going to bring home a baby girl due to China's one child policy and the tradition that the sons take care of the parents as they get older.
When we first started researching adoption, we discovered that there are two ways to adopt from China.
First is the healthy child list and this list is made up of mostly girls. We thought that this would be the list we would want to be on, everyone wants a healthy baby right? Well the wait time on this list is currently 5-6 years.....Yup, years.
So that was out.
Then we heard about the special focus list. In China, any abnormality or deformity on a child causes them to not be "healthy" and puts them on the special focus list. These conditions can greatly vary from something as simple as a birth mark or eczema to cleft lip or club foot or more severe conditions like Spina Bifida. This list often has both boys and girls of all ages.
Brian and I spent a lot of time thinking and praying about this decision. To be quite honest, we never thought we would adopt a "special needs" child. However the more we thought and prayed over it, the more God started showing us what "special needs" really means.
We saw this video at one of our adoption training classes and I'm not ashamed to say that I had to hold back tears. Go ahead and watch it, we'll wait....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rztYMMhMT2Y

There were many things that stood out in this video (besides the cameo of a few pitties :)).
First, these parents admit they didn't know everything about their chidrens' needs, but they did know how to love and through unconditional love these children blossomed. This is really no different than having biological children. You never know what cards you are going to be dealt or what your child will be like, but the one thing you can do is love them no matter what.
Another thing I loved from the video was the quote "When you are adopted, your parents looked out at the whole world and chose you". What an awesome way to explain adoption to our child. Our goal for our child is to not feel abandoned or orphaned, but chosen. Chosen by God to be our child, even though he or she was born a world away from us.
I could go on and on about that video, but this post is wordy already. In short, it confirmed Brian and I's desire to adopt a "special needs" child in a way that I never expected.

Part of the adoption paperwork includes a "type of child" form where Brian and I need to specify what needs we think we would be well equipped to handle. We found it very difficult to fill out this form and because of this we are choosing not to share our decisions. We will say however that we did not take this decision lightly and took into account what we thought we could emotionally, physically and financially handle. We want to be open to finding our child as quickly as possible, but we need to be honest about our capabilities as first time parents and as working parents.

We're a little over half way through the adoption process, we have 1 more class, 2 more homestudy visits, physical exams and a few more (ok lots more) pieces of paper. We are hoping to have our application sent to China by the end of March and after that it is just a matter of time until we are matched.
We can't wait for the day that we can post the picture of our son or daughter on this blog!
Until then we'll just be here waiting......