A little impatience, a lot of progress

Which stands for Dossier to China! 

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you that our adoption process has had a few minor set backs (not that we would ever be bitter or impatient, we are much too zen for that).
However, we are beyond thrilled to be able to report that our dossier (aka our life on paper) is officially winging its way to China (don't mess this up FedEx or you will have one angry almost mama on your hands!). 

I have no idea what the FedEx Panda team is,
but it sure seems like an adorable way for our paperwork to get to China!

Once our paperwork is safely in the care of the Chinese government, we will be eligible to be matched. As we talked about in this post, we are eligible to be matched with a kiddo (or 2, but 99.9999% sure it will only be 1) of either gender, under 18 months old and our baby could have any of the special needs that we have decided that we are comfortable with.

During this time there may be some slow blogging as we will most likely not reveal that we have reviewed a match until after we have decided if that match is our child. We are doing this largely to make sure that we are making the right decision for us and not getting everyone's hopes up, but also because the Chinese government and our agency frown upon advertising a match until we have a few pieces of paper in hand that say our child is officially ours.
China releases a new list of kiddos eligible for adoption once a month, but we have been told that a referral could come at any time. At that point we will have 48 hours to say yes or no. One of the reasons we liked our agency is that they told us up front that their primary focus during matching is on the kids, not us. They want to make sure that kids get good homes and if we don't feel like we can best deal with the needs of a given child there is no shame in being honest and saying so. We don't anticipate saying no to a match as our agency knows us very well by now, but it could happen, once again a reason why we will probably wait to announce a match.

All this to say, thanks for sticking with us so far. I know it has been a long haul since this announcement back in December, but thanks everyone for your support and encouraging words. Hopefully very soon we will have more exciting news!

DTC

Any guesses on what the letters DTC mean in the China adoption world?

I'll leave you in suspense until Monday, but yes this means there is good news!