Funk

I wish I were talking about this kind of funk

But sadly I am not (although I'm pretty sure I would look awesome with an afro).

As you may have guessed from the silence, we were not matched off of the October shared list. Brian is handling this much better than I am. I have found myself in a funk of just plain being sad.

I'm sad that we haven't been matched. I'm sad that there are orphans that need homes and  families with love and space to spare and everyone is just waiting. I'm sad that the monthly shared lists from China have been smaller than usual with no explanation as to why. I'm sad that I have to walk past our empty baby room for yet another month with no idea of who it will belong to or when he or she will be living there.

So you will have to excuse this downer of a post and (if you have seen me in person) my attitude of late because I just can't fake it right now. I know I will recover and I know we will both be stronger for it, but I'm not there yet.

In the meantime, I offer this picture of a baby elephant as a warm fuzzy trade off for reading my depressing post.

Three Things Thursday

Thing #1: Quick update to let you all know that there is no update yet (aren't you glad you checked the blog today?). The October shared list hasn't come out yet, but with only two weeks left in October, it has to come out soon! We would appreciate any prayers/good thoughts you could send our way that this is our month!

Thing #2: I felt like I was a little harsh on Jen Arnold and Bill Klein aka the Little Couple (I'm just shocked I haven't heard from them yet, but am expecting a call any day now to set up a lunch date) in this post. I was frustrated by how fast and easy they made it seem like everything was moving for their adoptions (especially when ours was very slow and tedious at the time). However this past set of episodes since they brought home their son and have worked towards bringing home their daughter have been truly honest and heartfelt. I'm thrilled they are finally in India picking up their daughter and can't wait to see their new episodes as a family of four.

Thing #3: We have planned another getaway for this month. We thought we might as well get in as many quick trips as we can before we have a kid in tow and things get more complicated! We'll post pictures when we get back, but here is your clue as to where we are going!

The truth

Blog friends, we haven't been completely honest with you. Thus the radio silence for the last few weeks. It has been for good reason, but we promised to share the good and bad of our adoption adventure and we both feel that its time for this part of our story to be shared.

When we posted this, it wasn't 100% true. We were matched off of the shared list that came out in September, but we were matched with a child that was much older than what we had been approved for. We have been approved for a child up to 18 months and we have prayed and talked about this age quite a bit over the last 10 months and really felt like that was our comfort zone for many reasons. It was apparent that this child was not meant to be ours. Our coordinator apologized for the mix up and said she would make sure that the person doing the matching reviewed our choices before the next list came out. We were sad, but ok with it because it was just so obvious that this kiddo wasn't ours.

And then 11 PM the next night the phone rang. It was our coordinator, telling us that she had another match for us. Another family with our agency had been matched off of the shared list and they had declined the match.  Our agency had then thought of us and wanted us to review the file. There was a catch though. The other family had used all but 8 hours of the 72 hour hold on the file. Our agency thought they could just transfer his file to us, but we had to make our decision in that 8 hours. As you might imagine, it was a shock and we were wide awake at that point (which is saying a lot for me, once I'm asleep it usually takes a lot to wake me up!). We spent the rest of that crazy night reading the medical file, looking at the pictures of an adorable little boy and asking ourselves "is this our baby?".  Long story short, we said yes and with that "yes" we had a match and a son. We had waited almost a year for this moment and it had finally come.

Four happy days went by. We were dying to tell everyone, but our best efforts to get those we wanted to tell first together were unsuccessful for various reasons and as it turns out we were glad we weren't able to tell them.

That fourth night we received a phone call from our coordinator. We knew it was bad news just from the tone of her voice. As it turns out, there was a clerical error when this boy's file was being transferred from the first family to us. Somehow when his file was unlocked, it was never officially "re-locked" for us and his file was already gone and locked by another agency for another family.

Bottom line: He wasn't ours and there was nothing that could be done.

As you can imagine, we went through many emotions. At one point I wondered if this was a sign that we weren't supposed to do this, weren't supposed to be parents. It even brings back tears to my eyes to type that sentence. It was too difficult, confusing and painful to talk about with anyone. So, we ran away.

We took an amazing trip to New Orleans and Alabama. This trip had already been planned, but as it turned out it couldn't have come at a better time. We needed to take a breath and we just couldn't do that in Colorado (it's actually hard to do that in New Orleans too, hello humidity!).

So that brings us to today. Today we are ok. We have weathered storms together before and we always come out stronger for it. We are moving forward and trying to have closure and peace in the fact that this was not our child and it is a great thing that there are more adoptive families than available children right now.

Thanks for reading this beast of a post. We are trying to look forward to the next shared list, which will most likely be released in the next few weeks. As you can imagine, we might be a little hesitant to share the news right away when we actually do get matched, but we promise we will share as soon as we feel like it is really happening. We started this blog to share the ups and downs and after this experience we know we are due for an up and can't wait to write about it!

Not yet

A new shared list came out last night and unfortunately our child wasn't on it.
We knew that it was very unlikely to be matched off the first list we were eligible for, but that didn't stop us from getting our hopes up. I think we are realizing that this step may take longer than we had originally thought and our hopes to travel by the end of this year/early next year are probably a bit too optimistic.

Thanks for sticking with us folks, we will hopefully have good news of a match in the somewhat near future!

Somewhat wordless Wednesday

Nothing new on the adoption front (currently waiting for the next shared list to come out).

We had a much needed relaxing Labor day weekend in the mountains.Loved the cool weather and gorgeous scenery. There's just something about being in the mountains that makes my soul happy and gives me peace. It's easy to lose perspective in all the paperwork and busyness that come with adoption. It was nice to take a time out and just be still. 

Hope to update again soon with good news! 

Source

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!