Just Say When....Now?

I can distinctly remember thinking to myself on the eternal ride home from China, “This baby girl is precious and I love her, but I am so glad that I am only doing this once. You couldn’t pay me enough to endure another plane ride like this.” It was very similar to the thoughts I had when I was in hard labor with our first child. (Thank goodness, you tend to forget how bad it really is.)

After only a few months home with DD, we began to feel led to go back and adopt another little girl from China. Again, we prayed for God’s direction. After much prayer and thought, we decided to do it again. A family is required to wait at least 1 yr. before sending their dossier (paperwork requesting to adopt) to China for a second adoption. The CCAA received ours on Nov. 4, 2005 and we were logged in to their system (LID) on Nov. 7, 2005. At the time that we sent our dossier, we were expecting to wait approximately 7 months before traveling back to China. We were expecting to have a little sister no later than July 2006.

Obviously, we don’t always get what we expect.

I haven’t blogged about our second adoption because the wait has been soooo long. There have been times that I questioned whether or not it would ever happen. I have gotten excited only to be disappointed about the cutoff date of referrals. China has definitely changed the predictable way they previously handled international adoptions. We have been fingerprinted numerous times and completed our paperwork twice! For the past 3 months we have thought that we would be NEXT, but our time just hasn’t come yet. We thought for sure that we would get our referral last month, but the CCAA only matched babies with families with LIDs up to Nov.1, 2005.

Here we are 19 months post LID waiting for word from our agency about DD’s mei mei (little sister). We have been reading Rumor Queen http://www.chinaadopttalk.com/ constantly hoping to get an idea of whether or not we made it this time. Maybe we will know something tomorrow…

Although, we are discouraged by the wait, we know that everything is in God’s hands and that His timing is best. So while we wait, we will just continue to enjoy the wonderful children we have and continue to search desperately for the “Fountain of Youth” or at least some very good anti-aging cream.