Finally! An awesome update!!!!!!

So our dossier arrived to our agency last Wednesday.  Last night, we were debating how long we should wait before we called to find out the status.  We decided we'd call this Wednesday if we hadn't heard anything.

Well, tonight as I was frying up some ground beef for dinner, the phone rang.  I checked caller ID, saw it was the agency, and quickly turned off the stove so I could answer!

They said our dossier was "perfect" and it is getting shipped to China this Friday!!!!  We're ecstatic.  Not only did we do all the paperwork correctly, but we're making it with time to spare in terms of the documents expiring.

Also, they said they would start immediately trying to match us with special needs children.  Depending on the special need, the timeframe for referral is 2-12 months.  But it could still be longer.  I'm still liking that better than the current 3 year wait for healthy children, and definitely better than the rumored 5-6 year wait.

So we can breathe a huge sigh of relief at this point.  And now we keep praying that our daughter that's out there is able to come home as soon as possible!!!!

Aaron and Sherry

My Drama-Filled Paperwork Day

I (Sherry) got a ton of paperwork done today, but it was not without a fair amount of drama.  About a week ago, we finally got our approval from Immigration that we'd been waiting on.  We first applied to Immigration in July, we were fingerprinted in September, and we've been waiting ever since.  The week of Thanksgiving, they requested more information, so our social worker reworded the information she'd already sent and we sent the new document to Immigration.  A few days later, we got the Approval.

We're under a time crunch because our documents have to be less than a year old when they reach China.  That means our documents start expiring March 3.  If we have to do documents over again, we're basically going to have to start from scratch.  We still have a few steps to go in the process, so we've been tapping our feet waiting for that Immigration document.

Today, I drove to Richmond (about a 2 hour drive) to get 12 documents authenticated at the state level.  Basically, this means that the Secretary of VA is certifying that the document is notarized properly.  Parking was my first issue.  The website had listed 3 garages where I could park.  One of them didn't exist.  One of them was about 10 blocks away, and since the wind chill today was in the teens, I went to the third one.  Well, it was only for Library patrons, which I discovered when I was already IN the garage.  The poor parking attendant saw how upset I was and let me park there, and then told me to walk out the back entrance rather than riding the elevator so that the security guard didn't give me a hard time.  She also helped me figure out exactly where I needed to go!

I get to the Secretary's office and by this time, I had walked about 4 blocks and I can barely feel various parts of my body because of the cold.  They said they would authenticate the documents while I waited!  Well, 4 of them were not notarized properly.  More drama.  Thankfully, they figured out a way we could take care of that by re-notarizing them.  Meanwhile, I'm praying it's OK for them to re-notarize the documents in question.  Those notaries will also be receiving reprimand letters!  I paid my fee and went back out into the cold with my documents.  When I left the parking garage, the nice attendant didn't even charge me for parking!!!

I stopped for lunch on the way home and called the lady at the adoption agency to ask her about the not-properly-notarized documents and she said the way we took care of it is fine.  So then I was all ready to express mail everything to the Chinese Embassy in DC.  But then she mentioned sending them to the State Department.  Turns out, I completely missed a step .... thank goodness those documents were wrong, because otherwise, I never would have called her and I would have sent everything merrily on its way to the Chinese Embassy.  They would have been returned to us and we would have lost several critical weeks.  But she did tell me that the State Dept. would send everything directly to the Chinese Embassy for me.

I drove back to Virginia Beach and headed home to make some copies of my newly authenticated documents and get a letter ready for the State Department.  I get to the UPS Store, and the line is almost out the door.  I don't care if it's 3 days before Christmas, I have adoption documents to mail, people!!!!  The very nice guy at the counter helped me figure out how to send my documents via Next Day Air, and how to do prepaid envelopes for Next Day Air from the State Dept. to the Embassy, then back to me.  He folded the envelopes inside each other and packed everything up for me.  He didn't even charge me for the 2 legal-size copies I asked him to make.

Thank you to all the very nice people that helped a very frustrated adoption-document lady today!!!!  I truly appreciate your help.

So that's our latest update.  Supposedly, it's about a 3 week turnaround for the documents to get back to us.  However, I'm not sure how much the holidays will effect that.  Once we get them back, they go to our adoption agency in OR.  If they approve everything, they'll send it all to China and the wait really begins!

Still Waiting on Immigration Paperwork ........

We're praying we get the 171-H form from Immigration by this coming Thursday.  If we get it, we can go to Richmond on Friday morning to get all our VA documents authenticated in person.  This will save us a couple of weeks because we won't have to mail paperwork back and forth to Richmond.  Plus, it makes me nervous to send 12 documents in the mail that we've worked hard (and spent a lot of money) to get our hands on.

The reason we need the form by Thursday is that Aaron and I are leaving first thing Friday morning for a weekend together without the little guy.  We'll miss him, but we're looking forward to some time alone.  We're driving right through Richmond, so it would be perfect timing!

So please pray that our mailman brings us that precious piece of mail by Thursday!!!!!

Great Update!!!!

The latest thing we've been waiting for has been for Immigration to give us appointments to go get fingerprinted.  (This is the one where there's an unmarked door somewhere in Norfolk and they give you secret directions and a secret handshake or something!)  We sent our application to Immigration almost exactly a month ago.  I was so worried that they'd give us appointments while I was at school and I'd have to take a day off.  That wouldn't have been the end of the world, but since I just started teaching, I don't have a lot of time off.

We finally got our appointment notices today and guess what?  Our apppointments are on September 13th, which is a Saturday!!!!!!!!!  So after that, we wait (again) for Immigration to send us notice that they have processed our fingerprints and we are cleared through Homeland Security.  That's the last document we need!

Just thought I'd share our great (even though realistically, it's pretty minor) news!

August Update

I know we still need to post "Our Story".  I wanted to update everyone on where we are in the process.

We are still doing paperwork.  We have submitted our application to Immigration, and we are waiting on them to tell us when to show up to get fingerprinted.  Once that happens, they'll approve us (hopefully), and then we can go back to working on paperwork.  Once we get their approval, that document will go with about 10 others to Richmond to be authenticated by the State of VA.  Authentication means that the state is saying that our notarized documents are notarized correctly.

Then, once we get all those back, we turn around and send them all to the Chinese Embassy in NY for them to do basically the same thing.  When we get them back, our Dossier will be complete.  We will send everything to our agency for them to review.  Then they will send all our documents to China.  That's when we get on the official wait list.

Right now, the estimated time we will wait for a healthy girl is 30-36 months.  Yes, we're looking at 3 years from when our paperwork arrives in China.  We are also on the list to be considered for minor special needs.  So our wait *could* be shorter.

I (Sherry) will be back to teaching high school this year so we can save up the money we need for the adoption expenses.  It wasn't my first choice of a job, but the job market right now is pretty bad, so I feel very fortunate to have any job, especially a good-paying one.

So that's where we are right now.  I was really hoping our Dossier would have been in China by now, but now I'm hoping for October.  Then we can really start waiting!!!!

Sherry, Aaron, and Luke

Sherry's Story

I think this might be a little shorter than Aaron’s story ….. I grew up with a younger brother and a younger sister. I always knew I wanted to get married and have kids …. 4 kids, to be exact. Things don’t always go according to our plans, though. I wanted to be married in my early 20s so that I’d have plenty of time to have my 4 kids. For a while, I also wanted to homeschool them, so I figured the younger I was, the better.

Throughout my 20s, I dated a little bit here and there, but nothing too serious. My mom always said I was too picky. My response was that I SHOULD be picky when I was deciding who I’d spend the rest of my life with!!! I spent my 20s moving to a few different states and investigating various careers. I ended up in Maryland in late 2000 with a job at Northrop Grumman. I had had a few different jobs at that point and I was having trouble figuring out what I really wanted to do. My jobs had been in different areas of education and the pay was beyond terrible. So part of my goal of working at Northrop was to increase my salary situation. Once I was in Maryland for a few months, I bought a house. I never thought I’d do that on my own … as in, being single.

Well, once I turned 30, I was starting to think I might not get married. I was really fine with that. I owned a house, I had a great career, I had 2 master’s degrees, I had cats!!! What more did I need? In fact, my master plan was that if I wasn’t married by the time I was 35, I was going to investigate adopting a child through the foster care system. I figured that there were so many kids out there that needed homes, and a single, stable mom was better than nothing at all.

In 2003, I decided to return to education ….. teaching high school. I know, I know, I must have been insane. I found a teaching job at the high school about a quarter of a mile from my house. My first day of work was a Friday, Halloween. That night, I went to our church’s Fall Fest. I ran into Aaron there and we started talking. Now, we had met several times over the previous 2 or so years, but I don’t think we ever said more than 2 words to each other. Well, the night of the Fall Fest, we talked for quite a while. We said goodbye and I didn’t think too much more about it.

Our friends that Aaron was visiting when he came to MD worked a little matchmaking something or other. I’m still not sure exactly how it happened, but Aaron and I ended up emailing each other. To this day, our friends deny doing anything shady, but we know better!!!! Good thing it turned out well!!!

I was a little wary of getting involved with someone who lived 4 hours away. But I figured at least he didn’t live halfway across the country or something. So we started emailing each other and pretty soon, we started talking on the phone. I was so nervous for that first phone call. Aaron and I can both be pretty quiet, and I was worried we wouldn’t have anything to talk about! We started visiting each other in January. We got engaged in the spring and got married in August 2004.

Aaron's Story

So if you have made it to the blog then you obviously know that this is about our family’s process of adopting our daughter from China.  While a main purpose of this blog is to provide all of our family and friends with updates on where we are in the process, I (Aaron) realized that some of you may not know why we are adopting.  So this will be my first post on this blog (or any other blog for that matter) with some of my reasons for adopting.

 

Let me start out by giving you a little background about me.  Growing up, I always knew that I wanted to eventually get married and have children.  However, I was never really around children until I got into high school.  During my Junior year, I had my driver’s license but I didn’t have a car.  So my parents decided that on days when I had to stay late at school I could drive my mom’s car to school and then I would go pick her up from work when I was done.  At the time my mom worked at an elementary school where she was a teacher’s assistant for the Special Education teacher.  Most of her day was spent working with two children in particular who were mentally disabled and one was a little boy named Matthew.  When I would go pick her up I would usually get there early and wait for her to be finished.  After a while I would try to help my mom out and this eventually turned in to me volunteering several afternoons a week with these two children.  Matthew got to the point where every day he would ask my mom where I was and why I wasn’t there.  I volunteered at the school and watched Matthew grow up for several years.  My mom still occasionally talks to Matthew’s mom and to this day he will still ask about me sometimes.  For the next several years I didn’t have much interaction with children.  The closest I came was playing bass in a worship band for the children’s service at our church.

 

One of the last things I did before I moved from Virginia Beach to Maryland was to go on a mission trip with my church.  The trip was to Atlanta and the purpose of the trip was to work with a church for homeless people in Atlanta.  While we were there, we attended church on Sunday morning where we got to serve homeless people by providing them with clothes and toiletries.  We also worked at a house that was going to be used to get homeless people back on their feet by providing them with a place to stay while they started new jobs.  We also were going to be helping the church at one of the housing projects in Atlanta.  At the projects we were going to be setting up a computer lab for the children in the projects to be able to use and we were also going to be running a summer camp for the kids while we were there.  I was fine with helping at the church on Sunday morning and working at the house.  I was really excited to be able to set up the computer network because that is something that I feel more comfortable with. 

 

However, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to helping at the summer camp.  I was asking myself, what do I have to offer these kids, how am I going to relate to them?  I was asked to help with 4 and 5 year olds with one other person and I was more than willing to let her do the work and just tell me how I could help.  The first couple days went fine and I was even able to make the kids laugh, but one day one of the little girls got really upset at me and left.  I don’t remember why she got upset and left but the rest of the day I was pretty upset myself.  That night God took the opportunity to point out something obvious but hard to hold on to.  If I was so upset and saddened that one little girl that I had met only days earlier was mad at me then that is just a small taste of how he feels about all of the people that he created to love him that don’t even know who he is.  Of course the next day the little girl returned and had a great time and everything was fine.  I may have thought that I was going on that mission trip to help others and teach them about God’s love but in the end I was really going there so that God could teach me something far more important and valuable than anything I could have done in Atlanta.

 

When I first started dating Sherry, she was living in Pasadena, MD and I was in Virginia Beach, VA, so we would have to travel the 4 hours to see each other every couple of weeks.  On one of my trips to Maryland, Sherry was going to be babysitting her nephew Sam and niece Laney.  Since we only got to see each other every couple of weeks, I had no problem offering to spend the evening with the 3 of them.  I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal and we would just get to hang out and watch kid’s shows with them or watch them play and Sherry and I would be able to hang out and talk.  Little did I know that my night was going to be spent sitting in front of a computer with a 5 year old Sam sitting on my lap telling me about a couple hundred of the Lilo & Stitch experimental monsters for an hour or two.  It was only a couple of months later that Sherry and I got married and Sam and Laney were now my nephew and niece also.  We lived about 5 minutes away from them for a couple of years and got to see them at least once a week.  They both acted like I had been their uncle forever.  I got to experience both good times and bad times with them.  But I will always remember that almost every time I would see Laney she would run to me, saying Uncle Aaron right before she would give me a great big hug.

 

Before long some of our friends were having children and I can remember being in the hospital looking at my friends’ baby and hearing the question “Do you want to hold her?”  Up until this time I had plenty of chances to hold babies and was always more than happy to say no thank you.  But on this occasion I decided that I should.  I’ll be honest, I was pretty scared.  I had never held a baby before (at least not that I can remember) and I was afraid I was going to hurt her.  Of course, nothing bad happened, the baby was fine, and so was I.  I still didn’t offer to hold her very often but a little at a time I became more comfortable with it.

More to come .... Sherry's Story will be next, and then we'll post Our Story!