Today is Today

My mind is swirling with literally thousands of thoughts. Do I start my story with our adoption of Noah? Do I start before we adopted? Do I describe the process? The paperwork? The time? The details? Or do I write about adoption in general, about how God cares so deeply for the 147 million estimated orphans in the world? Do I write about our life after bringing home Noah?  Do I write about what a typical day looks like to us? Do I write about RAD? Do I write about therapy and behavior after adopting? Do I write about God adopting ME, adopting YOU as HIS own CHILDREN? Do I write about why we are adopting now? Write about China? Write about special needs? I really could go on and on. Where do I start? Do other people who write have these crazy thoughts?

Well a quote my dad once told me (which you will soon find I have LOTS of quotes my dad once told me) is, "sometimes, you just are where you are." On a side note, I tell my dad one day I am going to write a book with all the quotes I remember him telling us. So, Dad, that is quote number one (not in level of importance though, just the first one I am referencing.)

Where are we today? That is the question I think I'll start with and work my way backwards.

Today, we have pre-approval to adopt a little girl born in July of 2008 from China. She can not walk, because she just recently finally had surgery to correct her clubbed feet. She has clubbed hands, and has a possible diagnosis of MOP/FOP. The readers digest version of MOP or FOP is over time, based on injury, falling, surgery, or just plain old time, her muscle ossifies, or turns to bone.

We also are waiting on pre-approval to adopt a little boy from China. He was born in February of 2010. He is diagnosed as deaf, and a little bit behind. He can walk and run and play. We just submitted the initial paperwork to the CCCWA to give us the pre-approval for him.

We have all our documents for our dossier complete. We have them all notarized. We have most of them certified at the state level, however, Indiana made a couple of mistakes, so we are waiting on some corrections on that. Once we receive that all back we will submit all of this paperwork to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. They can then approve all of the documents and send them back to us. In the mean time, we will wait for our I-800A approval (which is approval from homeland security to adopt.) Once we receive the documents from the Consulate and the I-800A approval all back, we'll submit our "official" dossier to our agency to forward on to China. We'll then wait for China's approval of the dossier.  That usually takes 3-6 months.  Once we receive the "official" approval, we'll get visas and a bunch of other paperwork stuff. We'll send that all in, and wait for approval to travel (usually another 4-12 weeks.)  Our best guess of when we will be bringing our babies home is February of 2012. We'll then travel to go get our wonderful, beautiful, created in God's image, children- whom God specifically wanted us to parent!