Todd - Party of 3: an update about our adoption journey

As you may or may not have seen this past week, we are well on our way to completing the home study portion of our adoption journey. We have one conference call interview left to discuss the workbook we each completed after watching 4-5 hours of online videos. If you are keeping up at home with the hours of education we have consumed, you're looking at 20+ hours. This includes reading the book, The Connected Child, completing a 10-hour online Hague Adoption course, watching 4-5 online videos of an expert panel of Lifeline employees, and completing a workbook of what we learned during the education portion. I'm not going to lie and say that it was a piece of cake, or that I even enjoyed it most days. I mean, who enjoys reading about the background of kids who have started their lives in a tramatic experience? I questioned my abilities to parent a child, much less raising an adopted, special needs child through our education training. And not knowing exactly who our daughter is and what her needs might be didn't help comfort me at all. I felt defeated before we were given the chance to bring her home.

Even though the education portion of the adoption process was not always my favorite "pick-me-up" portion of my day, it has been extremely helpful in knowing and preparing us for what may come our way. In some ways, it helped soften my heart and develop my love for these precious orphans that much more. We may not parent Paisley the "traditional way" as we will our biological children, which might not be right 100% of the time in the eyes of some, but we do promise to raise her in a safe, loving, caring, nurturing home where she will never feel alone again. Even though she was birthed by another, she will always be our daughter. I am a firm believer that this journey Daniel and I are on now to find her is just the very tip of what is to come for our growing family. We aren't just changing her life; she is changing ours.

Once the home study interviews are complete, Lifeline begins to compile our draft for our dossier (which is the official packet of our lives) to send to China. This process will take about a month of compiling and revising before Daniel and I will authorize its completion and accuracy. Meanwhile, we will submit our 800A paperwork (asking for permission to adopt outside of the US) to the US government, which is needed for the dossier. This takes about 2-3 months to approve and our final piece of our dossier will be ready to go! Once sent to China, it will take about 3 months for the dossier to be approved, which means we will be officially Logged In (LID, meaning logged into the China adoption system). Essentially, this is when the matching process begins. If you are keeping up at home, this puts our timeline around the end of the year (maybe sooner) before we can move onto the next steps.

Next steps? Yes, there are more steps after our dossier is accepted, and honestly, I can't remember exactly what comes after that. If you look at the projected timeline in the Lifeline manuel, it is extremely overwhelming to see all of the different kinds of documents that have to be approved and how long it takes to approve each kind. Just know that once we are dossier approved, travel will happen about 5-6 months later, even though we are only given approximately 2 weeks' notice for our official travel date. Will I be even more of a nervous wreck when the end of the year comes around not knowing EXACTLY when we are set to jet halfway around the world? Yes. However, I keep reminding myself that is very small compared to the big change about to take place in this little girl's life and our lives. Soon we'll be hearing "Todd - party of 3".