Our Journey to Ellie

In January 2005, we began a journey to adopt a little girl from China.  The total time to adopt, from beginning our paperwork to bringing Ellie home, was about 20 months.  It was longer than we thought when we first began the process, but in the end, well worth it!  What follows on these pages is a description of our adoption process for Elizabeth Grace.  We put it together so we can look back, but we also hope that it might be a help to someone else who is considering adopting, whether domestically, internationally, or even specifically from China.  Our belief is that there are few things that we have experienced that have been as exciting or rewarding and we hope that there are others who will be able to follow a similar path.

People ask us frequently what it was that had us pick China in particular or how we even began to go down this path toward adoption.  That story actually starts a few years ago...

In 1999, Gina and I had decided to begin our family after a few years of our family being just the two of us.  We had moved to a new house in Lake St. Louis, MO and had begun to settle in to our routine.  I had just taken a new job with Addison Wesley and was on my way home from my first sales meeting when Gina called saying that she was doubled over in pain and needed to go to the hospital right away.  I arrived at the hospital later that evening after a flight home to understand that Gina was pregnant but that instead of the embryo growing normally inside of her uterus, it had attached to her fallopian tube and was threatening to rupture and which could cause severe complications for Gina.  At that point, with great sadness, we decided to immediately remove the embryo.

A few months later, Gina was pregnant again, although this time, despite our fears that we would again face another tubal pregnancy, we were able to have our first daughter, Hannah, who was born on November 2, 2000.  Just a couple of days ago, she turned six years old and has been a joy and blessing to us!

After having Hannah, we decided that we wanted to continue to try to have more children, but once again, we were plagued with another mishap, a second tubal pregnancy.  Unlike the first time, the doctor was able to save the fallopian tube, so we believed that we may still have an opportunity to become pregnant and have additional children.  Unfortunately, after additional tests a few months later, we found out that the tube had blocked up and so normal functioning of the tube, a critical process in becoming pregnant, would no longer be possible.

We tried going through in vitro fertilization, which held promise but was very difficult.  That is the process whereby the specialist will create embryos outside of the body and then insert them into the uterus hoping that they will attach and become viable.  We never came to the point where we would even insert the embryos though.  We were only willing to "fertilize" as many eggs as we felt that we were willing to keep, assuming all of the eggs ultimately became embryos.  In other words, we didn't want to find ourselves in a position of selectively terminating certain children in an effort to make sure that we were able to have our child.  None of the eggs fertilized and this process failed.  We recognized that we really didn't want to go through that process again as Gina had been pumped full of hormones which was very difficult on her body.  Therefore, our final decision was to not pursue this method for having children any further.

During this time, we built and moved into a new home outside of St. Louis, MO near a small town named Troy.  Our hope was to build a rather large home and then fill it with our family.  The problem was that we weren't able to have children of our own any longer, so through a process of grieving that loss to us, we felt that God was beginning to show us that by adopting, we could have more children in our family. 

Gina began to investigate and consider adoption agencies, although in the end, we only ended up visiting one before we decided to begin our process.  We chose Bethany Christian Services after attending an informational meeting that they held one night in January of 2005.  I remember saying to Gina on the way to the meeting that I had an interest in Asian countries, only because I had been introduced, to a very small extent, to some Asian culture by a friend that I had met back in the summer of 1994 while touring with a musical group, Star of Indiana.  We had talked late into the night about Korea which was his home country and he had told me about some of the differences between the cultures.  I had always been intrigued since that time but never really had a chance to go to that part of the world.

In addition, we knew that we wanted a girl and when we arrived that night, we found that many of the pieces seemed to line up for us.  We were told that in many places in the world, adopting girls would take longer because there was a higher demand and fewer girls.  However, in China, there was an over-abundance of girls as a result of their one child policy and a long-standing preference for boys.  In many cases, it seemed that girls were, in a sense, thrown away.  That did it for us.  We knew immediately that we wanted to begin the adoption process from China.  That process, then, went like this:

• The Paperchase - People in the adoption community call it "paperchasing" when you put together all of your documents to be ready to adopt.  In the end, you send an entire dossier to the country where you will adopt including a home study declaring your fitness to adopt, background checks, fingerprints, criminal records, and so forth.  For those that are interested, we're putting together more detailed information about the Paperchase portion of our adoption journey at this page.  In total, this period took us about 6 months, which I understand is pretty typical when you are working fairly aggressively to get your paperwork in quickly.  As you can guess, that's a lot of information!
  
• The Log-in Date - When adopting from China, the log-in date means a lot.  That is the date when your dossier is stamped as received in China.  That is also the date that you need to know with relation to China working through everyone's dossiers to finally get to yours and match you with your child.
• The Wait - Once you are logged in for an adoption from China, you wait.  Your dossier goes to a central agency called the China Center of Adoption Affairs (also known as the CCAA) where it sits until they get to it.  Every month, the CCAA updates their website telling you how many days worth of logged in dossiers they processed.  Some months, they would process and complete several weeks worth of dossiers, but in our process there were months when they only completed a few days worth.  This process can be nerve-wracking if you allow it to be!
  
• The Referral - The referral is an exciting time at the end of the wait.  The CCAA matches you with your child and you receive a few pictures and basic information about your child.  You find out for the first time what your child looks like and her general health. 
  
• Travel Authorization and Travel to China - Also known as the T.A., the CCAA sends you an authorization to travel to China to pick up your child.  Once you receive this, which is generally 2-3 weeks after the referral, you should be travelling in a few weeks.  Therefore, you're usually pretty busy during this time getting your visa to travel in China and doing a last check of the paperwork to make sure everything is straightened out and legal before you go.  You then travel to China for 2-3 weeks, depending on the itinerary, to pick up your child and bring her home.  At the end of this journey, your daughter comes home fully adopted and fully yours, as well as an American citizen once she hits American soil.  This is the pay-off for this entire process!

So that is an overview of our story and the process that we have been through over the last several months.  During this time, we have learned a lot, and I think I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the things that I think we learned from God in this process in that we actually are all adopted when we become Christians.  This idea, while prevalent in scripture, never really jumped out at me until we were in the middle of this adoption process.  I wrote some blog entries on these ideas a few months back, so if you are interested in more on this subject as well as some other components, be sure to go to this page to check out more information.

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