The title to this post is a bit misleading. Today my husband and I took the first official step in pursuing the adoption of a little boy from China. Today the “official” journey began. To be honest, this is a journey that began long ago.
I have always had a tug on my heart for children. Not long after my husband and I were married we began the process of becoming foster parents. We felt a call in the direction of caring for children that needed a home. During that process, we found out that we were expecting our first child. We decided to move our plans of becoming foster parents to the back burner and focus on our biological children. Our children are now 22 and 19 years old. We are on the edge of an empty nest. During this past year the tug on my heart has resurfaced and is getting stronger. We began to discuss resuming the process to become foster parents. Over the summer our daughter served on a short term trip to China with a non profit organization whose mission is to end the orphan crisis in the world. Her trip was life changing. It was life changing for her, but what surprised me is how life changing her trip was for ME. Her trip WRECKED me. What had been a constant gentle tug on my heart has turned into a full on tug of war.
Today, our “official” journey begins. This morning we submitted our application and paid the initial application fee for adoption with an agency. This week we need to also submit our letter of intent, a family worksheet, passport like photos, and pay an additional small fee to have our initial documents translated. (As a side note, I’m glad that we don’t have to submit our actual passport photos. I look like I’m mad at the world in my passport photo. It is time to take a new photo, passport like, but with a smile!) Most of what needs to be completed and submitted this week is done. We still need to have the photos taken. I think we’ll head to the local UPS Store to have those done. My husband has an existing doctor appointment later this week. Since a physical exam and doctors report is required for this process, we’re going to take advantage of this appointment. We’ve printed out the forms required by both our adoption agency and the agency that we are going to work with through our home study for him to take with him. We’ve begun to gather pertinent documents that we’ll need to have for our home study.
I have so many emotions running through my being right now. I’ll share some of them with you in future posts. We’ll also share more about this amazing little boy in future posts. At the moment we are still waiting to be officially “locked in” with this little boy and are limited on what information we can share. As much as I would like to be a proud mama bear and share photos of our little guy, I won’t do ANYTHING to put his adoption in jeopardy.
So, welcome to our journey. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Bringing Home China - 把中国带回家 