the details--adoption

Monday night we got an email for a group of kids on a shared referral--meaning it went to many different adoption agencies. Craig and I looked it over and said there were 3 kids we would consider but we had to choose one and we chose the one that pulled at our heart strings most. He has the biggest, expressive eyes. Since he was a shared referral we had to act quickly. We emailed our coordinator right away telling her of our interest. Our agency is on the East Coast so we didn't get any response from her that night but at 6:00 our phone rang and Leah (our coordinator) said he is still available, if you are interested I will send you more information. She sent it to us immediately and gave us an hour to look it over and if we were still interested we could lock him on the system so that no one else could look at his paperwork. Well, they want you to consult a doctor--to look over the records that they send, but it is only 6 am here. She understood that and since we have a personal relationship with our doctor's wife we were able to call them at home (at 7:30), email the paperwork and have him look over it.

Meanwhile, Ben was getting the award for generosity at school that morning. So we went to chapel. One of the first graders to get the award was a boy adopted from China. My eyes watered and I wondered if we were to have a chance to be a little boy from China's parents. Ben did a great job of receiving the award for his class and we are very proud of him. Our doctor called us back as chapel was ending and gave us the thumbs up. So Craig called our family coordinator and they locked him in.

That started the time ticking for a 48 hour deadline of completing some paperwork. We were able to get that to our family coordinator by the deadline and now we wait.

Here is the process as I understand it. We have accepted a referral of a 2 1/2 year old boy and sent in our Electonic Acceptance--the paperwork we completed in 48 hours. That then goes to China where they will provisionally accept (PA--pre-approval) us based on that paperwork. Then we have to wait for our original dossier (paperwork that was in May of 07) to be approved. Craig believes that they have reviewed dossiers from Feb or March of 07 and so we may not be too far away in the process. After that is done we will have our RA or Referral Acceptance. This can take some time.

After receiving the RA, in approximately 2-6 weeks we will receive our TA or Travel Approval. From that time we will work with our coordinator to join the next possible group going to China. Her best guess of a time line is that we would go in June. We had hoped to have him home by his third birthday (May 2) and will continue to pray for that but through this whole process God's timing has been right on and we will trust him for this timing too.

We are not able to post a picture of him on line until we have received our approval from China so you will have to wait to see him until later. We are very excited and thrilled and are trying to learn more each day about him and his city and his life. We have decided (I think) to call him Luke.