Adopt a baby

You can read the whole story at manylives.ca.

Worth doing? Hell yeah!

In recent months, the processing timelines for Chinese adoptions have slowed down. Once we had hoped to be travelling to China as early as May, but now November is more likely.

Delays like this are difficult. In the meantime, we continue to prepare for our child by taking workshop classes on adoption, reading, and getting the house ready.

In adoption parlance, DTC means “dossier to China”, and LID means “log-in date”. Our DTC date was August 19/05, and our LID was September 14/05. So we hope to have our referral sometime in April!

We’re in Group 243 with Children’s Bridge adoption agency, and there’s a website for our group at www.group243.tk.

Last week our social worker completed our home study, and our adoption agency forwarded our application to the provincial government for approval. That will take 10-12 weeks. Our next step is to assemble the last few items we need for our China application, and have those documents notarized and translated.

We’re getting closer!

We have two appointments left with our social worker, and we’ve made significant headway with our paperwork. We’re a little hung up on the medical forms, since our doctor is currently on maternity leave! But other than that, everything seems to be going smoothly.

We’ve chosen a practitioner and have our first home study appointment on February 18!

In December we interviewed several practitioners, and chose one, but when I called to set up an appointment, she told me she was going on sabbatical and wouldn’t be able to do our home study. So we’re back to Square One.

In 2004, Shawn and I finally decided to start a family by adopting. For a while, we thought we might be a childfree couple for life, but Shawn got hit hard by the pull of parenthood, and after a lot of soul-searching, I decided I wanted to go for it too.

We’ve chosen Children’s Bridge adoption agency in Ottawa, and we’ll be adopting from China. We hope to bring our little girl home sometime in 2006.