Updates and Pictures

We were told that once we received our LOA (Letter of Acceptance) we could ask the orphanage for an update. We were allowed to ask 5-10 questions so of course took full advantage of this and thought of ten questions and asked for pictures and videos of our sweetie. We waited a few weeks and finally received our update. While I am grateful for any information or pictures we can get, I am disappointed with the results. None of our ten questions were addressed and the three pictures we got were taken the same day and time as our previous two videos that we already have. It doesn't give a very good picture of how she is growing and changing over these last few months since we already have video from the same day when she was 12 months old. We also received updated measurements which were clearly inaccurate. They said she has gained five pounds in less than two months, now weighing 22 lbs. Isla doesn't weight 22 lbs. at 21 months. There is no way that this little girl weights 22 lbs. at 14 months. Apparently they weight them fully dressed (and the Chinese tend to dress their babies in A LOT of layers) so maybe this poor baby had 4-5 lbs. of clothes on during her latest measurements.

Here are a few additional pictures of our sweet girl at twelve months (she is 14 months now).

Although we didn't get any new updated pictures we were holding out hope because a family we have met online through Facebook are in China right now picking up their son from the same orphanage. Yesterday they had a chance to visit the orphanage and were planning on checking in on our sweet baby girl and getting some pictures for us. We held out hope this would be our way to get an updated photo. I obsessively checked my Facebook page and email and heard back from them last night. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is they were not able to get a picture or see her because she was not at the orphanage. The good news is they were not able to get a picture or see her because she is not living in the orphanage, but rather she lives in a foster home! This is wonderful news that we had heard may be a possibility but they were able to confirm it for us. This means that our little girl will know what it is like to live in a house with the love of a family. This is very good news for all of the attachment and bonding that we hope comes quickly and naturally once we get her. Kids who are raised in orphanages never learn to bond and attach to one specific caregiver and therefore often have a lot of issue attaching once you get them home. While she will grieve harder for the loss of her foster parents once we have her, we hope she will be able to easily learn to trust us and turn to us to meet her needs and love her. I pray everyday that someone is showing her love, attention and she isn't seen as a burden to anyone. Now that I know she has a foster family I believe there is a great chance that she is being hugged, kissed, talked to and played with every day by only a couple of people rather than the numerous caregivers she would have in the orphanage.

We are still waiting on US Customs and Immigration to get the next set of paperwork (our i800) back to us so we can move on to the next. I am hoping we will have it by the end of next week.

Stay tuned for two exciting updates that I will blog about soon. We have finally chosen a name and we hope to receive her finding ad soon. I will tell you more about finding ads in a later post.

Thanks for reading!

LOA!!!!

On Tuesday we received our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) from China. This is one of the most important pieces of paperwork through this whole process and the one that you generally wait the longest for. I am happy to report that our wait was only 41 days. Many families wait an average of 2-3 months and some have waited 100+ days so we lucked out. This paper says that China approves us to adopt the specific child that we have been matched with. We quickly signed our LOA and overnighted it back to our agency. They received early afternoon on Wednesday and overnighted it along with our i800 paperwork to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). The i800 finalizes the immigration process for our new daughter and allows us to bring her home. We hope to receive our i800 approval in the next 2 weeks. From there our information is sent to the National Visa Center (NVC) and then sent to the U.S. Embassy in Guangzhou, China, which is the city where we will spent our second week finalizing the U.S. side of the adoption. They first week will be spent in Tiayuan, Shanxi, China, which is the capitol city of the province our daughter is from with a brief day trip to Datong City, Shanxi which is where her orphanage is located.

Once our information is send to the NVC, there are a few more weeks of paperwork back and forth between the U.S. Embassy in China and the CCCWA (China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption). Then hopefully in early December we will receive travel approval from China and a Consulate appointment for us to finalize things the second week we are there.  Once we receive travel approval we will be able to book our plane tickets and finalize our travel plans. It will be very last minute and we won't know our exact travel dates until a couple weeks before we leave at the most.

Hopefully the paperwork moves very quickly and we can have her in our arms before the New Year but there is a good chance we will leave for China on January 2 or 3.

Pray for our paperwork to move through all of the systems quickly and without any hold ups and pray for our sweet girl. I have talked with another family through a Facebook adoption group who are adopting a little boy from the same orphanage and they are on the flight to China right now to pick him up. They are going to try to visit the orphanage and check on our little one and get some pictures for us. Hopefully by the middle of next week we will have some new photos and updated information on our little girl. We are so grateful to this family for checking on her and can't wait to see the pictures of them with their new little guy and hopefully hear a good report about our sweetie. Thank you in advance Whichard Family for your generosity and good luck on Monday! (That is the day they will get their son, Evan. That day is known as "Gotcha Day").

We will keep you all up to date over the next few weeks as the paper work moves a little quicker through this point of the process. We will be boarding that LONG flight before we realize what hit us!

P.S. We are still trying to agree on a name. If you talk to my husband tell him to make a decision already!

Introducing Baby Girl Higginbotham!!!!

We officially began our adoption journey on September 21, 2012 when we submitted our application to our adoption agency. Almost a year later around 9:20 p.m. on September 9, 2013 we saw our daughter for the first time. And here she is....

(Our sweet girl at nine months old)

We are still trying to finalize a name so for now we will continue to call her Baby Hope. She is 13 months old. We hope to travel to get her in January or February of 2014. She will be 7 months younger than her big sister Isla and just over two years younger than biggest sister, Olivia.

We are all so in love and cannot wait until we can go get her and bring her home to meet her family. 

We are waiting on our Letter of Acceptance from China which can take anywhere from about a month to about 5 months. We know our Dossier (paperwork in China) has been translated which is the longest part of the wait so we are hoping to hear something in the next month or two. Please pray for our sweet girl. We will keep you posted once our LOA arrives. After that the paperwork moves quickly and traveling will be here before we know what hit us. 

Our journey to find Baby Hope

Well, I am finally getting around to my next blog post. I intended to be really good about updating but the last several months have been busy and there has not been a lot of news on the adoption front, until last week. I didn't want to post our bad news until I knew that it was going to be followed by good news so make sure you read all the way through (or skip to the end if you want). In my last post in June I shared that we were waiting for a match with a specific child. We were logged in the China's computer system (LID) on May 15. We were told that the wait for a girl under 18 months would be about 3-6 months. A few days later we got an email from our agency saying it would be more like 6-9 months. Wonderful! We were shocked on the morning of July 15 (exactly 2 months into our wait) when we received a call from our social worker saying they had a file for us to review and we had 48 hours to decide whether or not we wanted to accept it. We frantically started calling doctors to have them review the file and help us make a decision. Aaron and I could not decide one way or the other and neither of us had a strong feeling about what we should do. The little girl was 15 months old so she was a couple months younger than Isla, which is what we wanted. We went to bed Monday night confused about what our decision should be and we prayed that we would have an obvious sign as to what we should do. On Tuesday morning we received a call from our social worker who said that there had been a mix up with the new computer system in China and more than one agency, therefore more than one family, had been given this same file to review. They told us they would get back to us when the figured out who locked the file first. After talking with our doctors, we decided that if this child's file was available to us then we would accept it. I took this to be the obvious sign that we had prayed for the night before. We waited by the phone until the next day when we received a call from our social worker saying that another family had locked the child's file first. We were disappointed and upset but relieved to know that she had another family fighting to bring her home. Our social worker told us that we were on the top of the list and could expect another file in the next one to three months.

On August 8th we received another phone call from our social worker saying that there had been another glitch in the Chinese computer system and a file had been locked for us on Monday night and no one knew about it until that morning (Thursday). We were told we had 8 hours to decide. This computer system seemed to have it out for our family! We couldn't believe that this was happening to us again. The baby was around 11 months old but very small. She was very small at birth and was not growing as she should.  Our doctor diagnosed her as Failure the Thrive and explained that there would likely be serious complications down the road. After consulting with our doctors we decided that this child was not the right fit for our family.

Then, on August 29 we received another phone call form our social worker saying they had another file for us to look at. This time it was a partnership file with our agency so we had two weeks to make a decision and more detailed reports, pictures, and videos. This little girl was about 10 months old and had a severe cleft lip and cleft palate and was diagnosed with developmental delays. She was also very small. While the complexity and severity of the lip and palate were very concerning, we were more concerned with the diagnosis of developmental delays. All of the kids in orphanages have some delays from lack of opportunity, but this was likely more serious delays. Aaron and I both quickly realized that this baby was not meant to be our daughter and turned the file down within a few hours.

At this point we were beginning to feel very discouraged and felt as though we were being too picky and wondering if we would ever find our daughter. I reached out to some other parents in my adoptive Facebook group and got the immediate support and encouragement that I needed. I heard story after story of families turning down multiple file (some in the double digits). We knew we had made the right choices for our family but it is still very difficult. I still pray for those two babies and hope that they have found their forever families.

On Monday, September 9 the shared list came out in China and our agency locked a file for us. Around 9:15 p.m. I was laying in bed dozing off and my phone rang. It was Sarah, our social worker calling and she shared the news that they had another file for us to review. I walked into the living room, shared the news with Aaron and grabbed the computer to open the email. We both saw her and read the file and had a very good feeling about it. After researching her orphanage and talking with a few other families on my adoption Facebook group we went to bed. I was so excited I was planning the trip in my head. I was thinking about the details, the weather that time of the year, what I would pack, etc. Needless to say I didn't fall asleep for a few hours.

After talking with our doctors and specialist the following days, we were back and forth about what to do. Late Wednesday night we both finally agreed that we would accept the file and we sent our Letter of Intent (LOI) to our social worker who forwarded it on to China.

Mid morning on Thursday I received a call from our social worker that we had already received Prior Approval (PA). Usually PA takes about 2 weeks and in less than 12 hours were had been approved. At this point we were allowed to publicly introduce our daughter!

Apparently this is what you do when you are adopting

Well, I have started a blog. I don't necessarily think I am a good writer or have anything interesting to say, but apparently this is the best way to communicate with friends and family and keep everyone informed with the status of our adoption. Aaron will be embarrassed with my typos and question whether or not I proofread anything I type, for this I apologize ahead of time. I am just typing quickly to share and inform and may not always catch my mistakes. This blog is private, by invitation only, so if there is a friend or family member who is interested in following our adoption journey than please let me know and I would be happy to add them. I thought it was best to keep it private since I will be posting pictures of the girls and details about our adoption trip.

If there is anyone reading this who doesn't already know, we are adopting a little girl from China. We have not been matched with a specific child yet and are currently waiting for a referral (a match with a specific child). We started the adoption process last September and have been working diligently ever since. It is a long process with lots of paperwork and even more waiting.

We submitted our application for adoption Sept. 21, 2012. This was a very lengthy and detailed application with all sorts of personal information. China is one of the pickiest countries to adopt from, with a long list of pre-qualifications. Once accepted by our adoption agency, Lifeline, out of Birmingham (they have a local office in Louisville too), we went through the homestudy process which consisted of four visits with our social worker over about 10 weeks. During that time we both wrote detailed personal biographies, completed hours of education and training and had our house, finances and personal lives closely examined. Not to mention the physicals with our doctor, multiple sets of fingerprints, state and FBI background checks and hours spent gathering documents and paperwork. Once our social worker completed and wrote up our twenty-something page homestudy report, we mailed it off to U.S. Immigration. After about a month and a set of biometric fingerprints, we received our i800-A approval, permitting us to bring a child home to the U.S. Next, we sent our Dossier, a set of 13 documents which are sent to the county, state and federal level for authenticating, off to China. After several weeks we were logged in to China's computer system which means we are eligible to receive a referral for a child. Once our agency gets a child's file that matches our criteria we are interested in, we will receive the file from our social worker and have 72 hours to have the file reviewed by international adoption doctors before accepting or passing on that file.  That is where we wait currently. We are waiting for the phone call from our social worker that could come today or in six months. Please pray it comes sooner rather than later and it is clear whether or not the file we receive is one we are meant to accept.

So, many of you have asked when we will travel. We have no idea at this point. It will be several months at the soonest. If we received a referral tomorrow, it would still probably be close to five to six more months before we traveled to China to bring our baby home. There are a lot of steps that go on between us, the U.S. government and the Chinese government before you have permission to travel and adopt a child. We will keep you all informed but we probably won't have any updates any time soon. It is a very long and drawn out process with a lot of unknowns. There are about fifteen steps in the adoption process and we are on step 7-8.

Hopefully we will have exciting news to share soon. We will keep you all posted. Please pray that our baby Hope (That is her name for now. We are waiting to learn her Chinese name before deciding on her name.) is being well cared for, fed and loved until we can bring her home.

Thanks for reading!

Katy