Adoption Update

Greg writing........

This coming Saturday is a big day in our adoption wait... this Saturday will be April 11th which will mark 1 year of waiting from our initial log-in date at Cathwel Services where we will be adopting from in Taiwan. When we started this process, we were told it would take us 18-24 months to get a referral (a referral is when we are matched with a child in Taiwan... we'll get pictures and a short video of the child) and then another 4-8 months after that before all of the court processes and paperwork would be finished so we could go and bring her home.

I'll be honest... these 12 months have not been all that difficult... until recently. There is one great discourager for those waiting for adoptions and I've been guilty of drinking from that fountain a bit too often lately... I'm talking about internet adoption forums.

Over on the Taiwan adoption groups, it seems that many people who were told 18-24 months (by different agencies... not ours) have now been waiting well beyond 24 months... some as many as 30-31 months and still don't have a referral. If you were in my shoes, this would be incredibly discouraging to you... you kind of prepare yourself for how long you think you can wait and 24 months to us is an eternity... the thought of waiting longer than that is almost unbearable.

What makes it so tough is that we're watching Connor grow up before our eyes. He's 5 years old now... if our wait stretches to the worst case scenario of let's say 36 months... add 6 months before we travel and that's 42 months... 30 months from now. Connor will be about to turn 8. That's not what we had in mind for our family. We realized that our kids were going to be pretty far apart but the thought of it going any further than we had originally anticipated is tough to swallow.

So yeah... lately the wait has been weighing heavily on us. It's so hard not knowing how long it's going to be... and knowing that some people out there are waiting 30 months plus is heartbreaking. I won't lie... we've thought about just trying to get pregnant and dropping out of the program.

However... God has a way of giving hope to the hopeless and I believe that came to us today. We found out this morning that another family from our agency received a healthy infant girl referral this past Friday... they waited only 8 months... the little girl is 2 months old. That's pretty huge... the biggest part of that news is that we found out that our dossier has been shown to a birth mother at least once. We weren't chosen, but we were presented. We didn't expect this to happen for many more months... for it to be happening already is a very good sign.

It's a rollercoaster... even the good news (like what we found out today) can leave you feeling worse. As the time creeps on, it seems like it occupies more and more of our thoughts. There's such an obvious hole in our family... Jessica and I both want to be parents again and Connor is such a sweet and wonderful kid... he's going to be an incredible big brother for Claire... even he can sense that our family is incomplete. The longer this goes, the more painful that missing piece of our family seems to become.

We'll continue to keep you posted on any news. Please pray for us to have peace as we wait and pray for our referral to come sooner rather than later... and join us as we celebrate having one year of waiting behind us. We're glad to have that one finished and as the Counting Crows once said... "there's reason to believe... maybe this year will be better than the last."