Well to start of the new year right, my wife and I have decided to begin the process again to adopt another child from China. (YEAH!!) We have been spending the last several months settling in to the Seattle area after our move from VA and we have been talking about going back ever since we were in China in June of 2005 when we got our now 2 and 1/2 year old daughter, Fiona. Things in China have been changing a lot since then. There is now much more demand for adopting children then there are children available (available for adoption, that is…there are thousands and thousands of children in China that I am sure could be adopted, but have not been, and may not ever be, “available” for adoption…which is very sad! I hope this will change), and a lot of the reason is China is now encouraging adoption within their own country. So because of this, a lot of the requirements for adopting have changed, making them a little more restrictive. Also, the time frame from China getting your documents to when they place you with a child, has almost tripled since we went in 2005 (going from 6 months time to 13-16 months and increasing). So, since the time had increased, we thought that we might not go back to China, since we were hoping to have our children within a year or so in age (they will end up being about 3-3 1/2 yrs apart). But after some thought and prayer we both kind of simultaneously came to an agreement that we wanted to adopt from China and that the age gap was not that much of a concern for us. So here we are! We just sent in our application last week and once we get accepted (which should be no problem) we will begin the great paper chase of getting all of our documents together, notarized, certified by the Dept of State and authenticated by the Chinese Consulate. Last time this process took us about a year…this time we are hoping and striving for more like 3 months. So look for future updates of our process and please pray for us during the long wait and for our future child, who is most likely not born yet (maybe not even conceived), since we are requesting a child up to 14 months old.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 2:14 pm and is filed under God, Life and Culture, our stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.