Background - how did we end up with Xiao?

Well, we finally got approval from the Holt Waiting Children's committee to move forward. A little history. We began working with Holt International as our agency and Lutheran Social Services for our local work and home study. We started our journey about three years ago when we decided toadopt. We thought Vietnam would be great, as we have close family friends from there. We quickly found out that no one from the U.S. can adopt from Vietnam - they are waitng for an agreement to be signed between the two countries (the agreement took three years, it was just signed in June, 2005).

So, next we tried Bulgaria. We were referred a beautiful little girl named Alexsandra. We were all set to accept her, but after a few days, Holt called to say that the orphanage director would not refer her to us because we already had a child. Even thought the law allowed it, each director can make their own rules. After about 5 months, Holt told us that we should switch because they didn't think we would get a referral. We looked at our options and decided on Ecuador. We thought a spanish speaking child would fit in great, since our church is bilingual and at least Sarah and I could speak some Spanish. After a few months, everything stopped in Ecuador as far as adoptions. Laws were changed and the committee was overturned and changed. Every few months we were told thing should free up, but they didn't really. A few referrals came, but not many. We had worked our way up to #1 on the waiting list when we got more bad news - Ecuador was requiring three trips and they were changing the way they did referrals, so our agency was in a rotation with others. It could be a long time before we got a referral.

Needless to say, we were very discouraged. We had prayed and wondered what the Lord had in mind for us. We were just about ready to give up, but I said let's sign up for the Waiting Children's list in China. Not one week later, we got a picture of XiaoTing and some basic info. XiaoTing will be 5 in Nov. and has cleft lip and palate. The lip was repaired when she was an infant and at the time we got the info, the palate was not. We researched and talked and read and decided we would move ahead around June 1. However, when we called to get some info, we found out she was in another city having her palate repaired. The info was a bit sketchy, so we requested confirmationon the surgery. We waited eight weeks to get it. We got the confirmation on Aug. 1st. We said, YES !! But we were not quite there yet. We needed to be approved by the Waiting Children's committee from Holt. On Aug. 10th, we received approval to move ahead. YIPEE and THANK YOU GOD !! So, three dossiers later and many home study updates later and three fingerprintings, we will be moving ahead. Next steps - finish the dossier, get it to Holt and to China and wait for a travel date.