It's all about perspective....

Our Sweet Girls

That mop of shiny black hair on the left is Mary. She is teaching our Zoey how to say Mommy, Daddy and brother while pointing to our pictures in a photo album that we sent to Zoey. This is a screenshot from the video we received after sending a care package to Zoey. I worked hard to capture this moment because I absolutely adore the way Zoey looks at her in this very moment.

We have shared the story about the nine year old girl that we have been pursuing in addition to Zoey. The one they said was "unadoptable." We begged for the orphanage officials to make a file for her. She is adoptable! We will adopt her! THIS is the girl. This is Mary. Mary is not her Chinese name. I cannot share her Chinese name or any photographs that identify her until and unless we have approval to adopt her.

We made it very clear to our agency and to everyone we know that with two boys in college and a third almost there, we would definitely not be able to afford two trips to China. Our best hope of bringing both girls home would be in convincing Mary's orphanage to prepare her file very expeditiously. Her orphanage agreed to make a file and we prayed, prepared and prayed some more. We knew this was out of our hands at this point.

Well, we reached a milestone in our adoption process. We received our I800A approval. That is approval from US Customs and Immigration that says we are suitable to adopt a child from a Hague Convention country or in our case: two children. We are taking the steps to Authenticate our approval and when we finish that process it will be sent to our agency in Colorado. This will complete the dossier process on our end. Our agency will then triple check our documents, bind them in a file, translate everything and ship it off to China. We will finally, blessedly, officially be DTC (Dossier to China) this month. With this knowledge and bearing in mind that timing is of the essence in order to pull off a concurrent adoption, I asked our agency to check on Mary's file for international adoption. Our agency rep got back to me today and said it's coming along slowly and she will check back in a few months...few months???
We should be traveling to China in a few months.
I asked her what this means for our chance at a concurrent adoption.
She said it's not likely.
Not likely.
That's a punch to the gut.
Now what?

I told Pete. We were both devastated. I kind of sat here all afternoon steeping in my own misery and then I thought about a post that I read yesterday that was written be a sweet friend and fellow adoptive mom Nicci Scarborough. In the post she talked bout people who said they always wanted to adopt but could not afford it. I went back and re-read it. She said:

That’s a problem with perspective. If you look at it as though you ARE a parent of a child living in deplorable conditions, who yearns for a home, who desperately needs to be shown love in order to grow healthy and strong, if your heart tells you that you ARE a child’s parent and you’ve decided to see it from that angle, then how much money could stand in the way of you going to get your child? What would you do if your child was being held half way across the world? What would you pay to ransom him/her? What is that life worth to you? Would you say, “Darn, my child is living apart from me. I’m not sure if she’s being adequately cared for, but probably not. I just can’t come up with the money to go get her and bring her home.” What WOULDN’T you do if that were the case? What could possibly keep a parent from their child?

In answer to that. Nothing. Nothing will keep us from fighting for this file. Nothing will keep us from pursuing this adoption. We will do whatever we have to do in order to bring both of our girls home. Keep us in your prayers please. All of us. Pete and I, Zoey and most especially Mary.

Thank you.