Thursday, November 30, 2006

Time, Time, Time

I pray that our travel approval comes quickly, I want to be approved and get Acer home Reality is that the China Center of Adoption Affairs is swamped with many more applications than they have children's information. I do know they're at least looking at our information, otherwise they wouldn't have asked for more, but based on what I'll paste below, my thoughts of having Acer home by Easter may just not happen. It might, but our dossier was submitted to the CCAA on 10/18/2006

Length of waiting process: Once dossier is submitted to the CCAA, on average, it can take 4 to 6
months for CCAA to issue Travel Approval (TA). Once TA is issued, CHI can start making
your travel plans.

Travel Information: Upon receiving your Travel Approval (TA) your schedule will be coordinated
with other Waiting Children Families and/or with the NSN Referral Families waiting to travel. You may
be traveling to your child's Province without other CHI families, but a CHI Coordinator will accompany
you during the whole process. You will travel approximately 4-6 weeks after receiving your TA.

Nothing Happening Here

Well, this has been a 2 week period when we've not had a single piece of paperwork to submit, re-do, or create. I'm not quite sure what to do with myself.

Aaah, I know I have to find a sturdy box to pack away my china tea cups and stuff that are currently on a wall shelf hanging above Acer's bed. Exciting I know. Maybe I could try to fit them in the regular cupboard, that would involve re-arranging a lot of dishes, also high on the excitement factor. Woo Woo, feel my joy.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Log in Date Finally!

We were pleased to find that our LID is 11/14! A little tiny bit sooner than I'd expected. Here is the notice we got on our CHI chat group.

Congratulations to the 27 CHI families whose dossiers left our St.
Louis office on 10/5/06 (DTC), our Beijing office submitted your
dossiers to the CCAA on 10/18/06 and the CCAA logged your dossiers in
on 11/14/06.

Yeah Us!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Yet more paperwork

Yesterday I received a call from two of the agency staff, they explained that the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) had requested that I write a letter explaining my being a birth mother to an adopted baby. While I felt this was a good thing, because it meant they were already looking at our paperwork, it was frustrating because it's a slow down and I thought this was well addressed in our home study and application. Here's the letter I came up with. I hope this works!



To the China Center of Adoption Affairs
Thank you for reviewing our request to adopt JSC from Jindezhen, Jiangxi Province. As part of this review I was asked to explain about the child I gave up for adoption, what happened and my thought process; what is our current relationship; and whether the child will come back in the future.
In the summer of 1998, when I discovered I was pregnant, I was shocked, I didn't think I could get pregnant at all. I was not married, not in a relationship with a man with whom I wanted to be married, not in a financially rewarding job and not going to have an abortion. As a parent your first responsibility is to do what is best for the child. What was best for my child was to be raised in a stable, secure 2 parent family, as I wasn't able to provide that, I went looking for a couple who were.
I contacted a lifelong friend who had relatives, whom I'd met, who had lost several babies to miscarriages and asked him to ask them if they were interested in adopting, in an open adoption. This couple had been married for 17 years by this point, and had the stability and security I was looking for, for my baby. They were actually in the process of adopting a girl from China at this point, and decided to adopt both children so their children would have siblings.
The adoptive family and I have kept in touch and we meet yearly at the wife's father's home for a weekend visit. They are a warm, close, loving family and have made both myself and my husband Bill welcome during the visits. I have watched my son grow and mature in their care, turning into an intelligent, funny child. He also has a good relationship with his sister, with little sibling rivalry.
I have left the timing of telling him he is adopted up to the adoptive parents, as well as the fact that I am his biological mother. Right now, he just knows me as someone he meets at his grandparents once a year, a friend of the family.
During the adoption process I signed away my right to sue for custody but I kept my right to sue for visitation. I feel it would be very harmful to him to be taken from his family, but I never want to be totally excluded from his life. If as a teenager or adult he wanted to come for a visit to get to know me and my family better, we would welcome him, but his true family is the one who raised him from the day he was born, not the one who gave birth to him.
The decision I made, to give up my son for adoption was the hardest decision I ever made, but it is a decision I am totally at peace with. I would never try to wrest him from his adoptive family and undo all the good I achieved by placing him with a loving stable family. My son will always be a part of my life, always loved by me, but he won't come back to me, to our household, he will stay with his family because that is what is best for him.
Thank you again for considering our application to adopt Jing Shen Chao.
Sincerely,
Heather Annis Bowman-Tomlinson

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Eyesight

I just visited a very good sight dealing with what I believe will be part of Acer's vision problems. The site seems to day that surgery will be part of the cure and that therapy will be another part, which is extremely logical. It warned that some surgeons will think that surgery is the best option and will ignore therapy options. So I will continure to study on this and go armed to our appointments with knowledge.

http://www.strabismus.org/index.html

Milestone

For the past 2.5 months, I've had a bookmark on my web browser. The bookmark to Acer's 6 month old pictures and brief medical description, the page where we fell in love with this small boy. I've watched as the description under his picture went from 'being reviewed' to PLACED, as the descriptions under the other children in the batch underwent the same process ahead of his description.

From a group of 35 waiting children, with varying problems, Acer was one of the few left. No one even looked at his file before we did. I have to wonder why. There were children with far more severe or disfiguring problems than his, he has a wonderful cute chubby face, why did no one look? I sincerely believe he was meant for us, he was protected for us, that's why no one else looked.

Today I clicked back to the bookmark to look at those baby pictures and the page is gone. They're bringing in another batch of waiting children, with special needs like Acer, and so Acer's page is gone, cleaned away to make room for the new children.

I'm happy he's found a home and doesn't need to be on the waiting children site anymore, but sad because those were the only baby pictures we may ever have for him and I don't have a copy.

Note,(1/15) I found that the SN Co-ordinator had actually sent us those pictures, I've gotten some from people who've actually seen him and am up to 12 pictures of him now! Album here we come!

Monday, November 06, 2006

Maybe Acer won't go back to the orphanage

I was re-visiting the site about Acer's SWI (State welfare agency) when I came across the following line.


In the summer of 2004, one family found out that there are a few infants and toddlers living in the SWI. Each child's situation is different. Some babies have multiple foster parents, some have only one. Some come to the orphanage 2 or 3 weeks early and some stay with their foster parents up until the day they travel to Nanchang. There is no firm set plan for all children.

It gave me hope, that He'll be allowed to stay with his family. For a guy with limited vision I can't help but feel it would be better for him to stay in familiar surroundings.

You can visit this site via the links on the right of the page

Friday, November 03, 2006

Link to visit, very powerful

I just visited this link and read the article. Wow, very well written and it brings up things you just don't think of and explains them to you in a way you can understand.

It's called perspective
http://www.emkpress.com/perspective.html

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Dossier Copy Finally arrives back home!

Our Dossier copy was in the mail tonite when I got home. Yeah! We'll need this when we go over to pick up Acer. What was interesting to us were the front couple pages where the agency had put our pictures into a collage-esque effect. They chose to put the picture of our Chinese language class barbecue at our house on the front page. I think they liked the fact that we had a mix of obviously Asian with obviously not Asian. I'll have to email our friends from class Mark & Kristin, who are waiting for their referral, and let them know they're part of our dossier.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Acer back in the orphanage?

I just found out from another mother to be (out of the same waiting child batch and the same province as Acer) that she heard they will take Acer (and her Hannah) away from the foster families they've been with and put them in the orphanage before we come get them. She says it's so they bond better with us, but I hate to think of the little guy pulled out of his foster family and put into a situation where they don't really know him. No sad little guys! He'll be all confused and lonely for so long until we get there.

Letter of Intent

We received a postcard yesterday that stated our letter of intent had been sent to China 10/27!
Yeah! One more step down the road to Acer!

Commenting is okay

Howdy,
If you read something that resonates with you, that really makes you think, or smile or mutter, please let us know. Just click on the comment button and let us know that you're actually reading what we're typing.
Don't forget to read from the bottom up if you want to read this in chronological order!