Welcome!

Welcome to our blog! This is our first time doing this, so please bear with us. First we want to thank you for your interest in our Journey to China to get our daughter, Mei Gui. Her English name will be Nina Mei. Also, a BIG thank you to all of you who have supported us along the way. It has meant so much to us and we would not be where we are today without you!

For those of you who don't know, here is a bit of our history:

We first became interested in adoption in February of 2005. We originally started with a local program that brought Russian children to the US for the summer with the hopes of finding them a family. That didn't work out and we then tried many other options: Khazakstan, US foster care, and US infants. In July of 2006 we decided to try China. It seemed to be a good match for us and we sent in our paperwork in early November. A few months later we received word that our LID (log-in-date) was 12-25-06. Our first Christmas miracle!

We waited in the LONG line of LIDs for China and learned in March 2007 that our agency, Children's Hope International (CHI), had a "Waiting Children" (WC) list, which is a list of children that are waiting for parents. These children are considered "special needs" by China, meaning they could have anything from Mongolian Spots or Cleft Lip/Palate to Hepatitis B or congential heart disease, or anything in between. We decided we would be interested in one of these babies, depending on the severity of "special need" and whether or not it was correctable with surgery.

The way CHI's WC list works is anyone who is part of the agency can look at the website and if interested in a child they can fill out a form and hope to get chosen to review the child's medical file. All forms are collected after about a week and a family is "randomly selected" to review the child's file. One family may look at a file at a time. They have one week to decide if they want to adopt the child and then they submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) to Adopt that child to China.

In March, we submitted forms on two different children, but were not selected.

The next WC list came out in June. There were 3 children that we were interested in and submitted a form for each of them. It was a tense weekend with many prayers being sent that we would be selected to view a file. Tim got a call on June 26 that we HAD been selected to view a file! It was for a 20 month old girl, Mei Gui, that Joanna had thought about all weekend long! We later learned that we were chosen out of 73 couples that had sent in forms! (miracle #2!)

A week later we sent in our LOI to China and it was received there 7-13-07. We now needed to wait for our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) from China saying that they had reviewed our file and we were approved to adopt Mei Gui, whom we would call Nina Mei. This typically takes 70-90 days for those with similar dates as ours.

The last few days were tense as the waiting was beginning to take its toll, but we received a call from CHI that our letter had arrived from China on October 2, day 81. We received the letter, signed it and sent it off. Now we await our Travel Arrangements (TA) from China, which is when they say we can come. Those typically take 2-4 weeks. CHI has already given us a tentative travel date of November 29. We will be in China for about 14 days, and will be home for Christmas (Christmas miracle #3!)

We are so blessed to be on this journey to China to get our daughter. We know she is the child meant for us, without question. Thanks for taking the journey with us!