Had a thought...

I had a thought after the last post that maybe some of you were wondering why I had not posted a picture of our girl because we do have some pics and a video that were in her file we received from the agency.

The Chinese adoption process involved many steps.  And you cannot post any pics publicly until you get to a certain step.  I will try to break the steps down a little bit.

1.  We applied to an adoption agency we found online that works with expats living in China

2.  We were approved so we started putting together our dossier.  The dossier has things like birth certificate, marriage license, adoption petition, physicals, pictures, police reports, fingerprints, immigration approvals, etc...Most people refer to this part of the process as the "paper chase"

3.  All of this paperwork has to be "authenticated".  All of the paperwork needs to be sent to the agency. It then gets notarized and after it is all notarized it needs to be certified by the Chinese Embassy.  This process takes about a month or more.  Usually we would have to do this on our own, but because we live in China the agency did it for us....for an extra fee of course ;o)

4.  Once all the paper work is authenticated our dossier is complete and it can be send to be China to be logged in.  Once we get your Log in Date (LID) we could officially be matched through our agency

5.  Once we matched ourselves with a child (another story) rather the agency matching us we then submitted a Letter of Intent (LOI) letting China know that we want to adopt that specific child.

6.  Once China receives our LOI we will receive a pre-approval (PA).  That is China's acknowledgement that they received our LOI

7.  At this point we can post pics wherever we want ;o)

8.  Then we get a Letter of Acceptance (LOA) That is when we can start making travel arrangements to pick up our girl.   

Since we live in China hopefully that should help speed up the travel portion because we do not need to wait to be approved for Visas and such.

So that is why there is not picture of Chu Chu yet.  Oh yeah, Chu Chu is her Chinese name. We will probably use it as nickname because we like it. ;o)  So on this blog I will refer to her as Chu Chu.  We already have a western name as well for her, but because I have privacy paranoid issues about the internet at times ;o)  I do not want to put her name out into the blogosphere.  I am kooky like that. ;o)

Stay Tuned!  We should be able to post pics soon!

1+1=3

The hubs and I are ready to make it official.  We are adopting a baby girl!  We are over the moon. 

It has been a roller coaster ride of emotion.....mostly good emotion.

I won't go into too much detail.  Obviously our close friends and family have been in the loop for a while.
We started the process back in February, after a trip to Cambodia.   God just touched and opened our hearts to the need of homes for orphans around the world.  We literally came home that weekend and googled an adoption agency in the U.S that works with expats living in China and started the process. 

I cannot tell you how God has grown me during this process.  I had moments of impatience, frustration, sadness, more impatience, more frustration and then I would realize how selfish I was being and give it to God and He would totally give me something to help me get through to the next step.  Things like paperwork getting processed faster than normal, getting logged in faster than normal and now being matched faster than normal.  I have not even met my daughter yet but she has already given me the best gift she could ever give me, a stronger relationship with God. 

As I stated before, we started the process in February.  We had to gather A LOT of paperwork.  It took us until about August to complete that process.  We were told it could be over a year before we got matched, but God had a different plan.  We found our girl on our agencies special focus list.  That is a list of children who are harder to place either because they are older or have more serious medical issues.  These children can be matched with families at anytime.  And that is where we found our girl. 

For privacy reason I won't be writing a lot about her here.  This is mainly where we will be posting pics for our family and friends.  And anyone who knows Michael knows he love photography.  And anyone who knows me knows I like to shop and will be dressing my girl in the cutest stuff I can find. ;o)  So this blog is going to become filled with pics of our baby.

Sorry to anyone who was reading the blog for our travel adventures.  But the positive thing is there should be more frequent posting. ;o)  But there will still be posts about our adventures in China.  We are actually heading to Vietnam in a week for October Holiday.  So we should have some great pics from there.

So that is what has been going on with us.  ;o)

Praise God from Whom all blessings Flow!!!!!

painting update

here I painted the scales...it takes forever or what seems like forever

then I do a more solid color over the scales....this pic would not let me rotate it....sorry.  you can see how the white of the flowers stands out more when the fish are colored in.