Done and Gone

It is official. Our Chinese adoption dossier is complete and on its way to China… via Seattle. We have paid our dossier fee and sent the thing which has consumed our lives for the past 9 months or so to the Americans Adopting Orphans headquarters in Seattle. They will start the translation process and should be sending it to the China Center for Adoption Affairs in China on or around October 1. After that we have to wait for our login date. This is the date on which CCAA accepts our application for adoption and puts us on the official waiting list for adoption candidates to receive referral of a little girl for adoption. We should receive a login date by the end of November. In fact, our login date will most likely fall sometime in October, but we won’t find out what it is until November.

From the point of our login date, we begin our wait for an actual referral of a specific orphan for us to accept or deny as the little girl we wish to adopt. When we began this process more than a year ago, the wait for a referral from the login date was running about 8 months. We are hearing news from other adopting parents that the wait time has gone up to 19 months with some fearing 20 months or longer.

Whatever our wait, it seems most referrals are being born about 12 months before travel dates, the time at which you actually travel to pick up your child. That 20 month waiting period doesn’t seem so bad to me at the moment considering we are currently dealing with the Terrible Twos from our youngest boy, Jude, with those Trying Threes to look forward to. But it might become unbearable if the wait were to increase any more. We have our fingers crossed that those wait times will actually start to decrease next year. My theory is that they will reverse once all the hoopla of the Beijing Olympics is over.

However long the wait, I have no doubt that Jack will be taking it in stride.

The Long Road

I know it has been a very long time since I made an entry in this blog. I had lofty goals at first of making weekly entries even when no progress was being made toward the adoption, but life gets busy and every time it stopped long enough for me to consider composing an entry, there seemed too much to catch up on. Now, so much time has passed, I feel I can just overview most of those details of life that don’t really pertain to the adoption of our little girl.

We’ve gone through house training for our Corgi. She is now in a training program so we can control her barking and chewing on Angie. She doesn’t chew on me, just Angie.

Jude’s terrible twos have firmly set in since his 2nd birthday in July. He’s gotten so terrible lately. But he's also so awesome. He’s still so cute and full of guile. I’ve started referring to him as “Busey,” after the actor Gary Busey, because he acts so crazy. He likes to rub various substances into his hair, giving him the appearance of a celebrity mug shot.

Jack has grown so much. He participated in his first sport team season this summer. He was in the town t-ball league. He took the term “magnet ball” to a new level, running anywhere on the field the ball would go. By the end of the four game season he actually was beginning to learn to stay in his position. And then our little boy started school this year. I suddenly know why my parents would go all nuts about how they were losing me to each stage in my life. The time goes by too fast.

We placed Jack in a parochial Catholic school. We are not Catholic, but we felt he would stand a better chance of getting the proper attention in a private setting as opposed to a public school. He’ll go to the public school eventually. The parochial is only for the lowers grades. But he loves school. And he finally gets enough activity that he doesn’t wake us up at 6 a.m. every day.

We entered the hellish world of home improvement this summer. We remodeled our kitchen, dining room and living room. We started with a bogus contractor, ended up firing him and going with a much more expensive one and did some of the work our selves. That would be why it still isn’t finished. But we are much happier with it.

But the really big news is that while all of this other stuff was going on, we have finished our adoption dossier. We got the doctors to admit there really is nothing wrong with my liver, so we could finish our home study. We’ve been finger printed by CIS. I don't know what happened to the newspaper article the local paper was supposed to run on us. I guess they decided the town gets to see my ugly mug on the front page often enough.

We’ve had all of our paperwork authenticated and re-authenticated. And just last week the Chinese Embassy in Chicago confirmed that we had everything we needed and it is ready to send off to the Chinese adoption authorities in China. Now, if we just hadn’t blown through our fee to them fixing up our kitchen.

That whole process would have taken much less time if we had let our adoption agency do it all, but by doing it ourselves we saved a great deal of money. Now, once we send our fee and dossier off to China, our real wait begins. I think it is still about an 18 month wait. Hopefully, that will change... for the shorter. We think it would be just great if it would time out so our little girl would be born at about the same time as our new nephew/niece. Congratulations on pregnancy number two Dan and Lisa!!!

Now, in order for that to happen our wait would have to shrink by a couple of months before April. We would still have a considerable time to wait even if they are born about the same time, but if we can get a log in date by the end of the year it would be possible. They wouldn’t get to meet each other until they were each about a year old, but that would be cool.

Anyway, we are very happy to finally be approaching our log in date, the date which our wait begins for the Chinese government to send us through the system and assign us a daughter. I’ll be sure to make a big deal out of the log in date for everyone, so you’ll all know when it happens. It been a long road, and there’s still such a long way to go, but it will be well worth the wait.

Dogs, Diets and Digests

Where to start? It’s been several weeks since we began this blog and much has happened. Hence, no entries in weeks. We’ve been too busy. It will probably be best to go through it chronologically. I’ll leave out the stuff that really has nothing to do with our growing family.

First off, we decided to start practicing our adoption skills early and have already added a new member to our family. She is short and furry and likes to go to the bathroom on our rug.

She is a Pembroke Welch Corgi and her name is Lucy. We agreed upon the name readily after acquiring her from a breeder not far from where we live. Her coloring makes it appear sometimes as if she is wearing a pair of glasses, so her full name is Lucy In Disguise. As you can see from her very large ears, she doesn’t share our former dog’s reception problems. I’ve already got a music mix in the works for her, including of course, The Beatles “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, David Bowie “Diamond Dogs”, and Dave Matthews Band “Satellite”.

We wanted to wait a while after our last dog, Helen, passed away before committing to another one. I know some people might think we really didn’t wait all that long (about 6 weeks), but for us it was quite some time. One of the key motivating factors was our oldest son, Jackson. Angie has always wanted to see one of her boys with his own puppy. Personally, I think I could have done without the whole puppy experience again. I say this after having spent half the night outside in the rain with Lucy because she just seems to refuse to move her bowels tonight. But if I left her out in the house, she would loose them the second we looked away from her.

When we explained to Jack what had happened to Helen, his immediate reaction was remorse, then within seconds his mood changed and he asked, “So when can we get another dog?” We asked him what kind of dog he wanted, big or small. Those are really the only kind to a boy who can rule one and be ruled by the other. No surprise for Jack, he wanted a small dog.

I don’t have much affection for most small breeds, but I always liked the Corgi’s. As adults they have short stubby legs but the body of a medium-sized dog. Sounds strange, but they’re cute. And as puppies, well, they just look like little bears at first. Then those ears pop up. It was difficult, even for me, to take home only one. Lucy was one of two Jack hand picked himself, Angie and I made the final decision. Angie liked Lucy because she was “spunky”. We maybe should have gone with one of the calmer ones.


As for our China adoption, well, our paperwork has been going very smoothly, except for one, my doctor’s physical. During my first set of tests, I got two negative marks. My cholesterol was slightly elevated, due to four months of inactivity from my back problems. That problem corrected itself after my return to full time work (and when I stopped eating all that Ben & Jerry’s).

The second negative was with my liver, which was reporting elevated enzyme levels. Upon a second set of tests, those levels had dropped significantly, however were still abnormal. Now, I think my liver enzymes have been out of whack for quite some time. I had mono at 24 and my liver shut down. When I tested for a new life insurance policy in 2001, the levels were elevated. The nurse said it could be a virus, or it could just be that my enzymes are naturally higher; but the doctor won’t sign off on me without a consultation with a specialist.

This stinks in terms of getting our paperwork all wrapped up for the adoption, but I am glad I’ll get the chance to figure out just what is going on with my liver once and for all. My appointment is on May 21.

Other than my doctor’s report, we are all ready to move on to the second step in the adoption process which is the FBI fingerprinting and review of our paperwork by the state and federal agencies. I certainly hope there aren’t any surprises popping up from the FBI.
And finally, this is not the only place where our adoption process will be chronicled. An ambitious young reporter named Rachel at our local paper decided it would make a good on-going feature. She came by this evening to interview Angie and I (Jack put in his two cents worth as well), and we welcomed her with a home cooked meal of ziti. We had a wonderful time, often straying off the subject. Once the article is published you can read it at http://www.marshallnews.com/.

Home Study Today and We're Away

Well, our next child is under way. It may seem to be kind of a misnomer to refer to an adoption as a surprise, especially considering the years we've spent researching this decision that we've made. But we couldn't be happier to learn that we're having a baby, even if this one will require considerably more contemplation and deliberate action. Not that our two boys, Jack and Jude, didn't require a good deal of that as well.

Perhaps a little more introduction is necessary for those who are unfamiliar with our family. I'm Andrew Wells, my wife is Angela Wells. We are more commonly referred to as Andy and Angie. We live in the mid-western state of Missouri. We've been married for more than seven years and have two biological children, Jack (5) and Jude (20 mos.).

That's us. I don't usually look quite so psychotic.

We are in the process of adopting a little girl from China. Don't worry! You haven't missed anything. We are still in the early stages of the adoption process. We have finished most of our preliminary paperwork and, just this weekend, we had our home study.

A very nice lady from St. Louis named Susan came to interview us last night and see our home. Of course, Angie and I were overly nervous about this whole visit, thinking we were to be judged on every detail of our home. We spent the week cleaning areas that probably weren't even noticed and fixing things we never use. We had been assured by friends that the home study was mostly to make sure we weren't operating a Meth house or something, but we wanted to make our best impression.

Our son Jack was very helpful during the tour of our home. He showed Susan his bedroom first, the Jude's, then Mommy and Daddy's. He wanted to skip unnecessary rooms, such as the office, the living room and the kitchen, so he could show her the downstairs with all of his video games and toys. Naturally, Angie and I wanted to down play things like video games, and we were pleased that he could remember where his toothbrush was for her.

Then I corralled the kids in the basement, while Susan interviewed Angie solo. Solo interviews? Did we know about this before hand? We hadn't rehearsed our answers! You had to get stories like this straight for the police, right?!

Luckily for us, Susan chose to interview me the next day. She found her way back to our home this morning with more ease than her original journey here last night. I told her my life story, which I will now spare the rest of you. Then she interviewed us together. The second part of the interview consisted mostly of questions about our outlooks as parents, as a couple, and as potential parents to a child of a differing ethnicity.

It was really all very laid back, and both we and Susan had a very fun time of it. I think she really enjoyed hearing my stories of my family and growing up in Maine. Considering Angie and I have very similar personalities, I'm also sure Susan enjoyed Angie's stories of her family and Missouri as well. We each had different funny stories to tell about our meeting and engagement, and Susan said she had rarely been so sure of a couple that should adopt from China.

We are very excited about our future addition, and now that we've actually met someone in an official capacity for this little endeavor of ours, it finally seems like something that will actually happen one day. We have a long road ahead of us, of fingerprinting, authentication of documents, and a whole lot of waiting. They are saying the wait time for a child referral from China at the moment is about 18 months from the time that the documents are submitted to the Chinese government. And we a re still a few months away from that.

I hope to update this blog on a regular basis to keep people informed of our progress, and to show off my wonderful family. I hope you'll join us here often.