Dear friends & family,
This is loooong overdue but we wanted to let you all know that we are in the process of adopting from Hong Kong. We have already completed our home study & dossier and are waiting for final matching approval from the Hong Kong Adoption Unit. We can’t wait to bring our daughter home!
Backing up a little bit:
Before hubby & I were married we talked about our desires to expand our family through adoption and now here we are. On September 4th 2008 we attended an informational meeting about adoption and started the paperwork process. Up until this point we were unsure about whether we wanted to pursue a domestic or international adoption but after the meeting felt like God was directing us to Asia. On September 17th we went to our agency’s local office, to meet with the director of Int’l Adoptions. While we were there she showed us a long list of children who were currently available for adoption, some of them are kids that hubby & I had taken care of when we lived in Hong Kong. We printed out the profiles of a few of these precious children and took them home to pray about them. At home, there was one little girl whom we both fell in love with and felt was to be part of our family. We prayed a lot, requested more information about this little girl, met with doctors from our local Children’s Hospital International Adoption Clinic and on September 30th told the adoption agency that we wanted to pursue adopting EB. They put her ‘on hold’ for us, meaning she was no longer available for other couples to pursue, while we began all the paperwork... and I do mean ALL the paperwork :-)
What’s next:
All of our paperwork (dossier) is in Hong Kong being reviewed by the Adoption Unit of the Social Welfare Department. They had some additional questions for us which we just answered this week… So we are ‘patiently’ waiting to get the official matching approval (which means that we are approved/matched by HK AU to adopt EB). After that happens it usually takes about 3 months before we would go to Hong Kong to pick up EB. At this point we are planning on both hubby & I going, so will leave AG & CC here while we travel. We are concurrently going through the application process with the US Citizenship & Immigrations Services. We have an appointment with them on Feb 20t.
Your part in our journey:
1) We would really appreciate your prayers:
• For favor with AU as they review our paperwork.
• For approval of our USCIS application.
• For everything to be done in a timely manner.
• For God to be preparing all of us for the transitions ahead.
2) We would love to hear from you:
• Advice from those who have done this before – things we should or should not do :-)
• Encouragement/prayers etc
Thanks so much! We will do our best to keep you updated as things progress.
Much love from all,
