Adoption Update ... In the Waiting

Today marks three months since our paperwork made it to China and was logged-in to their system! Usually by this point, families with our agency have been matched with a child and are waiting to bring him or her home. We are still waiting to be matched, and I'll tell you why. Back in April, our agency announced that their partnership with the Maoming orphanage had been extended for another year, and that they were just signing contracts to partner with SEVEN more orphanages! This is a different and unique way to do adoptions in China. The common route is to be matched with a child off the Shared List, which is a central registry of children maintained by the governing adoption authority in China and used by most adoption agencies. This is how we were matched with Lia Kate. These orphanage partnerships are different because our agency actually has relationships with the orphanages ... they send teams of medical professionals to go over to these orphanages to do physicals on the children and help the orphanage get the ball rolling to make the children paper-ready ... they offer financial assistance and resources to help with children who need medical or developmental interventions. It is a win for the orphanage because they get extra resources with which to prepare children for international adoption ... a huge win for the children because most of these children would probably have never been available for adoption ... and a win for families like us because we actually get to talk to someone (in our case, local International Adoption doctors and agency workers) who will have first-hand knowledge of the children. The other benefits of adopting a child from one of these partnership programs is that there will be a lot of children coming home from these orphanages to families in our city, so they will grow up together with the shared experience of having been in the same orphanage. This is very different from our adoption with Lia Kate as we only know of one sweet little girl who was in her orphanage at the same time. Needless to say, we have decided to wait to be matched with a child from one of these partnership programs. The orphanages are in Guangdong province and in Chongqing Municipality, so we know that our child is in one of these places. Guangdong province is in southern China and is where Lia Kate is from. In fact, two of the partnership orphanages are very close to Lia Kate's orphanage. Chongqing Municipality is a ginormous city of 32 million people located in central-southwestern China, and we actually have a number of U.S. friends who live there. So adopting from either would be really awesome. The first round of children's files will probably not be ready until August. So, we will just be waiting patiently (or not so) through the long, hot summer before we finally see our little one's face...