Adoption Update

For those of you just tuning in ... in addition to expecting lil' Giffen in February, we are expecting another lil' Giffen, by way of an adoption from China. I thought I would take time to address the questions that we seem to get asked most often.

1. Where are you in the adoption process?
We are almost done with all the paperwork! We are currently waiting to get approval from U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services to bring in an orphan from another country. We expect this approval any day now. Once we receive it, we have a few more paperwork tasks to complete our Dossier. At that point, our Dossier is off to China, where it will be translated into Chinese, and then submitted to the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). They will approve our paperwork and log us into their system. The date that we get logged in will officially be our "log-in date" (or LID). This date will determine when we receive our referral (information about our child) down the road.

2. Will it really take several years?
Yes, it really will. As mentioned above, the CCAA refers children based on log-in dates (LID). Our log-in date will likely be sometime in November 2007. The CCAA has just referred children for November 2005. So from this point, there are two years worth of referrals that have to happen before we get ours. To give you some perspective, the CCAA started working on 2005 LIDs in July of 2005, so here we are in October of 2007, and they are still referring babies to people who applied to adopt in 2005. At best estimate, it could be three years before we get our referral. But it could be longer.

3. Will your child be a boy or a girl?
We'll be requesting a healthy, infant female. Considering that 99% of orphans in China are female, we can be pretty sure that we'll be bringing home a bundle of pink!

4. How old will the baby be at the time of adoption?
She will probably be around 12 months old (in other words, she won't even be born for a couple more years). At the time of referral, infants are usually around 6 to 9 months of age. But since it takes a few months to get travel arrangements together, by the time families get to China, the babies are around 12 months of age.

5. Will you have to go to China?
Yes, we get to go to China! We'll spend about 2 weeks there. First, we'll go to the province that our child is in/from. Then we travel to Guangzhou (in southern China), where the U.S. Consulate is. We finish our paperwork there, shop for lots of souvenirs, and then fly home with new baby in tow. We are so excited about getting to travel to meet our baby. We hope to absorb as much of the culture as we can, so we can tell her all about where she came from.

6. Do you have to learn Chinese?
Because the baby will likely only be 12 months old, there will not be a big language barrier between us and the child. Our adopted daughter will probably speak English later than American children, but the delay will likely be because she heard Chinese for the first year of her life. Of course, we'll have to learn enough Chinese to get by during our two weeks there.

7. Why are you adopting?
This is a post for another day. In short, we are adopting because we feel called to adopt. This question deserves a longer answer, so we plan to post on this soon!