We began our 'adoption journey' in January 2006 with an Adoption Bible Study at our church. The class ended on March 5th, and the next morning my husband said that we should start looking into agencies. To make a long story shorter, we received our LID (logged in date) from China on November 13, 2006 and began the 'official wait' on our referral from China.
In November of 2011, I found a picture of a 3 year old boy with corrected PDA on our agency's Waiting Child List. We requested his file, and through a series of delays, holidays, medical inquiries, etc. ended up having his file for almost 2 months, instead of the usual 2 weeks. Our family was unanimous in going forward with submitting our letter of intent to adopt him. But it was a difficult decision, since it meant 'letting go' of our 'other referral' that we had been waiting on for over 5 years.
We have been blessed to babysit a little 4 year old boy since he was about 2 months old during our long adoption process. I'm sure this has made us more prepared and excited about having a little boy join our family. Our two daughters - age 21 & 17 are very excited for Kaleb to join our family too.
Since submitting our Letter of Intent, things have seemed to go much more quickly than we had expected. Our Preapproval came after a week, and our Official Referral (LSC) came a week and a half later. Last week was a shutdown in China due to Chinese New Year, so we are currently awaiting our Travel Approval and hope to travel in March!
