Our Daughter!

Um. I was supposed to get the call tomorrow. And based on that information this VERY organized girl decided to zip into Boston to pick up her husband's passport to literally kill time. On the way home I get a call from CCAI and I answer and it is Beth E on the other line. I say to her "is this THE call??" and she laughs and says "yes, we decided to surprise everyone and call tonight!" OMG I was so not ready!!!! I had a fancy dancy call sheet ready at home and wanted to video the whole thing but I was sweaty and in my gym clothes in the CAR or as we say here "ca". So I put her on speaker and got some little details and then asked if we could call back when we got home so I could video the call. So here are the important details...and I think more pictures will come tomorrow!




Her Chinese name is Song Xiao Yin. She is in the city of Yangxi in the Guangdong Province in southern China. She was born 9/27/10 so she is 9 months old. her name means dawn and bed of grass. Song is her last name and a front runner for her middle name.


We are not entirely sure of her full name yet. Stay tuned!

 

Love. Love. Love!

Dream

I woke with a start around 6:00 am this morning having just wrangled myself from an awful dream. I had a dream that we got our referral and the way they sent the referral was via snail mail in a giant binder with everyone in your travel groups referral. So I get this huge binder and start madly flipping through to my section and when I find it there are no pictures. I keep scanning and scanning the pages for a picture and can't find one so I start reading the information. I immediately find out that our referral spontaneously burst into flames when it reached CCAI so they lost all her pictures. Our daughter's name was "Cassie" so there's the "c" part I was hoping for but she was born in September 2000 so she was nearly 11. She had bounced from foster care to foster care and had been referred 4 other times but they were all denied. Finally at the end of a long two pages of information I couldn't believe I was reading, there was a small faint picture that seemingly had partially survived the fire. And she looked like this:

 

Now that's a bad dream.

Agency Weekly Update

It is amazing how painful the silence is when it is your LID swirling around in the rumor bowl. My agency does weekly updates on Wednesday and today they posted on their internal website that matches were indeed complete but that they don't know when to expect them.


So what does that mean? 


Beats me.


Tomorrow?? Friday?? 

Please, please, just don't make me wait it out over the holiday weekend. I beg of you.

Rumors!

Well I asked and I received. We awoke to rumors this morning and they are of the JUICY variety. Tasty, delicious, juicy rumors that are saying matches have been mailed and that they go through July 6, 2006!!! We are LID 7/6/06. And if this is true it is ironic b/c 5 years ago today my dossier left my agency in Colorado to fly east to China. How wonderful if my match was flying west to CCAI exactly 5 years later.


So it seems the stork may be in the air, as soon as I hear confirmation, I'll post it here!

**6/29 8:00 am UPDATE** Boy it sure seems that all the other times a rumor leaked matches were already mailed, we saw them landing in Europe before now. I was waiting for the our agency said they have a package on the way  rumor to show up yesterday or how about a referrals have landed in Europe rumor this morning?? Nothing but crickets!! Arrrggg. It is 2 pm in Europe already so if something was going to show up today, we would have heard about it already. Boo hoo!

End of June is FINALLY here!

With all the snow we had this winter we are finally of school for summer! Our last day was Friday so it hasn't felt like V.A.C.A.T.I.O.N until today! And thankfully mother nature cooperated. We spent the day swimming, sunning and of course grabbing an ice cream at every chance!

and yes, we are hanging in there. It is the LAST week of June and we hope to be up next for a referral. This time last month we had rumors already actively swirling around the globe. So we are crossing our fingers that rumors start and that July 6th is in.

Why did I wear mascara?

I knew enough not to wear my contact lenses because they itch when I cry but somehow I didn't have the same forethought when putting on my eye makeup this morning.


At 11:00 am I walked into a building I hadn't been in since the summer of 1987 when I attended a dance there with all my classmates after graduating from 8th grade. The boys were all in sports coats, ties and white pants and the girls were in a bevy of Laura Ashley dresses with tiny flowered prints and poofy sleeves. I am sure we were a sight to see.


But today I walked in to to say goodbye to a friend from that time in my life and while we kept in occasional touch over the years, time, place, and circumstance had separated us for most of the past few decades.


The service was lovely. The slide show was difficult. Baird was 37, would have been 38 this coming August. He left behind an adoring sister and a heartbroken mother. As a parent and a sister, so much of today was unbearable. I stood there with many of our classmates as we tried to digest this incredible loss. We were part of a tight-knit group of 40 kids who spent the K-8 years growing, bonding and finding out who each of us was. And sadly, this is our second loss from this group. We had to say goodbye to another dear friend 8 years ago. Phoebe was thirty, about to get engaged. Diagnosed with non-smokers lung cancer and succumbed to the disease 6 short months later. I can't even let my mind think about the life she has missed out on.


So wherever you are today, reach out to the people you love. Especially the people you've been meaning to reconnect with. Say I love you when you think it. Say thank you when you feel it. Hold people dear to you close.


And for me, my dearest friend who spends most of her time working all over this great big world is coming home in July and I cannot wait to hug her.

Matching

It is a bit surreal after all this time to think about the fact that my dossier has moved to the matching room. When we started this whole process 5+ years ago I was so good about documenting all the steps we would go through here on this blog. But so much time has passed and so much wonderful life has happened that I find myself glazing over the fact that our dossier is. in. the. matching. room!  If you are one of my friends jumping up and down with me right now and you find yourself thinking what the hell is the matching room? This post is for you....


In the spring of 2006 I spent 10 weeks gathering every piece of information about our family and every member in it. Medical documents, financial documents, pictures of us and our home, testimonial letters from friends, and of course the all encompassing homestudy. Once everything was gathered, notarized, certified by the State of Massachusetts, and authenticated by the Chinese consulate, it became our dossier and was sent to our adoption agency for translation. CCAI received it on June 22, 2006, translated it and mailed it off to the CCAA in China on June 28th. The CCAA logged us in on July 6, 2006 and then our beloved dossier sat.

And sat.

A year or so later, we were informed our dossier had been through the review room and there were no issues with our file. And then it sat again once more. This time for years and years. It is probably dusty now don't you think? It's been sitting in a room like this for YEARS.

But when the CCAA gets close to matching your LID (login date) they move your dossier into the MATCHING ROOM. It is likely transported like this, with lots of other dossiers.

At the same time, orphanage directors prepare little dossiers for the children in their care who are ready for adoption. Each month the CCAA sits down in this room, at these desks to match children with parents.

From what I understand, the CCAA first tries to match orphanages with agencies based on numbers. For instance if Orphanage 1 has 6 children and Agency B has 6 families with the same LID, the CCAA official will put that orphanage with that agency group. Sometimes agencies with a large number of families with similar LIDs will be matched with a grouping of orphanages.


Once orphanages are matched with agencies, parents are then matched with the children. This is where all that paperwork comes into play. The CCAA matching officials will read your dossier, learn a little about you and your family, and try to match you with a baby they think will fold well into your family. The photo below shows people busy at work matching.

So right now, someone in China could be reading about our family of four and thinking about which baby might love being the little sister to SweetPea and Buddy. But here's the fly in that ointment, our dossier is a snapshot in time. The pictures they are looking at show a 4 year old little girl and a 3 year old boy. So much has changed but we have not been required to send updated photos or information to China.

And the horror of horrors, the CCAA thinks I am blonde. 
 (when my son recently saw a picture of me from that time, he said with a frown on his face, "mommy, that color hair wasn't the greatest for you." Ha! Even he knows I looked silly!)

Easy Week Night Dinner

Here in the Northeast, school still isn't out. Yes, I know we are edging into late June but we're still packing lunches each morning and doing homework at night. And because of all the snow we got this Winter, we have had 4 days tacked on to the end of our school year so the kids are not out until Friday June 25th! If you are a parent, you know the end of the year is busy, busy, busy so it helps to have some easy week night dinners the whole family can enjoy.

One of our favorites is a grilled Panini brimming with all sorts of goodies. Layered with taleggio cheese, prosciutto, spinach, peaches, and drizzled with honey, the salty sweet flavor of this very sophisticated grilled cheese is heavenly. Brush the cibatta bread with extra virgin olive oil and grill in your panini press until the cheese is melted, the spinach is wilted and the bread is browned. 

Now that summer is approaching, this pressed sandwich could be tweeked to include the season's freshest produce. I'd love to hear what you do with your summer paninis!