About us...

Right now our family consists of Mike (dad), Shelly (mom), Jayde (16), Sage (9), and Isaiah (7). We have 3 dogs, Lacy (our whippet), Happy (our Italian Greyhound), and Armani (our 2nd Italian Greyhound), and two cats Enoch and Joey. Oh, I almost forgot our two little hermit crabs Sage and Isaiah got for their birthday last June.

We are excited to be in process of adopting a sweet girl by the name of Jiang Ting from China. She is 11 years old and is deaf. When we started the adoption process in June of 2006, we thought we were going to be bringing home a little girl of toddler years by Christmas 2007. By the time all the paperchasing was done it was December 4th, 2006. Why does that take so long? We weren't logged in from China until January 4th, 2007. At this point the wait time increased from 12 months to 15 months. We thought...bummer, but we could wait the extra 3 months. By the next month the wait increased to 18 months...okay now we're up to 6 months longer, but we thought...okay...guess we wait. Then in April it was up to 20 months and still increasing...this is not okay anymore! That's when the thoughts came. Why in the world are we waiting for the "perfect" little baby when there are sooo many children in China waiting for a home RIGHT now? We have had 3 healthy beautiful boys, why not adopt a child who has been waiting for a loving home. So we filled out an application for a special needs child. Apparently with the longer wait more and more families are filling out special needs applications. Then we were told that we probably would receive a healthy referral before a Special Needs Referral. What??? That did not make sense to us in the least. So we wait...

Meanwhile, there is this sweet girl Shelly keeps going back to on the wait list of our adoption agency. She looks at her picture and thinks "could I be your mama?" She's deaf and we don't have any experience with the deaf culture or ASL or anything. Shelly's Uncle, who was deaf, died when she was young and didn't get to know him very well. We had to find out if we should even be thinking of adopting her since we might be looked at as inadequate anyway :). On July 18th, we contacted the Special Needs Coordinator and asked her if we could even be considered to be her forever family. She said that we didn't need experience with deaf children or know ASL to adopt her! What great news! Now we needed to pray, talk to our boys, pray, talk to the rest of our family, and pray. As we suspected, some family members were not as receptive to the idea of an older deaf child. But the majority believed because we are a solid, loving family we could be exactly what she needs. And many were brought to tears when they looked at her picture and read the information about her. Most importantly our three boys are VERY excited about the prospect of having a sister (even if she is older than our younger two!).

Tomorrow we meet with our social worker to see if she can approve us for our prospective daughter. We are looking forward to talking with her and discussing some thoughts and ideas that we haven't thought about yet.

Today we spent the day at the furniture store buying a new bedroom set for her and a bigger kitchen table to fit all of us. We are so excited to be on this wonderful journey. Even though our plans were different when this process started, we couldn't be more thrilled as to where it's heading! We can't help but believe that she will fit perfectly in our family because there are things that seem to just...fit. Her birthday is June 25th. Sage's birthday is June 21st and Isaiah's birthday is June 23rd. So that makes the birth years 96, 98 and 00. The June birthdays are 21, 23, and 25. Pretty cool if you ask us! Shelly has been wanting to adopt since she was pregnant with Sage 9 years ago. Couldn't figure out why when she hadn't even had the baby yet, but she just had to check into what it takes to adopt even back then. Crazy thing is this is the exact time that our little China doll was being abandoned at the age of 2. Timing didn't work out for us to start the adoption process until last summer, which leads us to where we are right now. Can't wait to see what the future holds!

...more to come...