Never Say Never

     We are too old to adopt from China any more. We were barely able to get our third daughter adopted before Steve crossed over the age line the Chinese government has set, and now more than two years later, Cathy has crossed the line, too. And anyway, we already have three wonderful daughters, and that's plenty. Right?  And international adoption is expensive. And raising kids is even more expensive.

     And yet..................

     A few months ago Cathy read a blog posting by Amy Eldridge, Executive Director of Love Without Boundaries (a group that raises money to help at orphanages in China) about the lives of older kids she had met on her visits to several Chinese facilities. Many of these kids have no major problems, they just "age out" when they turn 14 and are removed from the lists of kids eligible to be adopted. And sometimes the Chinese government will allow older parents to adopt these older kids.

     Several of the international adoption agencies (including WACAP, the agency we used for our last adoption from China) have begun highlighting some of these older kids in the various EMails and other materials they send out occasionally.  We talked about their plight and felt sorry for them, but there was nothing we could do to help. We are too old, and already have three daughters (and an equal number of grandkids), and adoption is expensive.

     And yet.................

     Eventually, over the course of a couple of months, we both came to the conclusion (at two different speeds, as usual) that we still had lots of room in our hearts for another child, and none of our reasons/excuses for not at least trying to adopt again were "deal breakers". (And it seems that both of us believe that doing this is what we are "supposed" to be doing at this point in our lives.) One young girl on our agency's list seemed to be a good fit with our existing family - her special needs were minor, she was about 7 months younger than our oldest daughter, and all of our girls REALLY wanted us to try and make her their sister.

     And so, we contacted our agency and asked them to see if the Chinese government would grant us an "age waiver" to allow us to adopt another daughter. It took only a few days to get the answer - yes, we could proceed. We sent the initial applications in and waited for "pre-approval". (At least we didn't have to do all the work involved with creating our "dossier" first.)

     Our pre-approval was received by our agency today!

     SO...now, once again we start the paper chase that we have become so familiar with (you would think that if nothing has changed, we could skip some of the papers - after all how many certified copies of my birth certificate does China need in a drawer over there somewhere?). And now that it's "official", we can share what we know about our daughter-to-be.

    Her name is Jiang Zhen and she is 12 years old. (She'll be 13 in October. ) And this is the picture that the agencies were using when they described her to potential parents. She was born with "spina bifida" and had a menigomyelcoele repaired when she was a baby. A few years ago, she had a surgical repair done to one of her feet that turned in. And now, she is healthy and can do pretty much everything any other 12 year old can do.







     She is living at the Jiamusi Children's Welfare Institute, in Jiamusi, Heilonjiang Province, PRC. And as you can see from this map, that's about as far north and east as you can go and still be in China. (Right up there between Russia and North Korea.)

The city of Harbin is where most of the official adoption proceedings take place for Heilonjiang Province. Harbin is known for it's annual snow and ice festival, so depending on when we are able to finish all our paperwork, getting Jiang Zhen may well require lots of clothing layers.

     Once we expressed some interest in possibly adopting her, our agency was able to send us two more pictures. Both of them were taken on the grounds of the Jiamusi CWI. (We'll explain how we can be so sure of that in a future posting.)

     And so, a chapter of our lives that we never expected begins. There is a lot of work that will have to be done before we can give this beautiful young girl a family of her own. But we know from experience just how "worth it" all of that work is for everyone involved.