The End of a Very Long Chapter

We started the adoption roller-coaster ride the summer of 2007, almost five years ago. After months of research, we picked a country and agency. Then we spent 9 long months putting together our dossier. When our paperwork finally made it to China we feared that we might be waiting 8 years before we met our daughter. We certainly hoped it would be sooner, much sooner, but we wanted to be realistic.  We spent our wait time reading books and watching TV specials about China.  We bought books for the boys about China and enrolled them in a Mandarin language class.  We took trips to Chinatown and soaked in the sights, sounds and smells.

After a year and a half of officially waiting, we knew that that we shouldn't wait much longer.  Waiting took a toll on Scott and I...reading adoption rumors, keeping track of others' referrals, reading official Chinese adoption news, trying to determine when it would be our time for a referral.  The longer we waited, our possible referral date managed to get further away.  How was it that our wait was actually getting longer as time passed?  We knew that it would be years and years...in fact, though the officials in China won't say how long a wait it would be, there are mathematical calculations that say we wouldn't see our daughter's face until 2018.

So, Scott and I did some soul-searching and some more adoption and cultural research.  We realized that though we had invested a lot of time and a lot of emotion and some money into adopting from China, that was not where our daughter was from.  We turned our attention and hearts to Ethiopia and added two beautiful daughters to our family.

And now it's officially time to close our dossier in China.  Waiting for a child that is years from even being conceived felt more and more ridiculous as time has gone on.  It is bittersweet though.  For years I imagined what our family would look like...Scott and I, Jack and Logan and a daughter of Chinese heritage.

Do I regret getting in line for China?  Absolutely not.  It was the first of many steps that led us to Ethiopia and our two amazing daughters.