One of the exciting things that happen when you get matched is that you get to send your child a care package! I am planning to send Jia’s this week and thought you all might be interested in knowing what we sent.

This care package will go to her orphanage before it goes to her foster family.  In the instruction guide they request that you keep the size of the package to shoe box size due to customs issues, so we’re talking about cramming gifts for Jia, her foster family and the orphanage director and the nannies… in a shoe box.  It was a challenge for sure.

So, first, the things we sent for Jia are a large blanket, a small fabric square blanket, a stuffed dog, a photo album with all of our family and a few friends in it, and a recordable story book with all of our voices.  I was going to send the Puffs, but totally ran out of space.  Thanks to the suggestions of people on Facebook, I ordered some vacuum seal bags which worked really well to get all the “fluffy stuff” down to a manageable size.  We also sent along several memory sticks because we’ve heard that they often get returned with many, many pictures from the time kids were brought to the orphanage, and we’re also hoping to get one back from her foster family.  It would be a gift to her and to us, to have those pictures.

We actually bought two sets of all of Jia’s items, so we’ll take those with us when we travel in hopes that if she did get the care package, she will recognize some of the items, as it’s likely that many of the items won’t be returned to us or brought with her.  Eden has been sleeping with the puppy every night since we got it, and we washed her blankets in our detergent so she might recognize that smell when we meet her.  They say smell is a powerful sense, so we’re hoping they’re right.

For the nannies and director at her orphanage we sent Bath and Body Works lotion.  Apparently, that’s a highly regarded gift, so hopefully they like it.

For her foster family, I actually was able to talk to an expat American living currently in China and just sent whatever she suggested, so I sent Reese’s cups, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Ranch dressing mix packets, and disposable razors, which we hear are hard to come by in China. I was going to include the lotion too (another hot commodity in China), but… shoe box. We also wrote them a letter introducing ourselves and telling them about our hopes for Jia.  This package is how they will likely find out Jia has been matched, and I’m sure that will be a bittersweet moment for them.

The care package will be delivered to her orphanage and then forwarded on to her foster family from there.  While her orphanage has been pretty good in the past about getting the package out, there is now a new director, so we’ll see how it goes.  You can send all your prayers and good juju for our package to get to Jia.  In the long run, it probably won’t be a huge deal, but for now it feels like all we can do for her, so we really want it to get there.

In other news, just as a quick “where we are in the process” update, we sent our documents to the NY China Consulate expecting it to be about 10-12 days before we got them back, but due to a paperclip where there should have been a staple (nope, not even kidding…), we had to resubmit a document which meant a whole mess of additional paperwork, money orders, copies and swear words.  As of this morning, all of our additional paperwork is on its way to New York, so hopefully this will do the trick.  If it doesn’t, as I so calmly told my friends the day we found out about all this, I’m going to drive to New York and staple my home study to someone’s forehead.  I kid, of course… but I really do hope this is it!

Hi friends!  No big news to share, but I wanted to do a quick update that includes a few different pieces of this adoption puzzle.

Where we are now:

Our dossier is currently in the hands of the China Consulate in New York City.  This is the first time since we started this process that our dossier has been mailed anywhere (we just walked it in to all the other places), so it’s a weird feeling not to have it close by.  Currently the wait time for processing is 6-8 business days, so we should have it back by the first week of February.  Then, it’s on to critical review with our agency (about 9-11 business days) and then on to China where we should get an official Log in Date within about 5-7 days.  The end is in sight!  I look back over the last 6 months and am blown away by how much we accomplished in that time.

Telling people about Jia:

I thought maybe some of you would be interested in how we told people we were matched.  We got matched a lot sooner then we expected so we didn’t have a lot of time to think about how to announce the news to Eden, our parents and siblings, but I think we did okay.  We printed out sheets of paper that looked like this, but personalized them for each person,

And put them in red envelopes and gave them to people as Christmas presents.   Everyone’s reaction was a little shock mixed with a lot of joy.  It was so fun to get to tell people in person and in a special way.

I also wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to all of you who left your excited well wishes on Facebook and elsewhere.  Getting to share this experience with all of you has made this process even more special.

What’s next:

Once we have our LID, we wait for our “hard” Letter of Approval, and then we start filling out more paperwork that I don’t even know about yet because I think our agency doesn’t want to overwhelm us (too late!!).  We will travel 3-6 months after our Log in Date in China so we’re still on target to travel sometime between June and August assuming nothing significant changes.  Josh and I both keep having moment of “at this time next year, Jia will be ______” or, my favorite from the other day as we were sitting at lunch “holy crap, we’re going to have two kids.”  We’ve already starting making plans for the summer with the tentative “well, we’re not sure when we’re traveling, so we probably can, but…”.  I mean, things are getting real, folks!

We are also working on grants and fundraising right now, so more paperwork!  We’ll keep you updated as we get fundraisers planned!

So, that’s our update for now.  Nothing earth shaking and it’s hard to beat my last post, but I wanted to keep you all in the loop as we wait for our girl to come home!

One question that people ask us a lot is “are you going to change P4’s name?”. That’s a complicated question we’re not really sure how to answer yet!  But here are some of our thoughts.

The first thing that is important to understand is that more than likely, P4 will already be on his or her second name: the name he or she was given at birth, and then the name he or she is given when he or she entered the orphanage.  It’s unlikely that the orphanage will know their given name, so they’ll be given another one.  And, often the name they’re given in the orphanage is not the name they’re called in the orphanage; many kids are given nicknames and that’s what they answer to.

The other part of that scenario is that often, names given to kids in orphanages are names that are culturally associated with orphans and being abandoned, which carries weight with it.  For instance, all kids in one orphanage might be given the same last name, which would identify them as an orphan to anyone who heard their last name – rather then giving them a common last name, they were given a last name like “Guo”, which means something like “ward of the State”.

On the other hand, a name is a huge personal identifier and something that we embrace as part of our personal identity, so changing that, especially for the second time in a child’s life, is a really hard thing to consider.  We are already asking our child to give up everything they know – home, friends, nannies, culture, language, food, EVERYTHING – and asking them to also give up their name seems like too much.

But, then, on the other OTHER other hand, if their name is very difficult to pronounce or literally not pronounceable in English, what then?

So, that’s a portion of the things we’ve considered when making this decision about what to do about a name.  The place where we’ve landed is that we’re going to wait until we’re matched to make a decision, and it’s all going to depend on what P4’s name is.  For instance, if his name is Bin, we would possibly change it to Ben or if her name is Lin, we might change it to Lynn because that’s a pretty close English match.  If it’s not a very simple change like that, our tentative plan is to choose an English name that starts with the same letter sound, like, for instance, if his name was Tian, we’d go with Tyson, or Tyler or something like that. Then we will absolutely keep their Chinese name as a middle name.  We feel like doing that gives him or her the option to go back to, or just keep using, their Chinese name if that is what they’d prefer. It also gives them an English name if that is their preference.  I’ve read so many stories of adult adoptees who feel like having their name changed stripped them of their personal and cultural identity, so it’s really important to us that P4 have both a Chinese name and an English name so there is no choosing one culture over the other, but embracing both.

The long story short is that we aren’t making any hard and fast decisions right now, and probably will travel with a very loose idea of what our name plan is, but wait until we’ve met P4 and figured out what name he or she she actually identifies with before we make any lasting decisions.

This is a tricky decision because we want to make sure that we’re making choices that honor P4’s culture and roots, but also will send him or her into a new culture with fresh wings.  So, we’ll see where that takes us.  But at the end of the day, no matter what their first name becomes, they’ll also be getting a new last name with all the messy Pollard family glory that comes with it, and a new identity as son or daughter.  So we can figure out all the rest together.

First, of course, a disclaimer that this is our personal story, and our personal decision and not in any way meant to suggest that other people should do what we did or that international adoption is better than domestic or any other negative thing.  I have a friend who is currently pursuing domestic infant adoption and several friends who have adopted from foster care and their stories are glorious and wonderful and so clearly just right for them and their particular set of life circumstances.  We love adoption however it happens.

So, all that said… here’s our story.  As I’ve mentioned before, we started the adoption journey alongside our struggle with infertility.  The infertility process for us was pretty much the most difficult and devastating thing we’ve ever gone through, and we walked out of the process exhausted and very sad.  So we knew going into adoption that we really wanted it to be as much of a “sure thing” as possible.  In adoption, of course, there are no sure things, but we were determined to try.  Additionally, Eden had been expressing for a long time how much she wanted a sibling and we didn’t want to introduce her to a sibling unless we knew for sure that it was a done deal.

So, after contacting several local foster care agencies, we were consistently told that if we wanted a child under 8, we would need to be foster parents and open our home to children who may not stay.  While that is something we might be interested in in the future, for us, and for Eden at that time, we knew that the unpredictable nature of foster parenting wasn’t a good fit.  I’m sure in other areas of the country, the foster care/adoption system is different, but that was our experience in Lucas and Wood counties, with both county and private agencies.

The other factor that was really important to us was the our kids be closeish together in age.  By the time we started really pursuing adoption, Eden was 6, so we didn’t feel like infant adoption was a great fit.  Infant adoption is also somewhat unpredictable, so for the reasons above, we didn’t feel like that was a good fit.

So, there we were, with the two in-country options ruled out. We started looking at other options, specifically international adoption.  We quickly found that for the age of child we were hoping to adopt (1-3) and the permanency we were wanting, international adoption was the way to go.  In Chinese adoptions, our child will actually become a US citizen in China, and will be issued a US visa at that time.  So we chose international adoption because it gave us the best chance of having two kids close in age, and it gave us the smallest chance of having an adoption fall through.

There have been a few questions from people (including the memorable “why would you want a Chinese kid when there are perfectly good American kids…. aren’t those good enough for you?), and I certainly understand those questions.  There are kids here in the US who need families.  But for us and our unique circumstances, international adoption is the right fit.  For other people and their unique circumstances, it might be foster to adopt, or infant adoption.  But no matter what, we CELEBRATE there is one fewer child without a family to love them.  Each adoptive family has their own story with their own set of priorities, griefs, and hopes and their own ways to make a decision about what’s right for them.  We’re really excited to be on our particular journey, and equally excited for our friends who are on their own, different journeys.  Because no matter how you get there, it means that one more kid has a family.  And that’s worth celebrating.