Flights are booked!

On the weekend we booked our flights to CHINA! We fly out of Toronto to Beijing  on February 24th and back home with our son on March 10th. We didn't have a lot of choices to make regarding flights etc. as most of those decisions were already made for us. One thing we had to decide was whether or not we wanted to buy a seat for our son for the flight home. Since he will be under the age of two he is not required to have his own seat,  but since the flight will be approximately 13 hours (less than what we originally thought, hooray) we were advised by the adoption agency that we may want to purchase him a seat. The cost to buy him a seat on our flight back from China was more expensive than one of our adult round trip tickets. So we weren't exactly sure what to do. Would he need to be in our arms for the entire flight? Could our daughter and son share a seat for part of the flight (knowing that our daughter  would likely want to be in our lap at some point as well). We looked into booking a flight back to London from Toronto as it has always been recommended to fly as close to home as possible, since your newly adopted child will have never rode in a car seat before. Our compromise was going to be if we could get a flight back to London that we would forget the extra seat from Beijing to Toronto and use the money to pay for the London flight. Unfortunately there are no flights into London on March 10th that would work, so the decision was made for us. As much as it pained us to pay the extra money for a seat on a flight that may not be used we decided we should just bite the bullet and book it. Perhaps the extra seat could provide more room for one of us to sleep and stretch out? Or provide a dumping place for all of the items we will need to keep two children occupied on an overseas flight? I guess we will just have to wait and see.
As a side note all other flights and accommodations while we are in China will be booked by our adoption agency. We should receive a full itinerary of our trip in the coming weeks as everything gets finalized.
Now we need to figure out how we are going to get to and from the airport. Will we drive ourselves and leave a vehicle in Toronto while we are in China so that when we return we can just hop in and go? Will family meet us at the airport to greet us and share some of the drive home? The biggest problem is that we don't know how any of us will be feeling at that point in our journey. Will we be too exhausted to drive? Will the kids sleep on the way home, or will they be wide awake and cranky? How will our son react to being strapped a car seat? We are still working on our return home plan as you can see. The only thing we do know is that once we land in Toronto all we are going to want to do is get HOME to start our lives as a family of four and sleep in our own beds.

While I was writing this blog post we received updated photos of Zhen Feng along with his most recent measurements. It was an unexpected surprise on a Monday and it completely made our day. He is still looking healthy and happy which makes our hearts smile. I haven't stopped looking at the new photos since we received them. I cannot wait until February 24th!

Care Package...and other news.

As promised here is a picture of the care package we sent to our son in China. With the help of the amazing sewing skills of my Mother-in-law we were able to make a felt book that would be able to be rolled up and crammed into the tiny box we were permitted to send.

Our hope is that the package makes it to him, and that his caregivers read him the book so that our faces become a little more familiar to him.

Our 2-4 month wait for the Letter Seeking Confirmation (LSC) ended up taking only 2 weeks to arrive! We were shocked when we received the call from Children's Bridge. When the original LSC arrived at our home we had to sign it and send it back to the agency A.S.A.P. There are two "original" copies of the LSC, one was ours to sign, the other one is for the Provincial Government to sign. Then the two originals are sent back to the China Centre for Children's Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) in China. To summarize the LSC, it is a document that requires us to make a decision about adopting our son. Basically we check a box that says "we accept the adoptee mentioned above" and we sign our names.

Now that the LSC has been signed our agency sent us tentative travel dates (while I was writing this blog post our travel dates were actually confirmed) for our trip to China. Our travel dates are February 24 to March 10, 2017. This is so much sooner than we anticipated! We are very happy and excited that all of our waiting will be over in the next couple of months. There is a mountain of paperwork to be done before then and I will continue to keep the blog updated with information as we move through the process.

In the meantime we need to start reading the 14 page document that Children's Bridge sent us called "China Waiting Child Program Travel Guide and Packing List" - cue my anxiety now! Packing for an 18 hour flight with our 3 1/2 year old and then a return flight with our son should be interesting. I am looking forward to every aspect of the journey that lies ahead of us, except those plane rides!

We did find out that two other families will be travelling to China at the same time as us. Although our children are in different provinces  we will be doing a majority of our travel with them. One of the families has already adopted a little girl from China and she is approximately the same age as our daughter. We feel very fortunate to have an experienced family with us during our time in China. Hopefully our daughters will be able to become fast friends during the trip and possibly entertain each other on some of the more boring portions of travel (like the plane ride I mentioned earlier).

Checking off items one by one.

On Wednesday we received an email from our Program Manager at Children's Bridge that our son's China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) online file has been locked and that the CCCWA will now review our match and issue the Letters Seeking Confirmation within the next 2 - 4 months. She did mention in the email that this timeline has been faster for recent families. So fingers crossed it is the same for us. So this puts us at step 17 of the 30 step process that was given to us when we originally started this whole journey over 3 years ago.
Once the letters seeking confirmation have been received back at Children's Bridge (we have to sign  the letters and send them back) the adoption agency will begin to plain our trip to China which means that we will likely travel 6 - 8 weeks after that.
So now that our CCCWA application has been locked we are permitted to send a care package to our son. We were notified that we are not permitted any direct contact between us and the orphanage our son is in until after our adoption has been completed. We were advised to prepare a package that includes the following items:

• A small photo album book that includes photos of our home, his room, photos of us and any close relatives he will meet once he comes to Canada. We were also advised to make a duplicate photo book to bring with us to China in case the care package does not make it to him. I plan to post a photo of the book we create on our blog once it's complete. Right now it is a work in progress.
• A small stuffed toy or lap blanket
• A toddler sized back pack
• A short one page note for his caregivers that will be translated for us

We were instructed that these items need to fit into a small child sized shoe box that weighs no more than 2kgs! We are trying to get all of these things together quickly it might arrive by Christmas (whether he celebrates it or not). We have to first send the package to Children's Bridge in Ottawa and then they will send it to China.

Buying these things and creating this book has been such a joy. It feels amazing to be able to provide something tangible to our son to let him know how much we love him already. I promise to post a photo of the completed package so stay tuned.

Another exciting thing that happened this past week was the Children's Bridge monthly email arrived in our inbox. Guess who's names were in it this time?!

"Warm congratulations are extended to the Palmer family on the referral of their son."

I of course cried happy tears reading those words. After months and months of reading about other families receiving referrals it was finally our turn. I took a screenshot of our names written in the email and I look at it from time to time to remind myself that this is really happening. Our time has come and we couldn't be happier!

Pardon me, we have a son?!

Following our last blog post we had quite a few follow-up calls with our Adoption Agency, Children’s Bridge. We were left feeling very frustrated and confused as to why we weren’t receiving a child referral. Some of our documentation was set to expire in January and we were starting to discuss the changes we could make to potentially broaden the pool of children we could be matched with. Last Wednesday night I had a conversation (or meltdown) with my husband as I felt overwhelmed with frustration. I said that I knew our son was out there waiting for us so why can’t we know who he is?! Following that conversation, we made a list of questions for our agency to ask the next day. On Thursday November 10^th 2016, my husband called and left a message with our Program Manager letting her know that we had a few questions and asked if she could return our call. Later that day, as my husband was about to coach a championship final for his boys volleyball team, he received her call. He was reluctant to answer since he was a bit busy, but he took the call and planned on telling her to call me instead. She said, “We don’t need to worry about answering those questions, as we have matched your family with a little boy”. In complete shock he told her to call me and that he would get the details later. How he went on to coach and win that game with that phone conversation lingering in his head I will never know.

I received a frantic text from my husband that said “Answer your phone when Cathy calls - I guess we don’t need those answers. They have a boy for us, he just turned one”. I of course missed the text and the initial phone call. I got back to my desk and saw that I had a text message and a voicemail. I looked at the text message and panicked. As I started to listen to my voicemail I immediately started to cry. Before I could finish listening to the message our Program Manager was calling me back. I answered the phone and she said “Kathryn, this is a day that you are going to remember for the rest of your life”. The next few minutes on the phone were a blur. I tried to write down absolutely everything she was saying while wiping away tears. She assured me that she would be sending all of this information in an email right after we spoke, but I didn’t want to miss anything. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! I hung up the phone and felt like I should pinch myself. Was this really happening. Co-workers gathered at my desk and congratulated me as they could overhear my excitement during the phone call.

I refreshed my email on my phone what feels like 100 times before the email came through, and when I opened it…there he was…our son!

The document we received was 10 pages of background information and medical history on our son and 4 photos. It will likely be the only information we ever receive about his past. Here are some of the details that were included:

Name: Zhen Feng Jiang

DOB: November 6, 2015 (his date of birth was attached to him upon his arrival)

·            He is living at the Baby Care Institute of Jinjiang City in the Fujan Province of China.

·            He has bilateral cleft lip and palate and in April of 2016 had his lip repaired.

·            He has a good appetite (which you can see in the photos as he is a chunky little boy)

·            He is active and has a ready smile

·            He likes to have fun

·            He is a clever child

After we took some time to let the news sink in, we shared the photos with our 3 ½ year old daughter. She thought he looked cute and looked like her Papa (who is my father). When we asked her why she thought that she said it was because he doesn’t have any hair. I don’t think either of us will forget that response. She asked a few other times throughout that night to see his photo and now she has a printed one in a frame beside her bed. She already lovingly refers to him as “my brother”. The next several hours were spent on the phone calling family and friends and filling people in on our amazing news.

The next day we received a package from Children’s Bridge that included the same information we received in the email and some very important documents we needed to fill out with our Adoption Practitioner / Social Worker. These documents needed to be sent back to Children’s Bridge in Ottawa ASAP as they needed to be translated and sent to China within a few days. Our Adoption Practitioner came to see us on Sunday to finalize everything on our end. The most important documentation that we signed that day stated that we were accepting this child as our son. The whole process seemed a bit informal; I feel like there should have been some trumpets and fanfare in the background while we signed but it still felt very special.

In the coming weeks, several different authorities need to sign off on our documentation to make it official. We are hoping that in the New Year we will find out when we will be able to travel to China to bring our son home. The estimate we were given was likely March or April. To most of you that will seem like I long time, but right now we are still enjoying the fact that we finally know who our son is! Something we have been waiting on for a very long time.

For any friends or family members that would like to see a photo of Zhen Feng please email us, we would love to share it with you.

More waiting...

I woke up this morning feeling frustrated, defeated, sad, and a little angry. I have been trying to push down those feelings, but to be honest, it isn't working. This is the email we received from Children's Bridge yesterday.



"I wanted to let you know The Children’s Bridge received two children’s referrals from the CCCWA Online System last evening for two little boys but the special medical needs are not cleft lip and cleft palate. We will anticipate our next set of children’s files in December 2016 and I will also continue to monitor the online system for your family."



December feels like forever away right now and my logical mind keeps telling me that the likelihood of the adoption agency receiving another boy referral at that time is slim but I am trying to have a positive outlook even though it is very hard.



So now we wait some more and change our plans. We called our parents to deliver the news and to let them know that they will be on daycare duty longer than expected since our daughter will be in daycare part-time starting in January (see a previous post about this decision). We change our Christmas card photo plan since we were hoping to use our adoption announcement (we took these photos in July) as our card this year. We look at what this means for my job and my parental leave. We push everything back a little further and hope that we are travelling to China in the Spring of 2017.

A not so exciting update

Since our last update (when we were second on the list) we moved up to being first on the list to receive a children's file from China. Yes this is wonderful news, but ever since we found that out (which I think was mid-summer) we have been waiting for a phone call from the adoption agency. When I say waiting for a phone call I mean I wake up every morning and hope that today is the day. I check my email every hour hoping that we will get some news. So far no boy, no referrals, not really any news to report. When we talked to Children's Bridge about our status on the list they said that they expected the next set of files to arrive at the end of August or beginning of September. So once mid-September hit I emailed the agency just to check in so that I didn't have to receive the monthly update without our names on it.


The email response I received said:
"Thanks so much for your email message. Please call or email anytime. We have not yet received the individual children's referrals yet for September. I will contact your family to let  you know if there is a match for you once we receive and review the referrals. I know the waiting is challenging. Take care and have a good weekend-hope to have some news later this month."


I immediately printed the email response and put it on our fridge. To serve as a daily reminder that our time is coming and to give us some hope that this might still be our month.


So now, here we are, October 4th and late last night we received the monthly update in our email inbox just before we were about to go to bed. We both cringed and opened the email with our fingers crossed. It appeared there were no referrals this month. Sigh of relief. Then frustration set in. I said to my husband, maybe October will be our month. Maybe we will get an amazing gift for our wedding anniversary from China. Wouldn't that be amazing.


Today I received an email from Children's Bridge that said:
"I wanted to give you a quick update. We have not yet received the individual children's files for or WC China Program, and the CCCWA and businesses in China are on holidays for the next 8-10 business days for National Day and Golden Week holiday, and so we will not receive the files until after October 10th. I will keep you posted, and please don't hesitate to call me if you would like to chat."


I wrote back:
"Thank you very much for the update, we really appreciate it. We will try to keep our minds occupied until after October 10th. Our wedding anniversary is the 11th so a really great gift would be some good news. Fingers crossed."


And so we wait some more.............

The waiting game.

Likely everyone reading this post is hoping that we have some good news. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In my last post I mentioned that Children's Bridge sends out a monthly newsletter giving updates on each of the countries they facilitate adoptions from. The last few months I have dreaded receiving the update in our email inbox. The reason for my dread is that I am scared to open the email and read that families have received their child proposal when obviously we have not. The May update arrived and I had mixed emotions when I read that no referrals arrived that month. Deep down I had hoped that meant that there would definitely be referrals in June and that we would receive one. Normally the updates come on the last day of the month or sometimes a few days later so when I came home last night and checked my email I was surprised to see the Children's Bridge update waiting for me. As I opened it I hoped that once again there were no referrals this month since obviously we didn't receive one. Much to my dismay, I read that two families had received their referrals. My heart sank and I fought off tears. As much as you try not to get your hopes up, you obviously do. And after a busy and stressful week it was the last thing I wanted to read. I really tried to be happy for the two families that now have the information they have been waiting for. They have likely been doing the same thing we have every month when the newsletter comes out. But it is very hard in that moment to not be jealous and mad that your name is not printed in that email. So many thoughts go through your head.

Why not us?
I thought we were second on the list?
Were there no boy referrals?
When will the next set of referrals come?
Are we going to have to wait another 2 months?

An amazing friend that I talked to after reading the email said, "It will happen when it's supposed to. Those two children weren't meant for you. And four extra weeks (or however long it ends up being), although agonizing, will seem like a distant memory when you get that file of the child that was meant for your family."
So for right now, I am just repeating that in my head over and over and hoping that the next monthly update has our name printed on it.

Finally an update!

I have been hearing from people a lot lately that they keep checking our blog for updates but that there hasn't been one since February. Unfortunately that is the reality of the adoption process.We have been waiting as anxiously (if not more) for an update too. I promise that we haven't been holding back information from you. This is just part of the process, waiting, waiting, and more waiting.
That is until 3 weeks ago. Both my husband and I received a call (which we both missed) from our adoption agency late one afternoon. I remember being very excited and very scared to listen to the message. Unfortunately it wasn't the news I was hoping for. According to the adoption agency, China had contacted them requesting more information regarding the financial statement we submitted with our application. You might remember that we submitted our application to China in early February so I was disheartened to hear that they were just reviewing our file now. Thankfully after talking to our agency we found out that we had been verbally approved in China, we just needed to send some updated information regarding our finances. Both my husband and I contacted our employers for new letters of employment and changed a few numbers on our statement in order to prove to China that we would have enough money (through a bank loan or otherwise) to cover the adoption and provide a financially good life for our child.
After we submitted the documents I had a lot of questions. Most important was I wanted to know if this put us further behind in the process. Since this was the first we had heard from our agency in a few months we just assumed that everything was on track (up until now). Also, the last set of files that our agency received from China was smaller than usual. Meaning usually they would receive  an average of 4 child proposals at a time. In March when the Children's Bridge newsletter came out we read that they only received 2 child proposals that month.
After a few days of phone tag my husband was able to connect with our adoption agency and get a few answers. For the first time in this entire process we found out exactly where we are on the list! We are currently second on the list. SECOND! Yes this is amazing news! That means that, fingers crossed, we could get a child proposal when the next set of files comes from China (in the next 2-4 months). Now of course there are a few reasons why we may not receive a proposal in the next round but we still celebrated the good news. If the next set of files does not include any boys we would obviously not be eligible for a proposal. Or if there is a boy but he is more than 18 months younger than our daughter we may not be eligible. The adoption agency did say that if the child proposal was for a boy that was only 16 or 17 months younger than our daughter that they could speak to the Ontario Government and see if it could be approved anyway (hopefully it doesn't come to that). So I am remaining cautiously optimistic that sometime between now and July we will receive a child proposal for our little boy in China! When I say cautiously optimistic I mean that until I wrote this post I didn't really let it all sink in. So right now I am a bit of a blubbering idiot.
My hope that is my next post will be some of the best news we have ever received....I will keep you updated.

Happy Chinese New Year

February 8, 2016 ushers in the year of the Red Monkey according to the Chinese Zodiac. Monkeys are considered the tricksters of the Chinese Twelve Animal Signs and this means it is likely to be an exciting and “interesting” year. So Happy Chinese New Year to all of our friends and family.

Although it is technically not the New Year in China, we have already had a fairly eventful beginning to our new year. Due to the unpredictability of our adoption timeline we have recently found it to be difficult to arrange daycare for our 2 1/2 year old daughter. Since we will receive our referral for our son only six months prior to travel and because we have no idea when we will receive our referral we are currently trying to figure out what we can and should do for daycare next year. We adore our current daycare provider and want to keep our daughter (and eventually our son) with her until she goes to school but we likely cannot afford to keep her in daycare full-time while I am off on parental leave. And it is unfair to our daycare provider to pull our child out of full-time daycare mid-year (also she will not allow it). So right now we are trying to predict the future, weigh our options, and try not to freak out. I know it may not seem like this really is an adoption related issue but I am writing about it because it wasn't something that I thought we would even have to worry about. And its adding another layer of things we need to figure out. Luckily we received an email from our adoption agency today that has taken our mind of things...at least temporarily.

The light at the end of the adoption tunnel...today we received the following email from our adoption agency Children's Bridge:

Hi Palmer Family,

I am pleased to let you know we have sent your Waiting Child China dossier by courier to the CCCWA in Beijing today. The CCCWA usually takes 2 weeks to log in your dossier. Once your dossier is logged in, your family will be eligible for the next set of individual children's files form the CCCWA.

Hooray, another step closer! So hopefully that means we can possibly get our referral for our son within the next 5.5 months (when we asked our adoption agency what the average wait time was they said 1-10 months (that is not an average according to my math teacher husband) so we are going to go with 5.5 months). That would mean we could possibly have our son home with us in the next year. So maybe the predictions are true, the year of the monkey may prove to be very interesting.

Delays and learning to deal with them.

During our last post I said that we were hoping we would get back our Ontario Government approval  (Letter of Approval) before Christmas. Unfortunately, we received an email on Christmas eve from our Adoption Practitioner letting us know that the person reviewing our file from the Government wanted clarification on a few things (it ended up being 5 things) from our application. I chose not to read the email until Boxing Day because my initial reaction was frustration and anger. It turns out the items they requested more information on were fairly simple. I did have to go back to my Doctor's office and request that my new Doctor (as my previous Doctor who filled out my medical has since retired) fill out some additional information on my report. Although it was frustrating to receive our application back we know that this will likely be one of many delays that will happen in our adoption journey. It is good to know that adoption applications are looked at very closely, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating. Especially when we were expecting good news before the New Year. We added the information the Government requested to our report and our Adoption Practitioner had our paperwork ready to be sent back to the Children's Bridge (for them to send it back to the Government) for when their offices opened back up after the holidays. And then we waited...again.
Today, after waiting for 2.5 months we finally received our Letter of Approval. Hooray.
The letter basically says that we have been approved to adopt through the Children's Bridge by the Ontario Government and that they agree with our Adoption Practitioners recommendations in our homestudy report. One interesting section of the letter states that once the adoption is finalized, Ontario legislation recognizes the child as a full member of the adopting family and as such the child is treated in the same manner as all other children of legally constructed families. And that, Ontario welcomes the child from China as the legal child of the applicants. We both found it surprising that the Ontario Government would need to tell the Chinese government this information, but I suppose it is just part of the process.
So now that we have received the green light the next steps in the process are as follows:
1. Children's Bridge sends our Letter of Approval and China Application package to be notarized by their Lawyer (this should be completed by next week).
2. Children's Bridge will then send all of the above documents to be authenticated through Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Consulate in Toronto (this will take approximately 3 weeks).
And then we wait some more....