So here's the story.......

Last year, the wait got to me. It was time to update the homestudy and renew our I-600, something I was dreading. Looking at the forecast for adoptions in China becoming more bleak by the second, we made the decision not to renew and withdraw our dossier from China. We were D-O-N-E. Done. Meanwhile, we applied to our County Adoptions Unit to start the process of adopting through the foster care system. We went through 9 weeks of classes, hours of specialty classes on attachement, drug exposure and trans racial adoptions. We were fingerprinted, and FBI checked. We got CPR certified and First Aid trained. We were approved in April of 2010. We had a pretty open checklist of children we were willing to take but, there were a few we were not comfortable accepting so our social worker said we would probably wait a few months for a placement. That's cool, we still had lots of stuff to do to get ready. So lets fast forward to April 21, 2010. It was 6:ooam and my cell phone rings and wakes me up. I didn't notice the number so I hit decline and went back to sleep. Later that morning I decide to listen to my voicemail messages. One of the messages was from my China agency asking me to please call them. Oh, yeah I forgot to let them know I was quitting the program months ago. So I call back and the person on the other end proceeds to tell me that there is a little girl that they would like to have us take a look at (last year I requested a file for a little girl with a particular special need, after some medical consult and talking about it we concluded that this childs needs were out of our scope of care. However our agency new were were open to this type of special need) . Huh? I explain the her that our I-600 has expired and we planned on quitting the program. She tells me to hold on and grabs our file. She takes a look at our current I-600 and starts counting months and says "Nope, it's still valid, you have until May 3, 2010 before it expires". Again, HUH? Well it seems that I was counting from the wrong date, there are two dates on the I-600, the date of application and the date of completion. I was under the impression it expired from the date of application......WRONG. Ok, so we were in the clear. I said "Send her over". I run to my computer and open the file. There she was, our daughter. I stared at her photo and laughed at her pissed off look. I'd be pissed off too if I had to wait 16 months to find my mommy and daddy. I read her file five times and sent it off for a consult with the International Adoptions Ped, and went to find my husband. I finally found him and pulled him into my office and showed him her picture. I will never forget his words......."Let's go get her".

That's all she wrote.