Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Not THE News, But Still GOOD News! : )

This morning I was thinking things like "No news is no news" and I felt like we would just never hear anything.  Ever.  That somehow our whole adoption would just fizzle into nothingness because we would never, ever hear anything.

At mid-day, I took the kids to the library and when we came home I checked the phone to see if anyone had called.  Nope.  I checked e-mail, expecting the same.  Wait- two e-mails, from the Waiting Child Program manager!  (And more followed!)

Here's the news- the Thai government still needs more information about our family in order to make a decision.  She asked that our social worker send a draft of our home study.  (So we went out on a limb and told our social worker to please go ahead and write our home study for Thailand- they have to write a country specific home study but we had been advised against making ours specific to Thailand until we got an answer.)  They also have a set of child specific questionnaires for families to fill out in preparation for their selection committee meeting (the process in the WCP is that when you have identified a child that you want to adopt, Holt has a selection committee meeting to decide if it will be a good match for the child.).  In order for us to be able to move forward with the questionnaires and their selection committee meeting, they decided to send us "Chloe's" information! 

We now have her full informational write-up, almost a hundred photographs, and about 30 minutes of video of this sweet girl who has, until now, been living in our hearts on the basis of two photos and two paragraphs of information.  This is like a gold mine!  We spent half of the afternoon looking at pictures, reading through her info, and watching videos.  (The other half of the afternoon, I spent e-mailing and phone calling family, our social worker, Holt, and the clinic.)  Watching the videos was amazing.  It was so awesome to get a sense of her personality.  She is such a sweet, patient, easy-going little person...  And so beautiful!  Can you tell I'm in love?  : )

They also asked us to have her information reviewed by medical professionals, then get back to them to let them know if we want to proceed with the process.  Well, we already know what our decision is, but we've gone ahead and sent in our info to an international adoption clinic- they specialize in evaluating the medical information provided.  We should hear the results of that evaluation on Friday, and will give them our "decision" then, though I already e-mailed her to tell her to feel free to send us the questionnaire any time.  There's pretty much nothing that would make us decide not to try to adopt her.

So, in summary- we're still waiting to hear a "yes" but we are extremely encouraged that things are now also moving on the Holt end.  This means that they will be working on things simultaneously as we wait on the Thai government, instead of waiting to hear Thailand's answer and then getting things going with the agency.  If Thailand says yes, we will be that much further ahead in our process.  It also encourages us to see that the agency thinks it's worth pursuing right now.  And it is a blessing beyond description to get to see this little girl- who could become our daughter- in so much more detail, and definitely the boost we needed in the middle of this wait!  (And it feels so good to again be able to be proactive in moving things along.)

(P.S.  Along with all the excitement about this, there is also other good news- the option that we came up with for private health insurance is both acceptable for our home study AND affordable!  Woohoo!)

Thank you, Lord!  And, pray-ers, please keep praying!

1 comment:

  1. Yeah Babay!

    ~Josh

    See I am a nice person!

    ReplyDelete