Hand Picked

When we first announced that we were bringing Keeghan home I talked a bit about how a waiting child adoption from China works, but I've been thinking lately that I would like to document the whole process of how Keeghan came to be ours. A "non-special needs" (NSN) adoption from China works like this...you send your dossier (lots of paperwork) to China with specifications of the sex of the child you'd like to adopt and an age range, the paperwork goes through the "review room" to be sure it is all in order (and sometimes you are asked questions when your dossier goes through review) and then when your log in date (LID) comes up you receive a referral. China matches families based on their requests (though those requests are only requests and you could certainly end up with a surprise) and it is said they often look for a similar facial characteristic or shared birthday or some other commonality between the referred child and their new family. So, basically, you get a child picked for you.

Waiting child (special-needs) adoptions work differently. It used to be that China sent lists of specific children to agencies and you could adopt a child on only your agencies list. There were some occasions of people getting files of children to their agencies but overall, unless a child was on your agencies list, you had to switch agencies (NOT a good plan) or wait. Then, early in 2008 China came out with what is referred to as a "shared list". It is a list of waiting children available for adoption. The list is updated, generally, monthly and any agency can look at the files of the children on the list. Here's where things get tricky...now you've got agencies all over "competing" for children...younger children with less severe needs go quickly. When you decide to adopt a waiting child you need to think long and hard about what different needs you are willing to take on. We created a list (in March of 2008) of things we felt comfortable with but obviously you can't anticipate EVERY possible condition that may arise. Our agency happens to handle this process very fairly and well. We figured we'd be waiting a while to find a "match".

It was late of July last year (7/23 a Wednesday to be exact)when I received an e-mail with a list of children waiting to be adopted. It was 3 pages long. I cried. So many children waiting for families...I asked Doug if he'd gotten this e-mail but apparently it had only come to my e-mail address. I showed it to him that night when he got home. We looked through the list for younger girls (it only listed birthdate, sex, and what their special need was though many of them were listed as "multiple needs" or "other disease") with conditions that we thought we understood and found 3 children that we wanted to ask about. We figured this would be good. We could ask some questions and start to get a handle on how this would all work. One of the children had spina bifida and some other needs and we knew we couldn't handle that. Of the other two girls...one had congenital nanophthalmos and microcornea and one had congenital malfunction of lymphatic vessels on her right side. We started researching...found the first child had, basically, a small eye and probably was blind in the affected eye and that the lymphatic disorder was crazy rare and we were going to have trouble figuring it out. The first few bits of info I found showed photos of kids with HUGELY swollen faces but not much else. We decided to keep researching and after a few days sent some more specific questions to our agency. We learned late on Friday afternoon that the little girl with the eye problems was affected in both eyes and was totally blind which shut that case for us. We felt like total blindness was too much. Along with that information was the offer to send us the file of the other little girl to bring to a physician. Doug spoke to an international adoption physician and we decided we wanted to see the file of this child.

I tried calling our agency at this point but the number I tried had come out of an e-mail and a few numbers had been transposed by accident so I sent off an e-mail. My phone rang a few minutes later and it was the social worker at the agency. She was sending us the file and described the pictures that were with it so I could imagine what her hand looked like. PICTURES!!??? Oh man...did I want to SEE this little girl? Was I going to just fall in love and not be rational anymore??? The offer was made to blur her face out but I decided that if I was looking at photos I would look at all of them and keep myself neutral. We still had a lot to learn and we couldn't make a decision on cuteness alone. So at 4:30 on Friday 7/25/08 I opened medical files, orphanage reports, and photos of the little girl who was meant to be mine. Doug was home from work at this point so we looked at all of this together, contacted our pediatrician and sent her files along to him to review. The weekend was spent contemplating, questioning, researching, and wondering. Come Monday we had a few more answers and many more questions. I think at that point Doug and I both pretty much knew we were going to bring this little girl home but needed to debate it some more. We decided to somewhat involve the kids in this decision as it would mean some serious money crunching and I remember talking to the girls about the baby that would become their sister and Kennedy crying. Not one of them hesitated a minute when I explained if we brought home this baby that we would not being going on a cruise we had scheduled, dinners out and fun stuff would be almost non-existent and I would be at work WAY more than they were used to. They all said...go get our sister.

I know I posted that Doug and I made our final decision as I was on my way to work one night and he had 20 girls at our house tie dying t-shirts for soccer...so true to our way of doing things! We were up late that night (7/30...the day after Keeghan's 1st birthday) writing a letter asking to be Yin NianShuang's parents. It's very strange to go back and think about how all of this played out. Opening that document with SO many children waiting for families was heartbreaking but I never imagined finding our daughter there. Here we are not even a year later with our new daughter home six months already. I can't imagine our lives without Keeghan...she's perfect.