Adopting Mei-Mei From China

Kate and I began the China adoption process in late summer 2005. During that fall, as we completed our homestudy and gathered all the documentation, it was projected that we would be heading to China around October 2006. Unfortunately the timing of our application coincided with a drastic slowdown in China. The reasons are somewhat opaque, but possibly due to: an increase in applications from around the world, an increase in domestic adoption in China, increasing wealth in China leading to fewer abandonments, and a desire by the Chinese government to appear as though there are fewer orphans. The wait time has increased from 6 months to 19 months, from file submission to referral, and that wait continues to lengthen every month. So, if we weren't pregnant, I estimate that our group wouldn't be traveling to China until January to June 2008. If we weren't pregnant, I can't imagine how heartbroken we would be by these delays.

China has a very sensible rule that they don't want adopters bringing home a child if there are any babies in the house under the age of 1. So, we will be putting the adoption on hold. Getting back into line is also a bit of an unpredictable process, but I hope that we'll end up heading to China in the fall of 2008, when the twins are 15-18 months old.

Bolder people sometimes ask (and I suspect others sometime wonder more discreetly) why we would proceed with the adoption when we've managed to get pregnant. We have been talking about and imagining Mei-Mei for over two years (much longer than we've been able to conceptualize Jacob and Molly). Although she is not yet born, she feels very real to us and it won't really feel like our family until she joins us. Also, adoption was never an option of last resort for us. We had talked about it as a possibility long before any infertility issues arose, and we signed up for China because we felt ready to start a family, not because our infertility options had been exhausted.