Introducing our son!  His name is Zheng Yu Chen and is currently residing in the Pingdingshan Orphanage in the Henan province.  We are so excited and can't wait to bring him home.  We sent our letter of intent last week and locked his file on December 2, 2013.  Our agency is estimating that we can travel to get him in April or May 2014.  We have so much to do to get ready for him!  We need to buy a crib, a stroller, car seats, and so much more!  It seems like such a long time from now, but hopefully it'll go by fast!  We already love our son so much!!!

This is an updated picture that we just received.

 

These are the first pictures that we were given with his file to review:

 

 

We received the first report with information from when he was 8 months old.  We received a current update and he had gained 5 pounds!  He's currently 21 pounds and 27.5 inches.  He's a pretty big boy!! 

Wow, a lot has happened in the last week.  On November 15, our dossier was officially logged in with China!  At that point, I figured that we would wait another month or two to be matched.  Well, I was wrong!  On November 20 I received a call from CCAI letting me know that they had a file for us to review.  I got the call while I was at work and was so overwhelmed!  She asked if I wanted to look at it and of course I said yes!  I immediately called Mark and we looked at it together.  This was the first look that we got at our son.  We had a cardiologist and our family doctor review the file and they both said that everything looked good.  He is on target for social and physical development and his ASD is small.  So we have decided to submit a LOI to China letting them know that we would like to adopt this little guy.  As soon as we have his file locked in I'll post more information!!

Our Dossier went to China yesterday!  This is a huge step in the process.  It is the result of the last 11 months of gathering documents, waiting on approvals, taking classes, and just waiting and waiting and waiting on things that were totally out of our control!!  Yay!!!

Well, it's been almost 2 years since we started the adoption process and we are finally ready to submit our dossier to our agency.  Dossier prep usually takes about 6 months but we have been at it for 10!  Some of the processes have taken much longer than normal, like getting background checks and immigration approval.  But we are almost there!  After we submit our dossier to our agency, they will review it and translate it, then send it to China and we will be officially logged in!  After that, we will be matched with our child.  We are hoping to be able to travel in late-spring/early-summer.  While I'm in China, I plan to keep up with this blog and post lots of pictures and details about the trip!!

These are our current babies! Sure hope they like having a little sister or brother!

This is my first post to this blog!  Just experimenting.