Sunday, November 4, 2012

Journey: to David!

These three pictures are with me day and night. They're up in our house, in our offices, on our phones! These are the three pictures we have of our little boy~ David Steven Cates!
I may be biased but I think he is pretty cute! In these pictures he is 8 months old. He is now 15 months. So how did we get here and why isn't he a she? I'll try to answer all your burning questions as we move along :) So, now you know why it was time to brush off the 'old blog and get busy!
 
We've been in the process of an adoption from China since 2007 with a LID of 1-29-2008. When we started the adoption process we thought we'd wait maybe 2 years but not longer. Boy, were we wrong! With each email from our agency our wait time long got longer and longer and longer. Soon I couldn't even read the emails I just put them into an email folder.
This past spring my sister made some new friends both of who had children adopted from China's Waiting Child List.

The Waiting Child list is different from regular adoptions because the kids on the list have minor to severe medical needs. We had lunch with one of the couple's and their precious kids. We felt like moving to the Waiting Child list might be the right move for us. We met with our agency in May which was great. They were very helpful with our questions. We discussed and prayed about the change and decided it was the right move for us. As we were preparing to prepare our paperwork I got side tracked with the end of school and an update on our kitchen. Then we went on vacation for a month. During all that time we knew what we wanted to do we just needed to sit down an get busy- easier said that done!

Fast forward to end of September- things had finally slowed down a little bit from the beginning of school so we pulled our the paperwork and got to work. We turned in our Waiting Child list on October 3rd while at the same time letting our social worker know we were ready to get started updating our USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). On October 4th I got a call from our agency about our profile - we had had to sort through a laundry list of disabilities and disorders of children that we were willing and able to handle as well as choose the age we were okay with and gender. About 5 minutes after I got off the phone with one worker I got another call from our agency. This time it was a different worker within Waiting Child services who said they had a file for us to review! Less than 24 hours and they had already matched us with a child!! I took some quick notes and said "YES" to them sending the file to us.

Xin Zhengyuan is from the Xinjiang Province in China. His birthday is August 2 (our anniversary), 2011. He has VSD which is a small hole between his 2 ventricle arteries. He lives with a foster family and goes to the child welfare center during the day.
Our agency suggested we send his medical file to a doctor for review. We sent his file to 4 doctors who all agreed that it is a small hole and will likely close on it's own. If not, the surgery would be routine.
We were allowed to keep his file for 2 weeks for review. We sent our Letter of Intent less than a week after getting his file. The LOI was our way of letting China know that he was the one we wanted!
There is so much more but for now you have the beginning of the story.



3 comments:

ywilbur said...

Just found your blog via baseball and butterflies blog. My little boy is from Russia and one of his dx was VSD which did indeed close prior to his coming home (he was 4.5 at time). Congratulations and good luck on your journey.

Katie - a Blessed Mommy! said...

Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!!! Praise the Lord!!!!!
When I saw your comment on my blog this morning, I was so excited & rushed home (literally - ran!) to see your blog!
WOW! Oh, Cindy & Steve- we are so very excited for you guys and this precious (adorably cute!!!) little boy.
Can you send me your email address?
Thanking God for orchestrating this in His timing - for finding the perfect boy for your family & praying the the wait to bring him home will be FAST!
Love to all - Katie & Reagan

Leanne said...

How very exciting! Congrats on your Boy!!!!!