DTC!!!

The past couple of months have been a wild ride!! We have seen God answer so many prayers! We are so happy to announce that today we are officially DTC!! For those outside of the realm of adoption acronyms, this means that our Dossier has been sent To China! This is one of the biggest steps throughout the entire process. At this point everything is completely out of our hands for now and we wait mercilessly for the wonderful workers at the CCCWA offices in China to do their part. This is also often described as one of the hardest parts of the wait because you move from busy, busy busy with the never-ending paper chase to a screeching halt. But it doesn't matter if the wait is a breeze for you or agonizing, any person who has been through the process knows how much we wanted to jump up and down and scream for joy at seeing those 3 letters in our inbox this morning!!

This last few weeks, we have had a few more ups and downs. After we found out that we had been awarded the $4,000 grant, we emailed our agency and asked what was next. They had to first request the money. This organization likes to wait to send the money once the family is within 4 months or less of traveling. Since we weren't DTC yet, we weren't sure if we would be considered within that time frame yet. But since we needed this money in order to be DTC, our agency said they would go ahead and request it. Thankfully, they said that they would disburse the funds now, but that it could take up to 4 weeks for the money to arrive at the agency. Cue the sound of screeching tires in our minds. We were so close, and yet these few words once again put us on edge. The agency needed the money in their account in the next 8 days in order to be able to send our paperwork "as scheduled." Whatever that means, right?! So we did what we could do. We prayed.

Fast forward those 8 days. We woke up that morning feeling a little ho-hum because the deadline had arrived and we hadn't heard anything about the money arriving. We had been checking our email almost first thing every morning just hoping to see something, but for some reason, we didn't that morning. We went ahead and had breakfast and did our morning things. And then all of a sudden, Justin says "Whoa!! Do you see this?!" We had an email informing us that we had been awarded a $10,000 grant from another grant organization that we had applied to. We sat stunned for a few minutes, and let the fact sink in that this meant we were for the most part fully funded for the rest of our adoption! Then the first person to move was actually our son Stephen. He got up, jumped up and down, and said "we are getting this boy!" while I sat there crying.

I immediately emailed our agency and told them the news and they replied back saying that they had the check 2 days before but weren't allowed to say anything until we had been notified from the organization. All we could do was laugh. Because sometimes God is just hilarious in the way that He answers prayer!!!

This was on Wednesday, May 18. Then three days later on Saturday, we woke up to an email that said "Rejection at the Embassy" in the subject line. My heart sank as I read that the Chinese embassy was rejecting 3 of our documents. In order for them to authenticate that our documents were real and legitimate, they have to be notarized by a US notary. Well, because we live overseas, we don't have access to a US notary, except for the Consulate. So back in March we had taken the 7 hour trip to our US Consulate and paid $300 USD to notarize our documents by a US notary. But the new Chinese consulate in DC said that they would not accept any documents that originated in another country, even though they were notarized at the consulate. Yeah, don't ask. It's not even worth trying to explain sometimes. Fortunately, only 3 of our documents were affected by this and they were easily reproducible. I replied to her email and ask if we needed to make a new copy and send them to our Power of Attorney in the States in order for them to be notarized there and therefore become more "legit" than if we had signed the papers ourselves here. Ha! She replied back within a few hours and said that she had heard back from the CCCWA (Chinese Adoption Association) that they would accept the documents as is, notarized by the US Consulate, without being authenticated. YAY!

So here we are, today, May 25, with three big letters hovering in our minds, and for the first time in months we feel like we are finally able to completely exhale. And we celebrate. No matter what lies ahead, because we are sure that there are plenty of other bumps waiting to be jumped over, we are incredibly grateful for today. And this whole thing is finally beginning to seem real.