one can hope!

Today marks 15 weeks since our Letter of Intent to Adopt. Next Friday we'll enter the "average time frame." For most waiting child adoptions from China, the time from the Letter of Intent to the receipt of the Seeking Confirmation from the CCAA is 4 to 6 months. Our able Program Coordinator emphasized this when I visited her, despite the emails I handed her in which she wrote otherwise. Ah well...

But this is about GOOD NEWS. In fact, TWO GOOD THINGS!! I want to savor them, to introduce them over two posts, but I can't do that to you--you without the tiny Youyou shirts and Carhartt jacket, you without the Youyou screensavers and purse-size photos, you without the Youyou action figure and licensed swimwear. I must tell it all at once!

The first thing was an email this afternoon from an adoption fund to which we'd applied in December seeking a grant. When the 60 day period passed in which they say they review all packets, I knew what my weekend would be like. I even had the new forms lined up and ready. Round 2 of gimme some money to get this child here!

Then the email came--our file is tentatively scheduled for review in March!!! They wrote to request more detailed information--and boy did I give it! Yahoo!!! To even get this far is a light in the tunnel!!

Next, one of the most amazing women I know called to check in. She is also in the middle of adopting a child from the waiting list of China's children. We commiserated, and I lamented something I'd learned last week. Sometime before we travel to China, Youyou will return to his official orphanage. This is so that when we arrive, we travel to that orphanage to receive him, beginning the last official leg of adoption in an official social welfare institute. I was devastated to learn this, because not only would it mean that I had to let go of dreams of videos of Youyou at his foster home and tearful departures with our son from his host of loving ayis, I also was afraid that he would be traumatized by suddenly shifting to a completely different level of care amidst a group of total strangers. How terrified would he be by the time we arrived, and how would that affect his reaction to us, and how sick would he be? I know that in spite of some very good facilities, China's state-run orphanages, much like their American counterparts, lack enough workers to give children the type of care they would receive in a home with parents. Add to that Youyou's needs because of his colostomy and urostomy, and I envisioned his tiny bladder, unflushed by sterile water and beginning to infect his kidney, not because any of his new caregivers were negligent but just from lack of resources.

And then this amazing woman asked me where Youyou's orphanage is. I answered, "Henan province," and found the name in a stack of papers. "Jiaozuo Social Welfare Institute." She sucked in her breath, and my heart stopped. "They have a special care unit!" she exclaimed.

As it happens, they do have a special care unit. It's an outreach of a medical foster home that we visited in Beijing last year, where I first began to think that adopting a child with special needs might be something we could do. Their Henan care unit is actually INSIDE this state-run orphanage!

Out of one and a half billion people in the world, I have already met and admired the very folks who will soon help care for my son. I'm gonna have to get a bigger boat--or a cup of hot tea.