Our Last Weekend as a Family of Four

We had a good weekend together spending lots of quality time as a family before Josh and I travel to get David. Saturday we assembled the girls' new trampoline, went swimming, read books, and just hung out. Sunday the girls played on the trampoline, rode their bikes, and we went to Chuck E Cheese!



Margaret (left) is much faster than Annabel (above) on her bike but Annabel is determined to get faster!

Not much other news to report. Josh's mom arrives on Wednesday and then we leave friday! Not long now. . .

Waiting and Waiting

It's hard to believe that we leave in 10 days. After the initial excitement of learning we were traveling so soon, we've settled back down into a somewhat normal schedule. Josh is incredibly organized and is taking care of all sorts of little details for the trip - like getting travelers' checks, starting to pack, and cooking lots of food for the freezer.

I have dangerously started to read The Lonely Planet guide and now want to skip the cities all together and spend our week in the forest. Taiwan is an incredibly beautiful country with lots of natural resource amenities. I know Josh is looking forward to the thrill of being in the cities and soaking up the culture, though, so I'll put aside my dreams of hanging out in the woods.

The girls enjoyed dressing up for Easter and looking for eggs. . we managed to have some tolerable weather to be outside hunting for them. But we did get a sprinkle of snow later in the day. This winter seems unending. The girls have also been enjoying riding their new bikes - they're amazingly good at it already and seem to enjoy the challenge of staying upright going over our very bumpy sidewalks! We need to get some photos of them on their bikes but for now you'll have to settle for easter smiles. . .

Our Adoption Timeline

I know other adoptive families are always curious about how long it took --

So here's what we recollect. We didn't keep very good track of dates so this is just from memory:

We decided in Summer of 2007 to adopt again. We submitted our application to Journeys of the Heart in July and immediately initiated home study activities. Since we'd adopted before and we worked with the same home study agency, we were somewhat expedited. We didn't have to meet with a social worker as often as first-time adopters.

It took a couple of months to get the home study done including all the police checks, pet vacinnations and other random things that the state of Indiana requires (proof of pet vacinnations was a new one for us from last time!). Then, it took JOH and our home study agency a few weeks to agree on the text of the home study before it could be finalized.

Meanwhile, we worked on putting together a set of family and house photos to send to JOH. (There is way much less paperwork for a Taiwanese adoption than a Chinese adoption - this was very nice).

So, our home study was finalized and sent to JOH at the end of September (Sept 28). At this point we were officially on the waiting list but we didn't know what this would entail. So in early October, Josh called to ask how long we should expect the wait for a referral to be. He was told that there was actually a file on their desk with some special circumstances and it wasn't in the normal referral queue. We won't go into those circumstances here, but, long story short, there were some odd medical issues even though it was not a special needs file.

We received the first emails with David's picture and medical info on October 16. Our doctor at Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis had a number of questions that she wanted answers to before she felt comfortable giving us an assessment. It took St. Lucy's quite a while to answer the questions -- finally we got answers on November 27 and accepted the referral on November 28. In our hearts, David was already our son from the first time we saw his picture and I don't think it would have mattered what the doctor recommended but we waited for more information just so we at least knew what we were getting ourselves into. Turns out after all the waiting, it doesn't appear that there's anything troubling about his health.

The referral was logged into the Taiwanese court system on December 25.

The first court ruling came through on February 18 (quite a bit sooner than expected!) and we received the final court ruling last week - March 11.

And so here we are. We were told it would be 4-6 months before we traveled after we accepted our referral. We expected to be at the longer end of the timeframe, and find ourselves very much on the short end of it.

Less Than 3 Weeks!!

We just learned today that we'll get to spend time with David on April 7th and 8th before he's officially placed with us on the 9th! So it's now less than 3 weeks until we meet him and hold him! We have to go to St. Lucy's after 2:30 on the 7th to meet him. This is great news as it will hopefully give him a chance to get to bond with us a little bit before we take him away. And it means we get to meet him 2 days early! Yeah!!

Everything else for the trip seems to be shaping up. We have hotel reservations in Taipei but still need to make them for Tainan. We were going to stay at a cheap YMCA type hotel near the orphanage but we just got word that St. Lucy's recommends we not stay there because of mosquitoes and because it might be hard to find food. Not sure what this really means but it seems best to listen to the advice we're given and keep everyone happy.

We went to Toys R Us over the weekend and bought more toys for David. We still had some baby toys left over from Annabel but we couldn't resist buying some new things. Some of the new toys are small and we'll take them with us for him to play with when we're in Taiwan. We also bought the girls lots of things - new leapster games and new bikes (their tricycles were getting too small). We enjoy spoiling them too much and they're now old enough that it's becoming a problem. . . they won't get the leapster games until we leave. They have the bikes already and took their first spin around the block today. They both predictably fell even with the training wheels, but that's what helmets are for!

After months of waiting it's now getting so real. . lots to finish up here before we can leave. I (Linda) have a huge pile of tasks on my desk and my 'to do' list seems to be getting longer not shorter every day. Josh is trying to finish writing the draft of his second book and get his first book in decent shape to send to people to review while we're traveling. And we're trying to spend lots of time with the girls. Margaret had surgery last week on her cleft palate so we're also spending time thinking of new and inventive 'soft foods' she can eat and keeping our fingers crossed that everything's healing well.

New Pictures

We got new pictures of David yesterday. . . .

We also finally confirmed out plane tickets -- we were hoping to fly on Eva Deluxe but there were no seats available so we're flying on Economy. It will be a fun cramped time!

Introduction

We received final approval to travel to Taiwan this week! Now we're busy booking plane tickets and finding hotels to stay in. We'll be leaving April 4 from Chicago and probably flying through San Francisco to Taipei. We'll arrive in Taipei the morning of April 6 and will spend that day seeing Taipei. We'll then take the high-speed train to Tainan on the 7th. We will officially be united with David Yueh-Chien on the 9th, but we're hoping we can visit the St. Lucy's orphanage on both the 7th and 8th to meet with him. We hear that he is very scared of strangers and so we want him to get to know us a little before we suddently take him away from the only world he's ever known. We'll travel back to Taipei on the 9th for a consulate appointment on the 10th. We will return to the U.S. on the 12th.

We will post here periodically before we travel to give us some practice! And we'll post here as much as possible from Taiwan to keep everyone posted on our journey.

You can click to see a short video of David from last December.