Thankful!

My friend Amy & I have never met but we have known each other online through our adoption agency connection. She is a kind and wonderful person that has a very big heart for all the children living in orphanages in China. She is hosting a fantastic fundraiser for a very special foster home in China. The Starfish Foster Home is an amazing place! It is run by a South African woman named Amanda that is a teacher by trade and three years ago decided to pick up and start a foster home in China for children with special needs. This is a woman of courage and strength if ever I have seen one. And she is surrounded by the most beautiful and courageous children at the Starfish Foster Home. You can check out her blog and learn more about the special work they are doing for children that have a cleft lip and/or palate.

Amy's fundraiser is a simple one. Simply go to her blog called Lots O' Kidz . Scroll down to the post titled Thankful! and leave a post about something you are thankful for. Amy & her husband will donate a dollar for every post of gratitude to Starfish Foster Home! That's it! Nothing else! She is not gathering email addresses. You can leave it anonymously if you so choose. Its just a celebration of all we have to be thankful for and an understanding that there are those out there that have so little. If nothing else just check out her blog and her beautiful children, two of whom were adopted from China.

Won't you please visit Amy's blog, join in the fun and do something good for someone across the world this holiday season? I did and hope you will too!
Cheers! Cindy

LOA!

We got it this morning on Day 61! The day has been a blur of excited phone calls and emails and planning, planning, planning! In celebration of this moment I am sharing a recent photo of my boys. Our whole family is so excited bring Celia home! China here I come!

Day 60

It has been 60 days since we submitted our Letter of Intent (LOI) to adopt Celia. Someone on RQ's forum told me yesterday that the average wait for LOA in the fall is now 72 days. That's just 12 days away. Here's to not having a Day 80 post! Wish us luck!

Pre-Approval!

Well it took us 41 days to find out but we got the email today that we received pre-approval (PA)! Our official PA date is October 12, 2009! We are thrilled to finally be able to share the photo of our beautiful little Celia!

What's in a name? Part 2

If you read my post about this before you know we did not have a definite name picked out for our daughter prior to being matched with her. We were hoping to see her face and have an epiphany. At the same time we also wanted to give her a name that had sentiment and relevance. We were leaning towards giving her a name with the same first initial as me. Since my real first name is Hyacinth but people only really call me Cindy we were wondering what to pick. An "H" name or a "C" name? It quickly became obvious, based on our preferences, that a "C" name would give us more options. Then there was the meaning of the names. I gotta tell you the "C" names we liked had potential issues. Some of the top contenders meant "blind", "crooked nose" and "white". As prospective adoptive parents to a child with a special need, we needed to be sensitive to the fact that these names might not be a good fit for our daughter depending on what her special need was. But we did find out that the name that meant "blind" was also a derivative name of the patron saint of music and we liked that. So we figured as long as our daughter did not have a visual special need than that name was still in play.

When we got matched I put a post on Rumor Queen asking for help translating our daughter's Chinese name. Luckily a super nice woman that also got matched on the same day as us, from the same orphanage and whose husband also happens to be chinese offered to translate her name for me! I emailed her the characters for our daughter's name. Her chinese name is Jiang Qin Dan. And she told us that Jiang means river; Qin means exuding or emanating; and Dan means Peony! Peony!!!! Her name means Peony and I am Hyacinth!!! If that isn't fortuitous than I don't know what is!!! The sentiment and relevance we were hoping for with her american name was already there in her chinese name. I love it!

Her referral information also mentioned a couple times that she liked music! Horray!

And so it is with great joy and excitement that we announce our daughter's name! It will be Celia Qindan ~ our "C" named, patron saint of music inspired, peony exuding little girl!

This photo was taken by our niece Caroline, aka Cece, and another inspiration for Celia's "C" name. It is a photo of the peonies growing in my SIL's garden. Beautiful!

Seeing their sister for the first time!

The Call - Part 2

So we got the call at 9:55 AM and I could not reach Dave. The next person I wanted to reach was Mommy at The Womble Times. She has been such an amazing friend to me and despite never having met her in person (which I totally plan to change), it feels as if we have know each other for ages. Possibly because adoption years are kinda like dog years!

So Mommy is like my China adoption BFF and the problem was Mommy was all the way around the world in China picking up her sweet Mei Mei! Not really a problem for her as much as me ;) We had actually joked about this happening! A Murphy's Law kind of thing! So I quick sent her an email with the title "Of course you knew this would happen!" Not a 1/2 hour later she emails me back! (Seriously, how did people go through adoptions before the internet and email?!) In the meantime, I was calling my SIL and telling her we got the call. My SIL and niece have been uber-supportive of this whole process and it has been so wonderful to share it with them. My SIL kept saying "I really think this is it! I think she is your baby!" Our niece was in the background and I could hear them oooh and ahhh as they pulled her photo up on their computer. It was fantastic!

In hind sight, I should have known we would get "the call" that day. The stage was set for "the call". First, the Rumor Queen report was that there were few children on the list and so I was completely convinced our wait would continue. My husband was unreachable. My China adoption BFF was in... well... China. And I scheduled my carpets to be cleaned that morning which meant that I would have men here moving around my furniture and obscenely loud vacuum noises in the background. Of course these same men had to shout to each other over the noise and did so in Russian... at least I think it was Russian? This in turn triggers obscenely loud noises by my dog that is mad about the vacuum and men shouting in a foreign language. And finally my 2 youngest boys sitting next to each other with their Nintendo DS's turned on full volume and shouting to each other over the rest of the noise.

Now the stage is set... Cue skype call from Mommy from The Womble Times! Picture me holding my laptop in the corner of my living room and her huddle over hers in the darkness of her hotel room in China. She is whispering because Mei Mei is asleep in the room, "Can you hear me?" and I am screaming over the cacophony of my house "Yes! Can you hear me?!" Mommy whispers to me "I think you found your baby!" And I am thinking, you know that, I know that, my SIL and niece know that... if only Dave knew it too! I guess this is one those cases where the husband is the last to know! LOL!

We are still on cloud 9!

PS In this photo are Dave and the beautiful pale blue hydrangeas he brought home in celebration of our adorable daughter!!! Plus a balloon that is hard to read but says "It's a girl!". He has promised to bring our daughter hydrangeas every year on this anniversary - September 17! What a guy!!! Next one is Evan and Ryan with the flowers and ballon.