Pages Menu
Categories Menu

Posted by on Feb 15, 2014 in Adoption | 2 comments

We are DTC!

  Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we received some fantastic news! Our dossier (the GIANT package of documents) is officially officially DTC or Dossier To China. This means the documents were processed through all channels of authentication on the US side and are now on their way to China. This is a huge step in the adoption process and we hope the rest of the several steps to go move quickly. What’s next? Our next acronym target in the language of adoption is to be LID (Logged In Date). This means that our dossier has been received by the authorities and logged into their systems. We would love to see this happen in the next 10 days or so. How’s Eli?     We wish we knew the answer to this question each and every day. While we can’t request any new updates right now, we have been doing our best to get to know Eli in other ways. For Valentine’s Day, our family celebrated by eating a Chinese...

Read More

Posted by on Jan 20, 2014 in Adoption, Fundraiser | 0 comments

Dossier out the door

In the midst of a all the snow Friday, our family made the trek to Columbus to get all of our dossier documents state sealed. This is a HUGE step in adoption. What is a dossier? The dossier is a set of documents used to describe our family to the foreign courts. Our homestudy is part of the dossier but there are around 19 other pieces! What’s in a dossier? Our dossier included birth certificates, our marriage certificate, letters from our employers, financial forms, police clearances, medical forms, our homestudy, passport pictures, additional pictures of our home, our immigration approval, and a letter of our intent to adopt Eli. How is a dossier prepared? Completing a dossier is yet another reminder that it takes a village to adopt! Several parts of the dossier required us to rely on someone else to help us with its completion. Small hiccups can be pretty nerve wracking because Eli is on our minds day and night. We don’t want him to miss out...

Read More

Posted by on Jan 12, 2014 in Adoption, blogging, Fundraiser | 0 comments

Amazon Store Now Open

Update: Since publishing this post, I realized that the footer widget doesn’t work well. Instead, I set up our own Amazon store. This allows me to add more of our favorite items and categorize them. You are actually shopping through Amazon….just with a link that let’s them know we shared the product with our recommendation. Visit our store here.  Polishing the blog tonight in preparation of a few exciting things to come. It seems each day brings more items on our adoption to-do list. While still juggling our jobs, we’ve done something each and every day this week. On Friday, we got a few more items notarized and had our blood taken for our doctor to complete the last (fingers crossed) medical form. In addition to the paperwork, we’re also finalizing plans for additional fundraisers. Unfortunately, we were not selected for a grant that we’d been very hopeful to receive for a few months. The news was disappointing but just instilled a greater clarity that we are meant to...

Read More

Posted by on Jan 3, 2014 in Adoption | 0 comments

Building a History

Building a History

It’s amazing to me that Eli lives almost exactly on the other side of the world. Yet, our weather is shockingly similar. Right now, it feels like just 1 degree here in Cincinnati. In Eli’s province, it’s also freezing-just a tad colder (at -1). I’m starting to understand the sentiment “living in two time zones” as I frequently find myself checking the weather where Eli lives and thinking about what he might be doing. Does he have warm clothes? Is he giggling with friends? Sleeping well? Eating something he loves (which we’re told is nearly everything)? At this point, we are somewhat used to not knowing…there are so many things we will never know. Harder yet, there are pieces of Eli’s history that he will never know. What would it be like to know nothing of where you truly came from? What would it be like to know even your birthday was very unlikely your actual date of birth? We feel it’s our obligation to track down everything we...

Read More

Posted by on Dec 31, 2013 in blogging | 0 comments

Follow us on Blog Lovin’

Blog Lovin’ is a site that organizes a stream of all your favorite blogs. When you’re ready to catch up on blog reading, it allows you to visit one site rather than several. I previously used Google Reader but after it shut down several months ago, I like this option even better. Here’s how you can follow us and other great blogs there as well. Follow my blog with...

Read More