Friday, June 27, 2014

The chase is on!

In the last post, I said that "everything happens for a reason."  Those words don't ring any truer than in our chase for Lilija.

It's November of 2013.  Vilia is reading emails, and for some reason, she decides to read an adoption email for the Dave Thomas Foundation.  She tells me that she normally just deletes them.  But, for some reason, that day, she opens it.  Through various links in that email, she comes across the Gladney adoption website.  She goes to their Waiting Child page, and there she is!  Instant connection!  The little girl who is staring at us from that page is our daughter, which we have been waiting for a long time.


Let me take a step back for a minute.  In late spring of 2013, we had decided that we try 1 more time to get a match.  We renewed our home study, our fingerprints, and paid more money to get us current in the adoption process.  Each time a family renews their credentials, it takes time and money, and as we all know, money doesn't grow on tress!  So, this was our last ditch effort.  If, by the time our credentials expired, and nothing had happened, we were going to go with our lives, and say that it just wasn't meant to be.

Fast forward back to November, and voila, "everything happens for a reason."  We were meant to find Lilija, and she was meant to find us.  What follows is a flurry of paperwork, agency switching, and more updates.  She is locked in to us by December, and in February, we find out that we show up in the database in China as matched to her.  Officially, she is ours!  No one else can bring her home!  The only thing that stood in our way was the Chinese government approving our paperwork that has been sitting in some file since 2007.

March 31, 2014:  official documents arrive in NewYork at the office of our agency.  Our LSC is here!  LSC is "Letter Seeking Confirmation" - this is the official document from the Chinese government saying that they have approved your dossier and all supporting documents, and by signing this document, we are officially accepting our match with Lilija.  This is it, the thing that we have waited for, have worked towards, prayed for, tore out our hair for, you name it!




 

Lilija is no longer just a dream; she is real, and she is OURS!  Welcome to the family, little one!

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