The waiting game...

In a way, adoption roughly follows a trimester timeline much like a pregnancy. The first "trimester" is finding an agency, gathering mountains of paperwork, getting your home study done, etc. The second "trimester" begins when all of that preliminary paperwork (known in adoption circles as the "dossier") has been completed and you are placed on a waiting list. The third "trimester" begins with the referral of a baby and ends with traveling. This is definitely over-simplifying the process and I'm sure there are myriad better ways of categorizing and describing it. This is just how it makes sense to us.

After we sent our photo album to Taiwan in December 2004, we officially began the waiting game (the second "trimester"). It was pure torture! Every step of this whole adoption process pushes you to the point where you don't know if you can make it through, but somehow you do. Getting through the dossier paperwork and the home study was all-consuming. For every item we checked off the list, it seemed like 3 more were added. Just when you think you that you'll die if you have to sign your name one more time or run around town to another goverment office again, you suddenly find that you've done it all. You would think that handing off all that paperwork and moving into the next "trimester" would be a hugely momentous occasion worthy of spontaneous song and dance, but it's actually sort of anti-climatic. You are relieved, for sure, but you sort of find yourself saying "Ok...now what?" Adoption is all about hurry-up-and-wait.

So, on December 23rd, 2004, after a rather unceremonius trip to FedEx, our gargantuan photo album (nicely reduced to manageable size thanks to the wonders of color copying) along with the rest of our dossier was finally on its way to Taiwan. The official wait begins...