Adoption Update

This past Wednesday I mailed off our dossier to our adoption agency.  Whew.  I've only been working on that since August.  It didn't help much that I tend to procrastinate tedious tasks, and a large portion of the dossier definitely fell into that category.  Aidan, Harper and I spent the better part of Wednesday morning getting pictures developed, having copies made, and completing the assembly of the dossier.  I'm pretty sure Aidan thinks we are mail-ordering his sister, since we had to get the papers ready "to send to China to get his sister".  Just one more thing to explain to his future therapist, I guess.

Speaking of crazy, (lovely segue, I know), I've been coming up with some come-backs to tell those few people who are, how should I say, less than supportive about our adoption.  Most people are very encouraging when I tell them that we are in the process of adopting.  However, sometimes, when I tell people that yes, we have 3 biological children, and yes, we are adopting a 4th, they actually look at me incredulously and say, "Why??"

So to those of you, here is what I would at least think about saying back to you:

1.  Brandon and I suffer from mental illness.
2.  The more children we have, the more work hands we have for all of the farm chores.
3.  We have all this extra money lying around that we just don't know what to do with.
4.  Harper has all of these hand-me-down clothes that we just hated to get rid of, so we're going to bring a little girl home from China just so she can wear some of them.

5.  We can't think of a good enough reason "why not".  There's plenty of not-quite-good-enough reasons "why not", and we spent the last several years using those as excuses.  But we really want to add a 4th child to our brood by adoption, and we believe whole-heartedly that this is what God wants for our family.  

From this point, someone at our adoption agency will review our dossier, and if it looks acceptable, they will send it to China to be "logged in".  Our log-in date (LID) is when our wait time officially starts.  The wait time from there could be a year or so, but I have also read blogs of families who only waited a few months, and in one case, 6 days for a referral.  Holy cow.  At the time of referral (this is when they call us and tell us they have a child for our family, information, picture, etc.) is when the bulk of the remaining adoption fees are due (yikes!).  So basically, a very unpredictable time-line from here on out, and a lot of things that are completely out of our hands.

And if you think of any other completely sarcastic responses I could use in the meantime, please do share.