Special Focus Child!?!?

I don't know how to write this update without posting my optimism so I'm just gonna go with it.  We received a gentle nudging from some adoption friends asking about whether or not our adoption agency is willing to try and secure Hope's paperwork for their agency and for us.  Of course, that is what we're trying to do and our agency has been aware of that.  But yet it got me to thinking that I should probably make a call to the director of  Holt's China program to see if there is anything more we should be doing in trying to secure  Hope's file for our family.

So yesterday I made the call.

After a great visit I learned a bit more about the way in which we might be able to secure Hope's file which is far different from how I had originally thought the process would go.  I thought that because Hope's condition is correctable that she would be considered a "Child of Promise."  Child of Promise adoptions take place when a child available for adoption with a minor, correctable condition is placed onto a shared list and all agencies scramble to those children to match them with their adopting families-usually during the middle of the night on the computer-when they are released.  This is kind of a difficult situation because so many variables go into whether your agency is able to lock a child's file before its locked by another party.  Its very iffy and that is how we assumed Hope's  file would be handled.

But it sounds like we were wrong.  And that's a VERY GOOD thing.

The China Program Director feels that Hope's condition, while certainly correctable, is not likely to be considered "minor" which therefore makes her eligible for a different type of matching process.  We are now 99% sure that Hope's adoption will be a part of a Special Focus group for children whose conditions are considered to be more involved or significant.  We don't see it that way, but I guess needing a bunch of surgeries is a sure thing so thats enough to qualify as "significant."  Special Focus children are able to be matched with families through a much different process and one that eliminates  the challenges of snatching a child from a shared list in the middle of the night with no guarantees.

To put this complicated process in very simple terms:  There is a chance that if Hope's file is ready for adoption in China right now that we could lock her file very soon without all of the unknowns of the shared list and waiting until we have a Log In Date.  It seems our odds of being able become Hope's forever family have increased.  God is moving mountains and parting the seas to bring our daughter home!

As if that isn't good enough news for one day, check out this big girl standing up in the middle of the floor all by herself at just shy of 11 months old!  Click here for the picture we discovered :)

At this point, I can barely sleep wondering if her paperwork is ready and if we could be getting our referral in the next week or so.  I know that I won't know anything until next week, I suppose.  My gut tells me that her paperwork hasn't been started yet by her home orphanage, which means a wait of at least one to two months before we could secure her file.  That is still much sooner than when we were expecting a referral...more like January/February which is so very encouraging.  If you're in the business of praying and would be so kind to pray for our family, we could really use prayer that this part of the process goes smoothly and that we would know who our daughter will be as soon as possible!  Next week would be great :)

PS.I should add that even though we may know who our daughter is earlier than the typical process, it will not speed the process up all that much at all.  Maybe a few weeks at most, but we're plugging away!