Let's do a little timeline review of our adoption process so far.
- November 2012: We started the very early stages of the adoption process.
- May 2013: Completed our first home study and started working on our dossier to send to Uganda.
- July 2013: Sent our completed dossier to Uganda and began the wait for a referral (child match). Wait times at this point were 3-12 months.
- July 2014: Wait times increased to 12-24 months.
- July 2015: Wait times increased yet again to 24 plus months - unknown...
- October 2015: Decided to start the process to adopt from China, since we were still waiting for Uganda.
- November 2015: Waiting for a referral from Uganda for 28 months and found out we were expecting! (If I am being honest, I wasn't super excited to be pregnant...knowing we would have to put our adoption on hold) Of course we are both excited to welcome baby boy #3 into our family any week now!
- June 2016: Found out that the President of Uganda signed a law stating international adoptions must be finalized in Uganda (instead of the U.S.) and adoptive families must live in Uganda for 12 months for this to happened. Obviously this was devastating news for us. We just can't put any more time or money into this adoption, knowing that it won't be possible to move our family to Uganda for a year or longer.
I cried, I was sad (still am). It's just a helpless feeling. We knew going into this process that Uganda was a pilot program and that things could change. But you never expect to be 3 years into a process and then just have it end so quickly. We are emotionally drained. We had been picturing a little girl from Uganda joining our family for over 3 years...and then realized that it wasn't going to end up the way we had hoped.
I don't understand it, but I do still have hope in God's plan for our lives and our children's (both biological and adoptive) lives. His plan is better and it might take a lifetime (or longer) to see how it all plays out.
So what now? Right now we are focusing on the birth of baby boy Waltner who is due in a few short weeks (August 8th). Once he is around 6 months old, or sooner if our agency will allow it, we will continue with the adoption process from China. We had only completed our home study for China when we found out we were pregnant. So we will update our home study and then hopefully get started on our paper work (dossier) to send to China. Our agency has been doing adoptions from China for a long time and have a good and reliable process in place. There is a lot less risk for the program to change dramatically, which can put us at ease that what happened with Uganda would be very unlikely to happen with China.
Well, that's where we're at in this crazy life. We didn't plan it, but someone greater did. We hold fast to His timing and know His grace is sufficient. Thank you to everyone who has supported us in building our family through adoption. In some ways, I feel as though I have let you down. But I understand that unexpected things happen and that control of our lives must be surrendered to the God who loves us and knows the desires of our hearts.
