Friday, May 30, 2014

Alphabet Soup

The adoption world is FULL of letters. There are abbreviations and acronyms for everything. It takes a while but soon these funny letter combinations are part of your everyday language, thoughts and prayers. There are a few major letters that we look forward to and celebrate as we attain them and can put a date by them. We've recently added a few letters to our "done" list: "DTC" means "Dossier to Ch!na" and it was a huge deal. Months and months of paperwork, interviews, approvals and authentications culminated in this beautiful packet of papers that represents us to our daughter's country. The way our agency handles the documents I wasn't able to hold the finalized, stamped and approved, stack of papers in my hands but nevertheless it was finally completed and shipped across the sea. It felt like such a victory to know that some part of us was in the same country as her. The next set of letters would come when someone took our dossier and logged it in the official system. When our papers were sent it was taking about 8-10 days to be logged in. Our agency said allow up to 3 weeks. Of course I knew all the buzz and was anticipating a phone call on day 8. It never came. It actually didn't come for 17 days. There were a group of us who had sent in our dossiers right around the same time who had this longer wait. Another family sent theirs in the day before us and it was approved in a week. I am fully convinced that someone picked up a stack of dossiers, put them on their desk, promptly got the flu and was out of the office for another week. It all worked out and we did get the next letters we were after . . . It is fun to celebrate each stop on the journey to our little girl. We hope she looks at our side of the journey she will how much she is loved now, even before she is in our arms forever.