What do YOU take with you to the storm shelter?

I'm a born and bred Oklahoma girl. I've seen a few tornadoes in my day, been in the storm shelter more times than I can count, I've even been tied into a tree with a fishing stringer during a tornado (I DO love my Uncle Gary!). So, when I saw that we might be in for some tornadic activity this beautiful Spring evening I cleaned out the closet under the stairs, grabbed the children, the radio, some books for the kids to read, AND, as any Okie girl preparing for an adoption would, the precious computer that has all my information I have been working on for the adoption (my autobiography, which is 4 pages long; my letter to the People's Republic of China, etc.), and "the" notebook that has all the documents, forms, instructions, etc.

I'm not stupid.

CRUNCH TIME

By this time next week (Monday 4pmish) we will have our Application Part II turned in!! So, the rest of this week is filled with completing forms, tying up loose ends, organizing, taking pictures (will be used for our dossier), and running errands. It feels sooooo good to be this close to the end of this part! After our App. II is approved we are moving into the Home Study section, and while that is going on we go through the process of filing immigration paperwork so our baby girl will be legal!!


YEAH!

Just Plugging Away!

Well, our goal is to have the Application Part II in by the end of this month. So, everyday this week I have been trying to fill in blanks, gather paper work, asking questions to our case manager, and just kind of being anxious! I don't know why I'm anxious, just because of all that has to be gathered and done. I just have to remind myself that I need to take one piece of paper at a time.
There are about 4 families from our agency that are in China right now having their Forever Family Days. I have been enjoying watching their videos and seeing their pictures and reading their online journals via their websites. I cry when I see their first pictures as a family together. I can't imagine what that sweet baby girl is thinking when she is handed over to "strangers!"
In the mean time I am trying to remember to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Lyndal is out of town during the week just for the month of April and that keeps me hopping with me and just the three kiddos. I try to make it fun by going to the park and getting ice cream, but I'm going to be a cow if I don't watch it with all my milkshakes! Anyway, if you are reading this, just say a little prayer for our family.

The McMurphy Family Christmas 2005 

An Organization in Oklahoma Helping Orphanages

Packages of Hope Incorporated provides a wide range of necessities to orphanages around the world. Visit www.packagesofhope.org to find out what they are doing, where, and how you can help. They even look for groups to help pack up boxes to be shipped. Their offices are on Garnett between 51st and 61st.

Some More From Lost Daughters of China

Here's a little more from the book:
- The only time a birthdate is really certain is if a mother delivers in a hospital, giving a false name usually, and then disappears, leaving the baby behind, or when birth parents leave a note with the child containing basic information. Otherwise the birthdate is an estimate, picked at random or for convenience. It's not unusual for a pediatrician here to disagree with the assigned birthdate.
- Ethnic minorities within China - there are numerous strains, particularly in the borderlands, but they add up to less than 10 percent of the population as a whole and were in some cases diminishing - were routinely aloud 2 children.
- Forced sterilizations, mandatory insertions of metal IUDs - which could be monitored by X ray to make sure they remained in place - became commonplace assaults on the women of China, as did forced abortions, even at full term. (Broken Earth, The Rural Chinese by Steven W. Mosher, 1983) (Human Rights in China documents "Caught Between Tradition and the State," 1995) (Slaughter of the Innocence: Coercive Birth Control in China by John Aird 1990)
- Officials of the Women's Federation of the Communist Party kept track of women's monthly cycles, and listed those to be sterilized and those required to have IUDs inserted. (A Mother's Ordeal by Steven W. Mosher, 1993)

Something to read to help pass the time . . .

I have been reading this excellent book called The Lost Daughters of China by Karin Evans published in 2000. It is about her adoption of a Chinese baby girl and the plight of Chinese women and their babies. There is tons of information in it. I just finished it, but am rereading it to share with everyone some different facts. There's so much more to this than just babies being abandoned.
- It is predicted that by 2003 there will be 30,000 Chinese children living in this country, most of them girls. (US Immigration)
- Chinese women's reproductive lives are largely controlled by the state. Permission from the government was required in order to have a child; women who became pregnant without consent were often forced to have abortions, even late in their pregnancies. If that baby was a girl, her husband and his family could disown her for giving birth to a child of the wrong gender. She could lose her job and her home.
- For rural women, who constitute 70% of China's populace, life is desperately hard, even in boom times and model villages. The suicide rate among women in the countryside is the highest in the world. China is, in fact, the only nation where the suicide rates for women top those for men. Most victims are young. The means of self-destruction, most often, is a lethal gulp of the poison closest at hand, agricultural pesticide. (NY Times January 24, 1999)
- A Chinese parent who wants to give a child a chance at being adopted must conveniently disappear, and so must the rest of the family, if anybody else is around. It's the Chinese equivalent to what's known in this country as "making an adoption plan." Thus, a birth parent who disappears is often intentionally creating a chance for her child to find a new home.
- Abandoning a child is against the law in China, another reason why parents are usually careful to leave no traces. A specific provision of the 1992 Law on Protection of Women's Rights and Interests forbids "forsaking" baby girls (often, on Chinese adoption papers the child is listed as "found forsaken"), although no one has reported any substantial pattern of prosecution. (Human Rights in China, December 1998)

An Update . . .

We have been given the green light from our case worker to go ahead and start the process of Application II. She said that we can turn it in as soon as the end of March. I don't think we'll be getting it in that soon because it is very involved and wants to know lots of things about us: how much our house is worth, full physical check-ups for Lyndal and I, health status on the kids, background checks, reference letters, notarizing things, etc. We have had to go slow at first because there has to be at least a years' difference between our last biological child and our adopted child. So, she hasn't even been born yet!
I went to this website called www.redthreadmaps.com it shows some provinces and where most of the orphanages are. There are between 30 and 50 orphanages in each province. I'm not sure how many provinces there are in China, but China is very large! That is a ton of orphanages! China has started using foster care for some of the children.
Here is a general guideline of the steps we have to go through: fill out and turn in Application II, go through a home study, file paperwork with USCIS (immigration), gather and turn in our Dossier (this is the last of the form gathering we have to do I think) to our agency, our agency waits for any other families on the same timeline as us then mails all the dossiers at once - called DTC (dossier to China), we get a Log In Date (LID) of when our dossier is logged in with the Chinese government, wait for the Center for Chinese Adoption Affairs (CCAA) to review our dossier and match us with a baby girl (they actually try to have your baby look like your family), the CCAA sends us a picture of the baby they have matched us with called a referral, we take the information on the referral to our pediatrician and have him review it with us, we approve or disapprove of the referral, tell our agency we accept the referral, they tell CCAA that we accept, then we wait for travel clearance. WHEW!! The CCAA is currently estimating that it will take about 10 months from LID to referral. That time frame changes frequently throughout the year, it could be longer or shorter of a wait. I'm not sure what affects this timeline.
We told the kids of this plan tonight at dinner. Nicci was very excited and already has plans for her to sleep with her when she gets bigger because she has a big bed. Conner was a little apprehensive. He said, "Mom, you know how I like to fit in and not stand out? Well, this is, well, you know." We told him that he has a year to pray about it and get used to the idea and we'll learn how to deal with standing out together. He also said, "Chinese people eat dog Mom!" I told him that we were going to take Sammy with us to China. He thought that was pretty funny. Ethan said, "BAH!"

Pre-Adoption Workshop Today!

Through the treacherous weather and having to use a back-up to the back-up for childcare (which worked out really well anyway especially because of the icy roads - we used our next door neighbor - THANK YOU KATY, JENNIFER, AND LEE!) we made it to the Pre-Adoption Workshop. We learned quite a bit, but still have some questions which I'm sure will be answered in time. Going into this I wasn't really totally set on China, but after today I am! I just had a peace about me after hearing all the case workers talk about the other country programs (Haiti, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, and China) I just knew China was it. Good thing! I would have had to change this whole blog thing up! Anyway, we met some really cool people both first time adoptive families and returning adopting families. This is really going to change our life, not just in the sense of adding a family member, but we are going to need to become half Chinese in a sense! They really emphasize you getting involved with organizations celebrating your child's birth country culture and the post-adoption services also supporting your child's birth country (which was one of the deciding factors for us in choosing Dillon, our adoption agency) which we really agree that that is what needs to be done. We were also told by a second time adoptive mother that we need to just look at one piece of paper at a time, not the whole stack because if you look at the whole stack you will get dizzy and overwhelmed. Thankfully, the application we are working on now will be very similar to our Dossier, so we won't have to do a bunch of new and unknown paperwork. I finally feel like we are on our way!

A Little Progress

This week I obtained copies of our birth certificates, I applied for a passport (which sounds exciting and like we are close to the end, but we're really not!), and a few weeks ago I started working on my autobiography. The autobiography was not as daunting as I thought and once I got going it wasn't that hard to put my life on paper.
This whole process is so exciting and I pray everyday that God makes everything clear and gives us patience. Our God is NOT the author of confusion or distraction!

The Application Process So Far . . .

We haven't started filling anything out yet. The paperwork and required documents are very involved and will take a lot of work. The more I look at everything the more sense it makes and the better organized it is in my head. We attend a workshop in February and I'm sure that will clear some things up. To know that there's a little girl already being formed and handpicked by God just for our family - that is an amazing, bigger than life thought!

Origin of the Name of the Website

The red thread is an ancient Chinese belief. "An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break." We felt this was appropriate for the journey we are about to embark on.