Cousins

When we decided to adopt a daughter from China, the first people we called were Linda and Don, Jerry's sister and brother-in-law. Over the years Linda and I had talked about adopting daughters from China, but for one reason or another, the time was never right for one or both of us.

Jerry and I had been out at dinner for Valentine's Day, when he told me he was ready to adopt. As soon as I got into the car, I called Linda to tell her our news, and to ask her if they were still interested in doing it too. She said she'd let me know. A few days later, she called to say they had decided against it. Their boys were getting older, (12, 9 and 6) and they just weren't ready to start over.

A week or so later we received a DVD from our adoption agency (Great Wall) about Chinese adoption. It was heartbreaking. We showed it to Jerry's parents, and Marie said it was a good thing she was over the cut off age, or she'd be tempted to adopt a baby, too! She mentioned the video to Linda, and Linda said she'd like to watch it, so we sent her a copy. At that point, I figured we had them. There was just no way they could watch that video and not adopt one of those babies.

On the morning of March 17th, Linda called to tell us the good news. Not only were they going to adopt, but they were going to request twins! She wanted to use the same adoption agency, and asked if we could try to send our dossiers in together, so that we could have a chance of traveling together. I told her we'd wait, but to hurry.

Linda was fast. Within a week or two they'd caught up with us paperwork-wise, and I started to think they'd be waiting on us in the end. Amazingly, we received our last document, the I-171H from the CIS, within one day of each other. We then placed our dossiers into the same package and mailed them to Great Wall.

Our dossiers were sent by Great Wall to the CCAA on the same date, and we received the same log in date of July 8. This pretty much insured that we would be in the same travel group to China. Our next goal was to try to get babies from the same orphanage, or at least from the same province. We wrote letters to the CCAA, with our request, and our adoption agency wrote a letter on our behalf.

We have no idea if the CCAA will honor our request. As with everything else in this process, we have done everything we can do, and it is out of our hands. Our dream is of two (or three!) little girls, first cousins, who will share the bond of coming from the same place in China, and who will be able to return to their birthplace together someday.