Matched

A picture of Xiao Yue at 12 months from her medical file that was forwarded to us for review 12.23.14

Xiao Yun at 12 months from her medical file, too.  These were our first pictures of the girls.

Before we proceeded with adoption from China, I had to review all our options because I enjoy 360 degree turns.  Mark and I went went to a couple of adoption seminars including one at The Cradle in Evanston and Sunny Ridge in Bolingbrook.  Both focused mainly on domestic, open adoptions and the open adoption aspect appealed to me, as did the idea of having an infant with whom to bond immediately.  I was hung up on attachment.  Still am.

Both facilities kicked off their meetings with the domestic adoption, and then each agency gave talks on their international programs.  Mark and I were excited to be at these meetings but quickly sensed that our mood of guarded excitement did not quite match the mood of the other attendants.  First off, we were older than most people attending and also, we already had biological kids and both of these meetings were definitely geared towards couples or single parents that had encountered difficulties conceiving naturally.  So for many, this was Plan B.  It seemed like there were families lined up around the block to adopt domestically, but many fewer for the international adoptions, especially for children with special needs.  Being a Special Education teacher, a lot of these conditions didn't scare me and, it was a big incentive for both of us to give a child a home who might not otherwise get one.

We went to these meetings but each time, we wound up holding on to their fliers for Special Needs adoption in China, and that's what we decided upon.  The term "special needs" in China is a category that covers of a lot of different issues that can make a child more difficult to adopt such as common heart conditions, cleft palate, albinism, missing digits or limbs, etc.  It also pertains to siblings and older children.  We chose an agency in Kentucky referred to by my friend Dianne, who used that agency and was placed with a lovely little girl, Ava. Seeing them as a family helped me in particular to see firsthand that attachment from a child to a parent can be strong even past infancy, and that did it for me, since we knew adopting from China meant the youngest child we would get would be about 18 months old. So, Mark and I spent a lot of time filling out forms and thinking about which conditions we thought we could take on as a family - and ones we couldn't.  

On December 23, 2014, about 18 months after starting this process (that's a separate post) Dana, our adoption coordinator, called and told me that she was sending the medical files of the twins to us, for us to look at and to send to a doctor for review.  This is called Matching.  We were officially Matched.  Whether or not we accepted the match was up to us.  Generally you have 72 hours to review a file yourself and have a doctor take a look at the file to provide as clear a picture as one can get before deciding whether or not to proceed with adoption. For us, though, it was a holiday week and China's adoption office was closed for two weeks also, so we had much more time.  Which we did not need.  One look at the pictures and that was it for me.  We sent the girls' files to a doctor familiar with Chinese adoption - he himself has adopted four girls from there and knows how to read these medical files, understands discrepancies and can read between the lines.  He very kindly reviewed them that evening and sent us an email the next morning on Christmas Eve with a breakdown of what he saw in the files, and his interpretation. This included Opal Xiaoyun's (her American name with her Chinese names combined as her middle name) 2.6 VSD that may or may not need medical attention but she is growing so it's probably fixable, and Lola Xiaoyue's regurgitation in all the valves which isn't normal but she is growing so whatever is going on isn't urgent or presently significant.  At the end of the email he wrote:

"I see no reason why you should not go immediately and bring these girls home."

So we are.