Andrew S. Thomas

Hold on tight, folks. This one’s a little overwhelming, much like the period of time it describes. For brevity’s sake (and possibly sanity’s), this will be more of a timeline summary than actual narrative.

For those just tuning in, I’ve been trying to catch my blog up to my non-blog life and all the craziness therein. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, and now, the thrilling conclusion, Headline News-style.

September 2006

After finding out we’ve been accepted into America World’s China adoption program, they contact us about the next step: we now need to send the first installment of $2000 to begin the program. It’ll take about a month or so before we have the resources to do this.

October 2006

My 96 Hyundai accent is declared “not worth fixing” when we try to get it ready for inspection. The shop has a car they’ve just renovated from an insurance auction they can sell me for slightly more than it would have cost to fix and inspect the old one. We go for it, with one catch. They don’t have the title. Buying the car depletes us of most of the money we were saving toward our $2000 first installment.

November 2006

Before the month is over, we discover we have dead mice in our well, contaminating our water. We don’t normally drink the well water anyway, but this had us showering at others’ houses and making TV dinners a lot more often. My father in law and his crew were generous enough to drain the well, fish out the unwanted guests, and bleach it in hopes that things would get back to normal.

Toward the end of the month, after weeks of thwarted expectations, we finally receive the title for the “new” car.

We host our first Thanksgiving at the house with little incident.

December 2006

Early on in December, we’ve finally saved enough to pay the first $2000. While we’re waiting for follow up from America World, we start planning for the next big step - the home study. We contact a few agencies and start gathering information.

Dead rodents plague us yet again - this time in the insulation around our oven. Seems they’d been in there for a while, but we only noticed after attempting to clean up after Thanksgiving. Running the oven on self cleaning mode baked them right in. Afterward, our kitchen smells like mouse urine anytime we cook. Carla calls an appliance repair shop to find out if we can ever get rid of the smell. She’s told it will never go away until we get a new range.

Family comes to the rescue again - twice. First, my brother-in-law lets us borrow a camp stove. Second, my cousin in Connecticut just happens to have an extra range lying around. He works for a courier company that does frequent deliveries to Maine, so it’s no big deal to get it up here. We still end up having to wait another few weeks to get it, but it saves us having to shell out even more money that could be going to the adoption.

A day or so after talking to my cousin, a representative from America World calls Carla at work to give her the following news:

The Chinese government agency that regulates foreign adoptions is tightening up their requirements for adoptive parents. At least two of the new requirements would rule us out completely as adoptive parents.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

There’s been other stuff since then - the “new” car needed some brake work, and was then broken into, I managed to cripple my beloved, sanity-restoring iPod mini by trying to replace its dead battery, and our furnace has died on us twice over the past week - the coldest week yet this year.

It all pales in comparison with the possibility that the motivating reason for so much of our lives now might not be a valid one. Family and friends have been incredible to us over the past month, but it’s hard to get past the big questions. Maybe we didn’t really “hear God calling us to adopt.” Maybe we heard Him right, but got the country wrong. Maybe we just need to wait and see what will happen.

We’ve been told that if our complete dossier (home study, paperwork from immigration offices, etc.) is complete and logged in with the Chinese government by May 1st, we’ll still be grandfathered in under the previous rules. Our agency is supposed to be contacting all “paperchasing” couples in the China program before the end of this week - tomorrow - to advise them on how they might proceed. Tomorrow is also, coincidentally, the last day we could withdraw from our agency and get any of our $2000 back (40% of it, to be exact).

It seems like God’s been teaching us a lot about patience through all this, so it shouldn’t surprise me that we haven’t heard anything yet. Rest assured, I’ll be posting any updates as I get them. I’ve had enough blogorrhea for the foreseeable future.

So, give or take a few minor things, that about gets us up to date. Thanks for sticking around and listening to me whine. Your usual pop-culture/Christianity/sarcastic observation-type blogging will resume again soon, I promise.

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