Day 50 and no news.

*Note: I will reference many technical abbreviations relating to our adoption.  Please use previous posts and the sidebar adoption timeline to crack the adoption terms code!

We have entered day 50 in our LOA wait!  Ahhh!!!!  It will be 2 months on Sunday since we "got the call" and basically nothing has happened since then.  Well that isn't true, my daughter has gotten two months older, in China, without us.  I have debated what to write in this post, but I decided that to be fair and show all parts of adoption I am just going to be really raw.  This is not going to be the typical Shelly post.

Please know I still believe that God is faithful.  God is the Father to the fatherless.  God's timing is so much better than ours.  God sees a bigger picture that we don't see.  I do believe those are true... but for the next few hundred words I am just going to vent.
After a super quick turn around from LID to PA (20 days) we were very excited.  Travel before Christmas looked very possible.  I know we didn't say that on the blog, but we were pretty sure it could happen, maybe even in November.

Our wait began on August 1st which is our PA date.  We were watching to Olympics and had a "Go for the Gold" mentality as we saw some families get their LOA's at 30 some days.  Well, 30 days have come and gone, and I don't think we will be getting any gold prizes.

You see, we are not even OOT on the road to our LOA.  The fastest turn around from OOT to LOA is 2 weeks, but 3-5 or longer is more realistic.  Yuck.  To make matters worse there is a one week shut down happening in China the first week of October.  That week of course doesn't count for anything as it relates to us other than make our number counts higher.

Basically we are waiting for a call from our case worker that we are OOT.  Then we are waiting for a call from our case working that we have our LOA.  Then we are process through all the steps at the timeline on the side.

Once we finally get our LOA we hope to be traveling about 10ish weeks later.  Again, there is quite a range, but we think that time frame is pretty realistic.

Here is why it is hard:

We have not heard and will not hear a peep about our daughter.  With M we had new photos and updates all the time.  We could see him growing.  We were falling in love with a child we knew was real.  With YQ (Chinese name) we hear nothing.  We don't even know where she is.  We might be able to get a photo and update right before we travel, but children living in "foster homes" sometimes are not as easy to get updates for.  Like here, foster homes range in quality.  Unlike here, they might have 10 children in one room much like the "transition home" that M was in.  There are some huge benefits to a foster home which we are grateful for, but a drawback is being unable to locate her as we wait. 

She has medical unknowns.  We can do nothing about them until we are home.  It is hard.  I don't think I need to say more, because I am pretty sure you can all imagine how it would feel if your child might need important care and you are not sure and have no way for them to get it.

She is getting older and we can't watch.  We went through this to some degree with M, but the court trip and lots of photos and video sure made a huge difference.  This is one of the hard things about international adoption.

Selfishly, we are getting passed!  What?  Well, because I am in FB groups where we share adoption stats all the time, I happen to know that many families who have LID's and PA's after us are OOT.  This is very painful.  There is no reason at all for this, but it happens all the time.  I spoke with our case worker today and she said "maybe your dossier translator is slow."  Great, huh?  Nothing we can do to speed things along...

So now you know where we are at in the journey.  We are enduring.  We are treasuring time with M.  We are very busy with exciting things at church.  We are walking and laughing and playing and living life as though we don't have a daughter.  This is one part good because we really are cherishing time, but one part bad as YQ isn't a part of it and besides obsessing about no news there is nothing we can do.

Brighter posts are coming soon.  I have been collecting some great M quotes to share with you!  Thanks for enduring with me and reading between the lines and knowing what to pray for.  We covet your prayers.