Timeline, 2005 until Today

I thought I would outline the sequence of events and timing that brought us to today. When we adopted Aliya in 2005 we knew we didn't want Aliya to be an only child. So in 2006 after our mandatory 1 year wait we reapplied to adopt another infant girl. Our dossier logged into CCAA on October 18th 2006. (which just happens to be my birthday!) Then the wait began. We saw the adoption process timeline move out farther and farther every month. The Olympics came and went and still nothing seemed to be moving. We had considered a special needs child and often looked at the "waiting children" list on the AAC website. Unfortunately none of these children seemed to be "ours". In November of 2008 AAC called a special meeting to update waiting families. They described a visit to China, conversations with orphanage directors and conveyed the belief that the socio-economic climate in China was changing and that adoptions were probably not going to be speeding up. Again the possibility of a special needs child came up. AAC said that they were able to review new files from China daily. We went home and discussed it and sent Morgan a list of the special needs parameters that we could work within. We knew we didn't want to be heroes, just good parents to a child in need. On January 5th 2009 Morgan called us and said he had a little girl who would be a good fit for us. We asked to review her file. That was our first "meeting" of the precious little girl who was to become Kylee TianYan Lynn. Xia TianYan was three years old, turning 4 on February 24th. She is in good health but has profound hearing loss. We got her files, some pictures an admonition from Morgan that he needed a yea or nay within 24 hours. I looked at that sad, lost little face, asked myself a thousand questions and could not come up with one reason not to welcome her into our home and life. In that short day Xia TianYan had won our hearts and we could not wait to bring her home. We called Morgan and told him yes, yes a thousand yeses! On January 20th our dossier was moved into the special needs program in China. Two days later on January 22nd we got our Referral and on February 19th we received our Travel Authorization. So from the time we first "saw" Kylee until we were authorized to travel to pick her up was two short months.

That was our experience. It could be yours!!!