Wow, I can't believe it has been 15 months since we've updated on this blog! Most of the people following our journey know the things going on with it through our family and updates at church.
The reason that it has not been updated in that time is that there hasn't been much to say since then.
In the last post we had just completed our home study and were awaiting immigration approval. We actually received immigration approval REALLY quickly- I think it took a month after we got all the paperwork sent off. After that- everything on our process slowed. way. down. (As in it basically stopped).
We've learned a lot about patience in the past year! Every few weeks we would get an update that would basically let us know they still had our file and were still advocating for us, but nothing else was changing. Except for the government and officials in Colombia. It seemed like this was changing every other month, which could be a good and bad thing. We kept hearing that they were going to be adding a lot more children to the waiting child list and that the list would be updated more often. This never really happened and we began to consider adopting from a different country.
Adoption paperwork is typically only good for one year so in November we began the process of updating everything so that when the one year timeframe was up everything would be current. If we were going to change countries this was the time to do it. After much prayer and research, we decided to switch to China, if we could be approved for their program. The China program is MUCH larger than the Colombia one. It's been around for a long time and it very streamlined. There are also younger children available, which was somewhat of a concern for us with continuing with Colombia (it was becoming apparent that children under 5 years old was very rare).
We found out last week that we have been approved into the China program and have officially switched programs! We have already began the process of switching our documents and hope to have all our updates completed soon. Even though it might seem like we are starting over and things might be prolonged even more, we don't feel that way at all. After speaking with a social worker from the China team this morning, it sounds probable that we could be be traveling to China this year to bring home our little one! We are both very excited about the switch and can't wait to see how God will lead us next in our journey.
To everyone who has been praying for us and supporting us throughout all of this, we are sincerely grateful for you. We hope to be updating with some great news in the upcoming weeks.
God bless,
Sallie (and Chris)
