The Journey Began Months Ago

In March of 2004 we began our journey by completing the necessary provincial paperwork to get the ball rolling. This was the beginning of numerous rounds of paperwork and government forms. The Alberta government spent a couple of months with our paperwork to ensure that we were eligible for adoption and to make sure that we were not wanted by the authorities. Then, in June and July of 2004 we had a homestudy performed by a very nice social worker who specializes in these sorts of things. After that we waited and finally received the homestudy report back from the social worker in September 2004. A quick turn around and the documents were off to the Alberta government. The government reviewed the documents (apparently in great detail since it took two months) and we received the "official" stamped documents back in November 2004. We quickly forwarded these documents to Family Outreach International (these are the folks that we are using as our consultants to help with the whole process). FOI translated the documents into Mandarin and forwarded the documents back to the Alberta government by Christmas 2004. The Alberta government then reviewed the documents (again apparently very thoroughly) and finally sent our documents off to the Chinese authorities in early February. Our paperwork sat in Beijing for a while over the Chinese New Year and was finally given a Log In Date (LID) of March 3, 2005. Coincidentally this is the exact day that our young Haley was found abandonded at the entrance to the Bureau of Civil Affairs in Nanchang. From this point on it was simply a matter of waiting ... as patiently as we were able. Then, finally, on September 13, 2005 we heard the news that we had been waiting for ... a beautiful healthy baby girl named Wei Ping Lu was soon to be ours.