How We Came to Find Our Little Man

We are adopting from China again. We actually started the process more than a year ago. Our paperwork was all sent over to China and logged-in in February. We were told in February that the wait at that time was 16 months before we would receive a referral. Then in May, the wait time went up to 20 months from May. The wait just continues to grow and one thing we wanted from this adoption was a child to grow up with Mira. If we continue to wait for this (and now we are hearing that some are saying the wait time will extend to 3 years! We just don't know), Mira will be at least 5 and we would have a baby again. So we have been looking into older children. In China an older child is considered a special needs child even if they are perfectly healthy. If we adopt special needs we need not wait for the referral, we can choose from a list of special needs children and then we just have to wait for travel approval - a much shorter wait.

When our agency's new list of special needs children came out we found this darling little boy.
His Chinese name is Cao Xiao Xuan (pronounced Sao Shaow Shuan).He is 4 years old and his special need is "delayed speech." We fell in love with him right away and haven't been able to let him go. So this will be our new child. We're not sure exactly when we'll be able to travel. We sent over a letter stating our intent to adopt Cao Xiao Xuan and now we have to wait for the Chinese Government to approve our request, then wait for approval to travel. But we're proud to show these photos of the guy who has grabbed our hearts.