They say. . .

They say the wait gets harder after you get your referral. So far, that hasn't been true for me. Not knowing anything was hard. We had no idea how old the kids would be, we had no idea when we would receive their referral. We didn't know what they would look like, who would be older, when they would be home. Now, I KNOW who my meimei and didi are. I know their names, their ages, even a little bit about their personalities, their likes and dislikes, their fears. I can begin to imagine what it will be like when they are home. I can prepare for them. And that makes it so much better to me. I still don't know exactly when they'll be home, but at least we can give a range of several months as our estimate now instead of saying that we *hope* for a referral sometime before ...followed by an ever moving and increasingly distant date. I know that our wait time since referral should be somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 over. These past 4 months have gone by quickly, now that our adoption seems real and not just an impossible dream.


So, I keep looking forward to the day they come home and I can see Kai Wei and Si Ya again in person. But meanwhile, the wait has gotten easier. There's forward momentum again (speaking of which, Sarah Grace's paperwork is back from TECO and ready to get sent back to Taiwan!) I know we are waiting for them and I know they are waiting for us. We'll hang in there. The pictures and updates and letters back and forth help us along, and, hopefully it won't feel much longer until we have more than photos to look at and more than hand-drawn pictures to make us smile.

Addendum to the post: :)
In case you were curious- Si Ya, Ssu Ya, Su Ya and any variation thereof and Sarah Grace are one and the same. When we got her referral it was spelled SSu Ya. The double "s" is from the Wade Giles form of Romanization (I think), and looked confusing to us, so we removed an "s" when writing it. After looking up the character for her name, I realized the pinyin spelling (and the closer pronunciation) for her name was actually Si Ya. Since Pinyin is the more standardized Romanization system used in the US, we switched to that spelling. And Sarah Grace, in case you hadn't guessed, is what we are naming her. (We'll keep Si Ya as her middle name. Kai Wei we're going to continue calling Kai Wei, though it might be shortened to Kai. We'll give him an American middle name.)