Keep Digging

It's a gorgeous fall day and I spent the morning at the park with the kids.  Oliver found a shovel left behind by another kid and started digging a hole in the sand.

"Where are you digging?" I asked.

"China!" Oliver yelled for everyone to hear.

I remember digging many holes "to China" when I was a kid.  The Jersey shore with its miles of sand was a particularly favorite spot to dig the deepest hole possible.  I actually thought if I could dig deep enough, I'd end up in China.

Wondering if Oliver was simply referencing a popular saying, I asked him why he was digging a hole to China.  He informed me the hole was so he could get his siblings.  He chided Soren for pushing back into the hole because if we want to get them faster, they had to keep digging.

At this point, it feels like digging a hole to China will get me to my kids faster than waiting for a bunch of paperwork to be shuffled around.  We first saw our children's faces in mid-May.  We would have submitted our request to adopt them right away, except we had to wait for our dossier to transfer to our new agency.  It took six weeks for a simple process that involved our old agency and our new agency each sending a single letter to the CCCWA and for the CCCWA to go into their system and assign our file to the new agency.  That finally happened on June 24.  I was relieved that we were finally starting the wait towards approval by China, since that take anywhere from 60-90 days (or more).  Of course three weeks later we learned that we had to do a "mini dossier" since were are adopting two children and that took two months to complete.  We were back in a holding pattern with no chance of being approved by China until they received the additional duplicate dossier documents.    

The mini dossier finally went to China on September 5.  Clinging to hope that maybe we'd get a miraculously quick approval, (it has happened, especially for families like ours who've been waiting a long time) I called our agency for an update.  Our case worker confirmed that our mini dossier had arrived and had been logged in on September 19.  But otherwise, there was nothing to report.  She had no way to know when we'd get approval, or even how close we were to being reviewed.  That was depressing to hear.  The clock on that average 60-90-day wait didn't start ticking until September 19.  In our agency's eyes, we've only been waiting for approval since September 19, so nine days as of today.  By my calculation, we've been waiting for approval since June 24, or 96 days.  In my heart, we've been waiting a heck of a lot longer.

And that leads me back to the hole my kids were digging at Mattocks Park.  There's a hole by the artificial tree.  And the shovel my kids abandoned when we headed home for lunch might still be there.  If so, would you mind removing a couple shovel fulls of sand for me?