T I M E

you know, time is a bizarre thing. you can spend what seems like forever waiting on something, yet be totally unready for that thing to happen. a long time can quickly turn into a short time. "when will this ever happen" can turn into "oh my God this is really happening." i could go on, but i am sure you are annoyed already, so i will explain (although i expect most of you know exactly where i am going, figuratively and literally).

roughly 7 years ago Amy and i decided it was time to make the leap that so many people talk about with the whole gotta have a kid thing. yeah, that didn't go quite as planned. it took us several years to decide we were more suited for adoption than procreation. then we decided that China was right for us. there were a lot of factors that went into the decision, not the least of which was...time (you see how i am running with the same theme here).

international adoptions through china were supposed to take roughly 13 months when we started. i am going to pause for a minute and laugh at that myself...yeah, i said 13 months. 3.5 years later and we finally see the light. that light is young miss Dang Xue Er of Luoyang, Henan, China.

so yeah, we spend 3.5 years dreaming, hoping, wishing, or whatever way you want to describe it, for a little girl. there was a LOT of official stuff that happened in between all that, but i am sure most of you know that paperwork doesn't exactly make time fly by. i will add here that Amy is the one responsible for 99% of the paper moving. i think that was mostly because she didn't trust me to do any of it (i am aware that none of you blame her for that). anyway, i'll move on. we really started to think this might never happen. side note, the Olympics were quite rough seeing as how we saw all kinds of Chinese girls running around. the wait was frustrating to say the least and depressing to be more accurate.

back to the theme. what is the chronological paradox i spoke about earlier? since you asked so nicely, i will explain. we waited for such a long time that once we got the news of Natalie's (that is what we are going to call her until she is old enough to tell us she hates it) readiness to join our family we just expected more waiting. we went around telling people that we had to wait a month for this, a few weeks for that, and another months for who knows what. we told people it would take 3 months or so before we got to travel to China to dramatically increase the size of our family. were we wrong. just under 2 months later, we will be heading out.

of course, it is awesome. how could we not be excited? i will tell you how. we are scared! not so much scared really, but think of it this way, when you have been driving along at 45 for so long, 100 seems pretty fast and a bit out of control.

those of you that might be interested in how things progress can follow this blog. i will try not to be too boring and i will try to give updates as much as possible. the plan is to provide post on the blog updating our progress in China. there will also be plenty of shots of Natalie (yeah, that is the hook). i am aware that we won't have much time and may have little access to the internets (just ask my brother), but this may be the best way to let those that care know what craziness we have gotten ourselves so happily into.

thanks for reading.