Bok Choy

Towards the end of 2005 I made a decision that I would start a blog to document the journey of Aaron and I as we adopt a baby from China. It's been niggling at the back of my mind ever since, and a few things have happened recently as part of that journey, so I created one - and here it is.

I don't remember the exact time or moment or date that we made the decision to adopt. It seems that it's been our dream for so long now, that it's just something we were always going to do. At a best guess I'd say it was around 1999. I remember a man named Floyd Hart talking at church about his latest trip to China. He showed photographs and talked about the implication of China's One Child Policy on the girls of the nation. That was probably the seed that started it all.

We aren't adopting due to infertility, which people seem to assume. We've never chosen to become pregnant to even know if we can have children. A lot of that is because when we first looked into adopting from China, I recall reading that you were not able to adopt a healthy infant if you already had your own children. Not wanting to risk being ineligible, we've held off on the having a biological child thing. A couple of years later I read that China's International Adoption Law outlined that couples could have up to four children, either biologically or adopted. That was interesting, because it seemed that all of a sudden we had the option - but we in the end we decided to stick to the original plan... after much discussion. Maybe we will try for biological between adoptions (ie. adopt, bio, adopt, bio). But you know, I've learned through experience that even the best plans don't always work out the way I think they should. With that in mind, we'll just take this one day at a time.

We know that we're not the norm (from the way people respond when we tell them we want to adopt from China), but we know that there is more than one way to build a family.

We've known for a long time that both husband and wife must be thirty years of age before their file could be sent to China to apply for adopting (actually I think when we first looked into it, the minimum age was 35). Aaron turned 30 last Sept and I will become eligible in January 2008. We married in 1996, so by the time we get our application in, we will have been married for over 11 years.

Our friends and family have known about our plans for years, and affectionately refer to our future child as Bok Choy. It makes it easier when we’re talking... they can say, “look what I bought for Bok Choy today”, or “you won’t be able to do that when you have Bok Choy”... We look forward to the time when we have a real name for our baby, and will have to make sure that ‘Bok Choy’ doesn’t stick - as soon as we know her real name we’ll get everyone in the habit of using it. Until then, Bok Choy it is. Our baby Bok Choy.