Jia Yi Wei

Jia Yi Wei

will soon be

Maria Noelle!!!

We can not believe that after 5.5 years we have finally seen our first baby Girl!! Her file is securely "locked" for us and we have applied to China for her. We now wait for our Pre-Approval (PA), after that a Letter of Confirmation (LOC) and finally Travel Approval (TA). This should all last 2-4 months-ish, if you know what i mean! haha!

Her Chinese name: Jia (Beautiful) Yi (Happy) Wei (Brilliant/Valuable) Wei is the name that all children from her orphanage are given (think Last name), Jia is the name that all the girls there are given and Yi is her personalized name. So far we know the other two names describe her... we are just waiting to see if she will be happy! We hope so!!

She is in Tianjin City Children's Welfare Institute. Tianjin is in the NorthEast near Beijing.Tianjin is one of 4 Municipalities in China... Basically it is Classified as a City and it is the size of a small province... I mean 12 million people live there and there are Counties within this "City"! Some of the babies live in Foster Homes, but as far as we know Maria does not.

She was born December 15, 2008... so she is just one year younger than Anthony!!! He was born on the 16th! go figure... Maybe someday i will get a Spring baby! haha! Our whole family's birthdays are in the winter! So she is about 18 months old right now... but the info we have on her is from 11 months old! So we have requested an update, but we may hire someone to call and get an update. Because apparently CCAA doesn't always like to get updates done.

She was about 15 lbs and 28 inches tall. Kind of small. When I talked to our International Adoption Doctor, she classified her as "Failure to Thrive". Guess why she is listed on the Special Needs Waiting Child list... the diagnosis... Lagging Motor Development!!!!! What!!? And she was on the list for over a month and no one snatched her up!!!! I can't believe it! Alex and Anthony both had worse things on their medical reports! Hopefully the update will tell us more about what she is able to do at this age. She was not standing or walking or sitting at 11 months, but was crawling so that must be why they classified her as SN. Who knows!

Apparently she is a deep sleeper, sucks her finger, she crawls, uses her index finger and thumb to pick things up, laughs out loud, responds to facial expressions of adults, active and closest to a caregiver. There are some other things, she knows her name and responds... can hear and see. Her favorite toy is a rattle and is happy playing with toys. She had 2 teeth. Loves juice! Holds her milk bottle TIGHTLY! (that sounds like the boys) Her hands are "powerful" the report says! haha!

It also says that she will fall asleep in her caretaker's arms after drinking her bottle... so it sounds like someone has time for her! Oh! I hope so! She cries when she is hungry... Sounds like she is a lot about food, like the boys were. We can deal with that!

I almost forgot... I joined a yahoo group that advocates for the special needs children on this list... I was browsing through the pictures last week and saw Jia... The first thing i said to myself was "she is wearing the boys' pjs!" Alex had a pair of these pjs and then Anthony wore them! Alex says that we will have to get her some girl ones. She definitely should fit in around here... with all these tool pjs!

We are praying for another little girl that was on the list who was missing an entire arm... If they would let us, we would get both of them!! But we are told only one at a time!! We hope she will find a family VERY soon! Update on her... she has a family!