The Story of Our Journey to Shane - his first 7 months of Life

I know it is unusual to have a blog like this in which you are providing "history" of things that have happened but since I have not blogged before I didn't want to start with where we currently are with our current adoption of Abigail as our journey to her truly began with our journey to Shane. So here goes....it is 2004 and John Anthony is married and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Jeremy is a sophomore in high school and we know that unless things change we will have an empty nest soon as Jeremy is planning on attending Liberty University after graduating from high school. Susie and Buddy (my oldest sister) has 3 adopted children from China so it makes sense for us to explore this option if we are going to adopt. We can't imagine not having children in the house as our house is always full of children. With friends of the boys and all the nieces and nephews, children are very much a part of our home.

John saw an ad in the local Culpeper paper for a Christian adoption agency and the name is the Living Hope Adoption Agency. They are located in Pennsylvania. He brought the ad home and asked me if I would like to attend a seminar that they are holding in Stuarts Draft, Virginia at the Ridgeview Christian School. We attend the seminar on May 21, 2005. At the end of the seminar, we fill out an application and submit it that day. Our journey now begins! We start our journey anticipating adopting a little girl as we already have two boys. God had a different plan for us and it wouldn't be until July 2006 that we would "meet" the child that he had planned for us.

At the time we started our adoption process in May 2005, Shane was 2 months old. He was born on March 21, 2005. His Chinese name was Sun, Ya Wei. Shane was born in Inner Mongolia, China (Hohhot) and was at the orphanage in Inner Mongolia until he was 7 months old. In October 2005, he was transferred to the New Day Foster home which is located outside of Beijing. Here is a picture of Shane when he first arrived at New Day in October 2005. We are truly blessed as I have almost 200 pictures of Shane that was taken from time he was 7 months old until we brought him home in October 2006 when he was 19 months old.