A couple weeks later we went to the Adoption Faire. It was really quite interesting, there were a bunch of different agencies there and they held a couple different panel discussions with adoptive families. We went there pretty much thinking we would be working with WACAP, the agency who had hosted the event we attended earlier. I still have immense respect for WACAP as an agency and believe we would have been very happy working with them, but it didn’t turn out that way. As we were visiting with the various agencies and discussed their programs we met with representatives from a local agency called Children’s House International. Neither Tina nor I were aware of them before this meeting. I remember discussing them with Tina as we left the event. She was very taken with them for a number of reasons: they were local, they weren’t too big, and most interesting, they didn’t make people in their China program travel in large groups. I was unconvinced at first, I felt more confident in what I knew about WACAP, and I kind of liked the idea of a travel group. Tina finally convinced me though that this was the agency we wanted to work with.

It’s interesting now, in a way, that decision was one of the most important ones we could have possibly made, for it is the one that ultimately led us to our two youngest sons. Had we gone with any other agency we would almost certainly never have seen their files. Both Kai and Shen were “Waiting Children”. This means that because they both have a special need and were slightly older, the China Center for Adoption Affairs (China’s government agency which oversees all adoptions) put them on a list of children that is sent to a specific agency to try and find a family for them. In Kai and Shen’s case, they were put on a list that was sent to CHI.

Now back then, back in November 2004, we weren’t looking for little boys, and we weren’t looking for children with special needs or who were slightly older. I, more than Tina, felt particularly strongly about this. I clearly remember the night we filled out our agency application. They ask you to be as specific as possible in stating what sort of child you want to adopt. The standard accepted language in the China adoption community is as follows: “healthy infant girl, as young as possible”. There’s even an acronym: HIGAYAP. And I was fairly adamant that this was what I wanted written on our application. I had a number of reasons for this: first, we had two biological sons, this was one of the main reasons we were adopting from China in the first place, so we should put "girl" on the application. As to special needs, or older children, I did not want to endanger our pre-existing commitment to our two biological children, and I didn’t want to take on something that would disrupt this. I was also very concerned about Reactive Attachment Disorder so I thought it was important we try to adopt a child as young as possible. So that is what we wrote on the application.