“So, do you just get to pick one?”

Short answer: yes, but not exactly.

While we will have more say in what our 3rd child is like than we did with the first two, the “matching” process goes more like this:

When you sign onto an agency, you must fill out a medical conditions checklist (the MCC). On that list are medical conditions that you are okay with. They can be mild such as clubbed foot, crossed eyes, or cleft lip and palate, or they can be more major such as cancer, missing limb, or cerebral palsy. Some of these medical conditions might have already been treated by the orphanage, while some may need special medical intervention when the child comes back to the US.

What you CAN choose is if you want a boy or a girl. We have checked “either”, as we didn’t find out ahead of time with our children either. That being said, with our girls there was a 50% chance of either gender. This time, it’s a 75% chance that it will be a boy, since there are more boys than girls orphaned in China. Still, it just depends on which child fits the MCC at the time that our paperwork gets to China.

Our agency will sift through the list of children that are “paper ready” for adoption, and pick one that they believe will fit well into our family. They can be specific and if we say that we like music, and there is a child that fits our MCC and loves to sing, they might prefer that child for us.

The second way to be matched with a child is to find a “waiting child”. These are children that have been waiting paper ready for a while, without finding a family, to the point that some people may have gotten a chance to meet them in their orphanages (say, another parent picking their kid up from the same orphanage), and they can advocate for that child to be adopted, and can share personality traits and photos. This is especially important for children that are older than 2, because it becomes harder to find them families once they are 2 years old.

We aren’t going to disclose what was on our MCC. That will be something that we can give our child: privacy. Everything else is theirs to share, and, in the end, the child is so much more than what’s on the list.

To update how the paperwork is going: we are nearly ready to start our homestudy. We only have to get our physicals, Oliver’s vaccination updates, and our reference letters sent in. I have 17 other pieces of paper checked off of our list, for this second round of paperwork. So… onward!