Our Referral: Three Years Ago

Everyone remembers where they were when the got The Call. Me? I was at work on a Wednesday morning. My wife and I had heard that referrals had been sent out and many on our May 2003 DTC Yahoo group were already posting their good news.

Our agency called Lauren at home with the information they had and, in what seemed like a confusing game of “Post Office”, she relayed that information to me over the phone. I took down what she said in my notebook:

If you can’t read my writing, it says “Shang Juan Shi, Jiangxi Province, March 9, 2003, Shanggao SWI, Nanchang City”. I had taken down the province incorrectly as “Giangxi” and crossed it out. Although I didn’t know it until later, her name was also taken down wrong, and I’ve already explained what happened there. As you can see, I looked up what Juan meant in Chinese, not having any actual Chinese characters to go on. Very dangerous. March 9, 2003 was her birthdate and Shanggao SWI was her orphanage, although we’d find out later she had been living with a foster family for all but one month of her life. Nanchang is of course the capital city of Jiangxi Province and it would be there where we’d meet Ally for the first time.

We wouldn’t get her pictures until the next day (an eternity!) and of course it was love at first sight:

Our log in date was April 21, 2003 (San Jacinto Day for you Texans; Aggie Muster for you Aggies) and our referral date was January 21, 2004. Nine months. A true "paper pregnancy". If only our second referral would come so quickly.