So now we take a leap of faith and see what happens. We have to turn this:

Into a room that our son would actually want to be in! So we strip (the wallpaper that is!), patch holes and cracks:
















And the transformation begins:

A boy? Really!?

JANUARY 19, 2010!
A date that will live in infamy!
Denise is @ school doing um, kindergarten type stuff. It's about lunch time, 11:30-12:00. She gets a page over the intercom that she has a phone call from America World! The whole world stops..she drops her soup she was heating up, spilling it's delicious contents all over the linoleum floor. Racing down to the office to receive this most anticipated phone call she comes to find out that we have been matched with.....a boy. Now, set the Way Back Machine to earlier that morning. Troy is working w/another field rep. down in New Philadelphia. Busy day scheduled, finish up in New Philly, drive over to Mansfield, and then another field call in Norwalk. Cell phone rings, it's the wife. Time stops, again. Something about a referral, a boy, gotta get home...It's all a blur honestly!
Now the clock is ticking. Ze was a "shared referral" which meant we had 24 hours to look over the information we were sent, have his medical information gone over by a physician, and decide! Piece of cake, yeah right!
God is definitely running the show @this point! As Denise is talking on the phone, the school nurse happens by. Now, mind you, she wasn't even supposed to BE there THAT DAY! She overhears the good news and Denise relays the need for medical review. The nurse's brother works as, you know it, a general practitioner, out of state. He and his wife have their own practice and he's NOT WORKING today either! How crazy is that! "Sure, fax down the information, I'd be happy to look it over." The craziness is just running rampant @this point! Denise rushing home to go over the information in our email, trying to email the pictures to Troy's Blackberry, blasted Sprint, no service in this area! Finally, somewhere on I-77 the pics come through and there he was. Three little pictures and our whole world gets turned upside down!

Change of heart?

While we were updating our home study for the SECOND time, which brought along, you guessed it, fingerprints and Immigration paperwork, we started some real soul searching. This would have been approximately November/December 2009. At this point in the game, we were looking at yet ANOTHER 4 years for a "healthy" referral.

Now, backing up the trolley a bit, our whole journey has been about our waiting daughter. Girls are the majority when it comes to adopting from China. We also were thrown off by the Special Needs, the Waiting Children, in China. We knew we would not be a good match for a poor child w/severe mental or physical disabilities and those were the children we thought were in the program. Then we come to find out that it does encompass those children, but also as slight as cleft lip, or an ear deformity. So after much reflection and prayer we decided to pursue an adoption through the Waiting Children program.

So with a December 2008 date tentative in our minds, we went about our business. We busied ourselves w/family time, work, and other "basic activities". Sad to say, December came and went with no changes other than the waiting time increasing, but no firm date to be seen.

As time continued to grind on, our paperwork started to reach it's expiration date. So, it was off to Cleveland to renew fingerprints and background checks, over to the Sheriff's office for updating our fingerprints. We needed to update our home study, it had reached it's life span as well!

It's a gonna be a bumpy ride!

The whole journey for Ze started in March of 2006. We were @a birthday party for our niece Elizabeth. During the course of the party, we spoke w/some friends of Troy's sister. They had mentioned the Waiting Daughters of China TV program they had recently watched. So we all talked for quite a while. The hour's drive from Ashland back to Elyria was spent wondering why we had never looked into adoption (domestic or foreign). So we did some research and decided to go w/America World Adoption Agency. They are a Christian-based organization from McLean, VA. It is also the same agency that Steven Curtis Chapman and family used to adopt their girls.

Through months of paper chasing, affectionately known as "paper pregnancy", our dossier was submitted to the China Center of Adoption Affairs in December 2006. Now, at this point, we figured the wait would be approximately 2 years. No problem, December 2008, good to go!

And so it begins...

Herein lies the tale of Nathaniel Ze and his great oddessy to be brought home.

Nathaniel, or Nathan, or Nate, or Ze, all depending on the day, was born on February 3, 2007. He currently resides @the Daqing(da-ching) Children's Welfare Institute in Daqing City. Unfortunatley,his birth parents were never found and he has been in the Institute his whole life :-(

But that's ALL about to change!!