Our referral
Our paper work arrived in China on February 28, 1997. After the paperwork gets to China, families just sit and wait for their referral. The referral arrives with some basic information about your baby and a passport size photo.
In the early part of November, I called Susan Schoering, our contact at our agency, Family Resource Center, to ask if she had heard anything about the progress of our referrals. She said that, as usual, she couldn't be sure of anything, but that she really believed that we would be getting them in 2 to 4 weeks. I waited 10 days and then called her on Monday, November 24. Susan was on the phone, so I left a message for her.
She called back about 15 minutes later. When I answered the phone, she sounded surprised and I asked her why. She explained that the message she had received had said 'Mark Greenwald', my brother, who had recently begun the adoption process with FRC. I launched into a 5 minute diatribe about how much I hated to be called Mark, since people had been calling me by my older brother's name for years. When I finally stopped, she said "Well, how about if we just call you Dad?" I stopped dead in my tracks. When I recovered, Susan told me FRC had received the referrals that day. but that it would take a few days to get the medical reports translated. Until this was done, all she could do was to give us the vital statistics of our daughter, since they would be unable to match the accompanying photos with the children.
I listened in awe as I heard that my daughters name was Guo YuXiu, that she was in Guangdong province in a city called XinYi, that she weighed 7 5.6 kilograms, was centimeters tall and had a head circumference of 37 cm. She was born on January 6, 1997.
While I was getting this information, my wife LuAnn called with call waiting to ask about our dog Bailey. "I can't talk now - Susan's giving me the referral!" I gasped. As soon as I was done on the phone with Susan, I called LuAnn and gave her the details.
The next two days floated by. We called friends and relatives and shared the meager information we had about our daughter and made preparations for Thanksgiving, which was this coming Thursday. Thanksgiving also looked like it might throw a delay into the process, since the people who would translate the documents might delayed until after the holiday. We sat tight, although LuAnn said that we should just tell FRC we would accept the baby without seeing the picture. What, we're going to turn her down because she's not cute?
On Thanksgiving morning, we got a call from Jane Richmond from FRC letting us know that the translations were done and that we could pick up the papers and the picture any time. Since it was Thanksgiving, we suggested picking them up the next day, which was fine with Jane. A couple of hours later, LuAnn suddenly said "Let's see if we can get the papers today". We called Jane back, and she said we could stop by her house if we got there in the next 30 minutes. We turned off the roasting turkey and flew out the door. We had the Bears game on the radio, but even though they were being soundly thrashed by my home team, the Lions, it was very difficult to pay attention to it.
We walked into Jane's house and she handed us the papers in a sealed envelope. We sat on a couch, opened the envelope and pulled out the forms and the photo. My first thought was that she was having a really bad hair day - she had what looked like dreadlocks in the front and a buzzcut on top. LuAnn thought she was beautiful from the start, with her big alert eyes.
After looking at the picture for a few moments, LuAnn asked Jane if Guo YuXiu was wearing a barrette. Jane asked LuAnn if she normally wore glasses, since LuAnn was mistaking the staple that held the photo to the form for a barrette.
We gathered ourselves up and headed for home. Every once in a while I would look at the picture again and we would both smile. As we approached our house, I held up the photo facing out so that our daughter could somehow 'see' her soon-to-be new home.
Neither one of us were hungry for the big Thanksgiving dinner, and neither one of us remembers whether it was any good or not. We went out for dinner the next night to officially celebrate the referral and, after dinner, bought some expensive baby clothes. As it turned out, they didn't initially fit our tiny little girl, but we all had a lot of growing to do.