Introducing Ai-Mi!

We are delighted to announce that last Friday, May 19th, it happened! We received a referral for a five month old baby girl named Ai-Mi Hsu. She was born on December 15th and is now living in foster care in Taipei.

Ai-Mi was born with a cleft palate and cleft lip. She has had repair surgery on her cleft lip, which you can see is in the process of healing in her picture taken at about 4 months old. We don't think that she has had surgery on her cleft palate, so she will require additional surgeries, probably a couple more before early school age, and she will probably need some speech therapy. Mommy and Daddy can't wait to get her home and get her all fixed up.

Okay, so many of you are probably wondering, what happens now? Within the next week or so, we will receive lots of paperwork that we will have to complete. It will have to go through the authentication process, which is basically getting all of the papers notarized and then having the notary's certification verified at the county, state, and regional level. Once that is done and the paperwork goes back to Taiwan, we will enter the court process. The court process lasts approximately 3-6 months,and then we will get word that we can travel. We should have Ai-Mi home by Christmas!