My Girls
What do you do with three beautiful, happy, smart daughters? Well I guess you love and take care of them. It’s amazing to me how children interact with one another, how they play, share, show affection, show NON-affection 
and the myriad of other things that they do on a daily basis. I am blessed to be able to see and share in this along with my wife Amy. Our family doesn’t sound that much different than a typical one. But, this is where I tell you the story of how our family came to be. Late 90’s, Dr’s office in Birmingham, AL, “we don’t know why you can’t have children, maybe if you had married someone else you could”. Wanting children is a powerful drive in the psyche. We can’t have biological children so what do we do? Thus began the odyssey that became our family.
In February of 1998 I was on a business trip in Canada and my wife planned to fly to Vancouver to meet me for the weekend of our anniversary. It was also Chinese New Year and we chose to have dinner and ended up in a Japanese restaurant full of Chinese folks celebrating the New Year, (talk about providence). It was this weekend that we decided to adopt. Once home we started our search for ”how to do it”. We looked at domestic and international adoption including Russia and more former soviet countries, and several Asian countries including Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and China. We researched the rules and regulations, read about the kids and potential issues. Once we found out how difficult domestic adoption could be with all the pitfalls of the “biological parents” we decided to adopt internationally from an orphanage. But where? China looked like the best possibility but we were under the minimum age to adopt there, but then the rules changed and they lowered the min. age. We were in! Well sort of. We still needed to find out how specifically to do it. Enter a chance encounter with a family who had adopted from China. We met Doug and Joyce Love and their lovely daughter Molly. They were even facilitators for Chinese adoption! We processed our U.S. paperwork, completed our home study, were fingerprinted, were fingerprinted, were fingerprinted, oh and did I mention that we were fingerprinted? Well finally everything was complete and mailed and well….done so then the wait. This was November of 1999. It had taken 9 months to process the papers. The lucky part was we met 3 other families who where using the same facilitator and we became fast friends. We were notified that we would travel together to China when the time came. And we waited. Through the months of waiting, we 4 couples got together several times. We met the Chinese lady who would be our guide in China. Her name was Lilly. And we waited. Finally in August of 2000 we got a call, our dossier was in the matching room and we shoud know something soon. We got a call that our referral was being emailed and it had a picture! I was at work and Amy was at home. We opened the email and counted to 3 and opened the attachment and this is what we saw!
Katherine Garland
Julia Marcelle
Lillian Grace
So here is where I stop this little story and tell you that God has many blessings awaiting us in life! We just need to believe and go with the flow. Our experiences of adoption and China go much deeper than what I want or care to write here, but, if you are interested in adoption from China, send me an email (rich_hall@richardwhall.com) and Amy and I will be glad to talk with you! Come check out our local adoption group site Families with Children from China.
