Amy Botkin Bringing Andy Home

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We have been overwhelmed at the love and support of family and friends!  So many of you have asked us to keep you updated and we thought this may be a better way to keep everyone up to date as we get down to the final few months of pursuing the adoption of "Andy".   The title of this should be "Andy's Story", not Amy's Story, but the site would not allow me to edit that part.  On Feb.8, I was tagged in a post by my dear friend, Haley Dozier.  We met Haley shortly after moving to Atlanta and were blessed by her friendship.  She knew it was in our hearts to adopt an older child, and that at the right time, God would show us our path.  A family in Richmond, VA, who Haley knew, had posted the story about Andy's to find a forever family.  This  wonderful family in VA had hosted Andy last summer in the US through an orhpanage-agency exchange program and they were advocating to find a family for  Andy.  Unfortunately, the family who was supposed to adopt Andy had a tragedy in their family and had to stop the adoption process in late January.  Andy will turn 14 on June 29, 2017, and in China, children "age out" of their system and are on their own at age 14.  Andy has a strong desire to be adopted.  We read about Andy and his story immediately spoke to us, and by the evening of Feb.7, we were on the phone with his host family and by the next day, we were in discussions with his US agency to see if it was even a possibility to pursue his adoption, knowing that we were not even in the system of this agency in PA.  The adoption agency in PA (Living Hope) agreed that they would consider us IF we could find an agency licensed in the state of Georgia who would agree to complete a "Home Study" in less than a month.  After several calls to GA agencies, we were beginning to lose hope as they would say they had too many families in front of us to expediate a home study.  At this point, Alan and I realized we were going to have to ask friends and family to see if they had connections for support.  A huge thank you goes out to Billy Ching, a great friend to us in Atlanta, who shared our story with his entire law firm, and within 24 hours, we had a call from  the head of China adoption at "Lifelines" adoption agency, and on Friday, Feb.10, Lifeline agreed to take on our expedited Home Study and Living Hope agreed to pursue pre-approval from China for Alan and I to adopt Andy.  And off we went.....