Yet another year of waiting...

Three years ago today...

We got in a line for adoption with China. The wait at the time was expected to be six to eight months long. Two years ago the wait was 17 months long and a year ago was updated to be 27 months long. Today the wait is 37 months long and growing with each passing month.

This is what we know today
1. Referral and travel dates are still a mystery
2. There are only 47 days ahead of us in line. (Progress is being made considering a year ago there were 104 days ahead of us)
3. The name
4. We will probably have another Christmas without being a family of three.
5. We are anticipating our 4th fingerprint renewal by the end of 2009 because as we have said before, they change...WHATEVER.
6. Our original file is still somewhere between Chicago and Detroit, but we were allowed to recreate our file for Michigan in order to get fingerprinted for the third time--Good times!
7. We will probably have to renew another form for the fourth time if we haven't traveled and returned to the US by 4/24/10.
8. We finally spoke to someone with our placing agency (Rockford, IL) after 5 months of no contact and learned that the other 2 couples in our original group are still in the group.
9. We had the room painted to the color we have been carrying around for 3 years-- Ralph Lauren--Duchess Lilac.
10. We are still the only home on our block that does not have a child.

Early rumors for the next round of referrals indicate they might reach 3/14/06 which would be a SIX day referral month. Won't know for sure until later next week. We can only hope.

There is a site those that are involved in China Adoption often refer to known as Rumor Queen...we remember a few years back reading one of her projections when the slow down began. The projection on her site at that time indicated that based on our LID (Log In Date-4/24/06) our referral would come February of 2010...and we thought that was crazy...only to be sitting here now, facing the reality that it actually might come true.

Not much else to say. We have now waited the same amount of time that we spent trying to have children via IVF...who would have thought International adoption would have taken longer. We didn't.

We just updated our calendar to the left as CCAA finally updated theirs. It's been more than a month since they've updated their records showing the dates of families who have been matched. It is still hovering around two-to-four days per month of matching. So, with 49 days ahead of us (including the two we think they matched from this past month), at an average of three days per month of matches, our referral would come in 16 months or June 2010. Jenn will turn 40 at that time.

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Nothing overly new is going on with us in this beautiful Spring. Both of us have been working a TON. Jenn's down a body at work and I'm, well, down several bodies with some furloughs mixed in. BUT, we still have our jobs and continue to ask for more responsibility to ensure some type of security (does that even exist any more?)

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Our beloved Spartans are Motown Bound today for the Final Four... and YES, I do know what that means! GO SPARTANS! We will be watching the game... and not just for the commercials. :)