Done and Gone

It is official. Our Chinese adoption dossier is complete and on its way to China… via Seattle. We have paid our dossier fee and sent the thing which has consumed our lives for the past 9 months or so to the Americans Adopting Orphans headquarters in Seattle. They will start the translation process and should be sending it to the China Center for Adoption Affairs in China on or around October 1. After that we have to wait for our login date. This is the date on which CCAA accepts our application for adoption and puts us on the official waiting list for adoption candidates to receive referral of a little girl for adoption. We should receive a login date by the end of November. In fact, our login date will most likely fall sometime in October, but we won’t find out what it is until November.

From the point of our login date, we begin our wait for an actual referral of a specific orphan for us to accept or deny as the little girl we wish to adopt. When we began this process more than a year ago, the wait for a referral from the login date was running about 8 months. We are hearing news from other adopting parents that the wait time has gone up to 19 months with some fearing 20 months or longer.

Whatever our wait, it seems most referrals are being born about 12 months before travel dates, the time at which you actually travel to pick up your child. That 20 month waiting period doesn’t seem so bad to me at the moment considering we are currently dealing with the Terrible Twos from our youngest boy, Jude, with those Trying Threes to look forward to. But it might become unbearable if the wait were to increase any more. We have our fingers crossed that those wait times will actually start to decrease next year. My theory is that they will reverse once all the hoopla of the Beijing Olympics is over.

However long the wait, I have no doubt that Jack will be taking it in stride.

The Long Road

I know it has been a very long time since I made an entry in this blog. I had lofty goals at first of making weekly entries even when no progress was being made toward the adoption, but life gets busy and every time it stopped long enough for me to consider composing an entry, there seemed too much to catch up on. Now, so much time has passed, I feel I can just overview most of those details of life that don’t really pertain to the adoption of our little girl.

We’ve gone through house training for our Corgi. She is now in a training program so we can control her barking and chewing on Angie. She doesn’t chew on me, just Angie.

Jude’s terrible twos have firmly set in since his 2nd birthday in July. He’s gotten so terrible lately. But he's also so awesome. He’s still so cute and full of guile. I’ve started referring to him as “Busey,” after the actor Gary Busey, because he acts so crazy. He likes to rub various substances into his hair, giving him the appearance of a celebrity mug shot.

Jack has grown so much. He participated in his first sport team season this summer. He was in the town t-ball league. He took the term “magnet ball” to a new level, running anywhere on the field the ball would go. By the end of the four game season he actually was beginning to learn to stay in his position. And then our little boy started school this year. I suddenly know why my parents would go all nuts about how they were losing me to each stage in my life. The time goes by too fast.

We placed Jack in a parochial Catholic school. We are not Catholic, but we felt he would stand a better chance of getting the proper attention in a private setting as opposed to a public school. He’ll go to the public school eventually. The parochial is only for the lowers grades. But he loves school. And he finally gets enough activity that he doesn’t wake us up at 6 a.m. every day.

We entered the hellish world of home improvement this summer. We remodeled our kitchen, dining room and living room. We started with a bogus contractor, ended up firing him and going with a much more expensive one and did some of the work our selves. That would be why it still isn’t finished. But we are much happier with it.

But the really big news is that while all of this other stuff was going on, we have finished our adoption dossier. We got the doctors to admit there really is nothing wrong with my liver, so we could finish our home study. We’ve been finger printed by CIS. I don't know what happened to the newspaper article the local paper was supposed to run on us. I guess they decided the town gets to see my ugly mug on the front page often enough.

We’ve had all of our paperwork authenticated and re-authenticated. And just last week the Chinese Embassy in Chicago confirmed that we had everything we needed and it is ready to send off to the Chinese adoption authorities in China. Now, if we just hadn’t blown through our fee to them fixing up our kitchen.

That whole process would have taken much less time if we had let our adoption agency do it all, but by doing it ourselves we saved a great deal of money. Now, once we send our fee and dossier off to China, our real wait begins. I think it is still about an 18 month wait. Hopefully, that will change... for the shorter. We think it would be just great if it would time out so our little girl would be born at about the same time as our new nephew/niece. Congratulations on pregnancy number two Dan and Lisa!!!

Now, in order for that to happen our wait would have to shrink by a couple of months before April. We would still have a considerable time to wait even if they are born about the same time, but if we can get a log in date by the end of the year it would be possible. They wouldn’t get to meet each other until they were each about a year old, but that would be cool.

Anyway, we are very happy to finally be approaching our log in date, the date which our wait begins for the Chinese government to send us through the system and assign us a daughter. I’ll be sure to make a big deal out of the log in date for everyone, so you’ll all know when it happens. It been a long road, and there’s still such a long way to go, but it will be well worth the wait.