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.