Just waiting.... and waiting... and waiting

It seems like the closer we get to the anticipated referral date the slower things are going. Unfortunately, it is not only our imagination seeing we have the hard facts as well. CCAA has been only referring out half months. This means rather than all the dossiers that went to China in March being referred out in October, they split the month. Dossiers recieved before March 13 were referred out in October and dossiers received March 14- March 30 were referred out in November. I was hoping they would catch up but the people that got referrals in December were people with dossiers logged in from April 1- 14. So if referrals stay on that track they will refer out the second half of April in January, half of May in February and March and we will get our referral in April or May. This means we will not travel to get our daughter until June or July. We started our homestudy one year ago. This process seems like it will go on forever.

The reason for the slow down is because the CCAA are getting more dossiers and adoptive families than ever. They can only refer about 1500 children a month. The number of adoptive families that they are getting paperwork for each month exceeds that number. There is hope that if May is a smaller group the wait time will lessen but the trend does not seem in our favor.

One step forward, ten steps back

Steve and I painted the baby's room last weekend. It looks great. It is a celery green color. We have to buy the furniture to complete it but we are making progress. However, that is the only progress we seem to be making. There has been a tremendous slow down in the referrals from China. This month they are referring babies to those who had logged in dates (LID) in March. Evidently there were more than 1500 referrals for March LIDs. A typical month is about 800 referrals. With this many dossiers, the referrals are taking longer to be issued. Also the Consulate is going to get very backed up. We were excepting to get our referral in January and travel in March. Now it looks like we will get our referral in March and travel in May. This is really hard to swallow. I am praying that the slow down is temporary and that things will be picking up soon.

Another yard sale

Steve was gone this weekend. I got up early to take the dog for a walk on Sunday. As we were walking by the school I noticed people setting up for a yard sale. We browsed through the tables and found some really great stuff. I rushed home, got money and went back to pick up all the things I asked people to hold for me. I got tons of great stuff. I picked up a playschool doll house, a ride on scooter, a Lil Peoples farm and school bus, another farm set, a cause and effect toy, a shape sorter, a train set and some books. All for $25.

With yard sales and friends and family with older kids we are well on our way to having everything we need. Now if only I can find one more car seat and a crib at a yard sale we will be ready to go.

It has been a while

It has been a while since we last posted. Two months have gone by without much to say. There aren't any updates seeing we are just in the waiting stage now. Each month I hear of another batch of referrals leaving China and think that is one month closer to when we get ours.

Steve and I are preparing the room for the baby. We are going to be painting it soon. We will also be getting a new bed for Nick (a twin rather than the full he has now to save space) and a crib for the baby. It is amazing how many friends have given us such great things.

Phyllis and her family of girls gave us a playhouse and picnic table for the back yard. Carolyn has given us a high chair and car set. Beth will be giving us a running stroller. Not to mention all the clothes we are getting from Linda. My mother has been having fun shopping for the baby. Sophie will be the best dressed and equipped baby!!!

Keep watching this site for updates. I think we review our paperwork in November, take a class in November, and have a travel meeting in December.

Anne

Time passes slowly

Well it has been just about six weeks from when we logged in. Time really passes slowly. We have been having a good summer with Katie. Steve enjoys lots of fun days with Katie seeing he is home during the summer. We have tried to do some fun stuff on the weekends so I can join them. We have seen a few movies, went to the zoo, and have gone swimming at Grandma Bev's house several times. We attended another waiting family meeting. Katie enjoyed playing with the two children on the floor. The meetings are getting harder for Steve because it seems so far off until we are home with our daughter. I still enjoy seeing the families and hearing the stories.

I have started buying stuff for the nursery. I have decided I want to use panda bears. It is impossible to find a crib set with pandas. I have shopped eBay and found some stuff that I am going to pull together. I hope it will work. I think I am going to paint the room a light green.

I had a dream that a baby was handed to me by a Chinese man with a long beard. The dream occurred on July 23rd. I am not sure if the date will prove to be significant but decided it would be worth noting.

Paperwork in China!!

We made it past another hurdle. Our paperwork is finally in China! We had been waiting for the agency to send us an email letting us know that our dossier was sent to China.(DTC- dossier to China)

We were told that they were waiting for several other families' documents to be translated and we would be sent over in a group of five. When we did not get the email notifying us that they were on the way to China I sent the agency an email. They reported that the coordinator of the program decided not to wait and sent the two families that were done! We are in group number 28 with one other family.

The next day we got the official email from the agency stating that our log in date (LID) was June 13th, 2005. The email went on to further explain that the estimated time table is as follows: we will review paperwork for updating in November, attend a travel meeting in December, get our referral in January, and travel to pick up Sophie in March. We will also be starting our travel vaccinations soon, as well as, take one parenting adopted children course through the agency.

The waiting is horrible. Chinese New Year is the end of January. Everything shuts done for two weeks which can further slow this process. We are hoping that the craziness of the holidays will make the time pass quicker but that is yet to be seen.

We are very excited about being one step closer. We will keep you posted as the journey continues.

Update from Steve

The last few weeks have gotten us even closer to Sophie coming home to us in Maryland. Both Anne and I drove all over the Baltimore-DC metro area to get paperwork stamped and prepared for China. Just as we had finished up with those papers, our INS approval came in the mail. The folks at ATI tell us we have been very lucky, our papers only took five weeks and other folks are still waiting after twelve! We are looking forward to the summer and being able to get Sophie's room ready and baby proof the house.

It's very different becoming a parent through adoption. There are no "signs" of the baby's arrival, like an expanding waistline, so when Anne picked up some baby clothes at a yard sale last week, it made every thing seem a little more real.

Soon we'll be starting to look at flights to China and I'll begin my attempt to convince Anne that we'll be in real bad shape if we fly all that way in coach. Please send any horror stories you may have to her and help me in my cause.
Anne just told me that she's not mentioned that Sophie will be named Sophie. We had originally thought about Allison, but one day I came home after seeing a large sign near our houses which says Tai Sofia, and declared the baby's name to be Sophie. It's just stuck, and beats CTB (ask Anne).

Making progress

Time seems to be going by very slowly. It feels as if we will never meet our daughter. We are making progress, however slowly. The dossier is almost complete. We are still waiting for the INS approval. That was mailed to them 5 weeks ago so we are hoping to have that soon. The rest of our documents have been notarized, county and state certified. That process was not at all difficult. Steve brought the dossier, along with two copies to the agency on Friday, May 20th. They said they would start the translation process while we wait for the approval. Once the approval arrives and we get that notarized, county and state certified the documents will be ready to be send to China. At that time we will be assigned a travel group from our agency. The travel group will be the families we will travel with to China. I hear that once you are assigned a group it feels more real. We will see.

What did make it feel more real was shopping at a yard sale at work. They had so many cute outfits for girls for 25 cents. Who could pass that up? I am not sure if the things will even fit but it was fun buying them. I got about 20 different pieces of clothing for $5. Most of them are 18-24 months and really cute.

A note from Katie

I can't wait for my baby sister!!! I am so excited!! I always wanted to be a big sister, anyway. And Nick doesn't play with me so Sophia will be a lot of fun. I just hope she gets along with the dog. You think she will? Yeah, but everyone gets along with cats. Except Chloe, the scaredy cat of the family. Well let's hope the dog calms down before she comes. I just can't believe I have to wait a year.

Well, on Monday we went to a meeting at ATI, I met a girl about my age and two cute babies from China. They weren't that different from me. They just looked different. But who cares what they look like, anyway. I can't wait for my baby sister, again. Now I am done. Signed- Katie

It is finally ready!!

Our home study is finally ready!!! This is long overdue. Our social worker finally submitted the home study to the agency on March 31. They told us it would take about one week for them to check and edit it and then it would be sent to us for a review. Once the week had passed I sent a polite but strong email asking them when the report would be ready. The head of the social work department responded curtly that we should have it for review early in the week of April 11th but they do have ninety days to complete the home study and they were well within the ninety days. (Why they say it takes the social worker two weeks to write and then they take about a week to review is beyond me!)

So we waited patiently through the weekend only to get a call on Sunday afternoon from our social worker saying the agency would like her to interview Nick after all. Now I am sure the agency did not call our social worker on Sunday but you can see the kind of timeline she works on. She gets around to things when she can. All this meant another strong email to the agency and a call to the social worker. The social worker did interview Nick, for a total of about five minutes, over the phone on Monday evening.

We finally got the report for review on Wednesday, April 13th. Steve and I went through it in two hours and sent the agency all the necessary changes. Then we waited some more. A common theme with adoption!

Finally, on Monday, April 18th, we got an email from Anna at the agency saying that our home study was finalized and she sent it off to the INS. The approval normally takes four to six weeks. She encouraged us to get our dossier packet ready so we can move forward with that as soon as the approval from INS is in. Our dossier is almost done. I have two papers that need to be finished. I plan on doing that and then sending the whole packet to Anna for review before we go through the expense of getting them all notarized and certified.

I am so happy the home study part of this process is behind us. This was one huge hurdle that we passed. Every hurdle that we pass bring us that much closer to our baby.

Still waiting for our home study report

We are still waiting the the homestudy report. Patience is wearing thin. Our homestudy should have been completed about two weeks ago and we still have not heard a thing. The fourth and final visit from our social worker was on February 26th. It was then that she notified us that Katie would need a physical after all. We asked her to write the report and add the paragraph about Katie when the paperwork from the doctor was completed. We quickly arranged an appointment for Katie and submitted the paperwork two weeks ago. Hard to believe it could take two weeks to write the final paragraph!!

Steve called the adoption agency on Monday. I followed with a polite but strong email on Tuesday. The social worker is contracted through the agency. They intervened on our behalf and we are told the report will be submitted to the agency this week for proof reading. We are not sure how long that will take. Hopefully it will be ready to send to the INS next week.

My friends who have adopted told me to enjoy the home study process seeing that is the part where you have the most control over. Everything after this is really out of our hands. If this is control, we are in for a long and hard journey over the next year. My mantra has been "patience, patience, it will be over soon." Some days that mantra works better than others!!

What's next

The whole adoption process is just that, a process. Nothing comes easily but I guess that could be said for pregnancy too. We are waiting for our home study to be written and edited. It will then go to the INS. We have already been fingerprinted and applied to bring the baby into United States. Once the home study is there it will take about 4-6 weeks, or so we hear, for approval.

Once the INS gives us the approval we will add that to the documents for our dossier. The dossier is the information that will be translated into Chinese and sent over to China. Our dossier is almost ready to go, minus the approval. Once the approval comes all of the documents need to be notarized, then certified at the county and state level.

The documents will then go to Adoptions Together, ATI, and be translated and sent to the Chinese consulate. They will then sent to China where they will be for 6-8 months before we get our referral. With the referral we will get a picture and some medical information. If we accept the referral we will travel to China two weeks to two months after the acceptance. We will be in China for 10-14 days but get our daughter on day three or four.

This website will allow us to document the journey and update all those close to us.

Waiting parents meeting

We attended our first waiting parents meeting at Adoptions Together on February 28th. We met a family who brought home their daughter in August. She was beautiful. We just wanted to take her home. They had tons of good information about the trip to China. It was very informative.

We attended our second meeting last night. Anne's friends Pam and David were there with their daughter they brought back in October. She is so beautiful. Pam, an interpreter, is signing with her and she is picking up English and sign very quickly. There was also a family who just got back in January with their daughter. She is adorable. These meetings are very informative and supportive in nature. They are really getting us excited about adding to our family.

Getting started

We submitted our application to Adoptions Together on November 27th, 2004. We were very excited about getting the long process started. About one week later we got a thick blue book in the mail jammed packed with information regarding the adoption process and international adoptions. Anne could not wait to read through the information. The information presented painted a very real picture international adoptions with all its ups and downs. We knew the road ahead of us would be filled with paperwork and headaches as we waited for the arrival of our daughter.

We told Katie and Nick about their new sister on December 3rd. They were both excited with Katie stating she always wanted to be a big sister. We met with the social worker who would be completing the home study on December 18th. She gave us a huge packet of information and went through each form with us.

We took advantage of the week off between Christmas and New Year's to get fingerprinted, tested for HIV and TB, and to start gathering the paperwork. We scheduled our fire inspection and santiation inspection, went to the doctors, and gathered all the paperwork in no time- thanks to Anne's organizational skills!!

Our social worker completed four home visits interviewing each of us, Katie and Janet and Bob (one of our references) on February 26th. She informed us on February 26th that Katie would need a physical before she could submit our paperwork. This was not what she had stated previously. We were told that we only needed her medical records. Katie was a trooper and we got her to the doctors on March 12th, the same day we were celebrating her 9th birthday. This would be our first of many bumps in the road. Hopefully the home study will be completed soon so we can get on to the next phase of the journey.

Anne and Steve's story

Steve and Anne meet on Match.com in August 2002. Steve emailed Anne and they began to exchange emails and then phone calls in August. OnAugust 31, 2002 Steve and Anne met in person. We had a wonderful date. The night flew by. We talked about everything and really felt a connection. Steve called Anne the next day and set up a second date.It wasn't long before we knew that this was meant to be.

Anne met Katie and Nick in November. Steve started talking about getting married over Thanksgiving weekend 2002. We got engaged on Dec 21, 2002 and started planning our October wedding. We got married on October 18, 2003. We had a lovely wedding and reception here and then a wedding party in Connecticut a few weeks later for those who could not travel here for the wedding.

We started thinking about adding to our already wonderful family even before we got married. In August 2004 we had decided, for many reasons, that adoption was the best option for the both of us. Anne started talking to people who she knew had adopted. Adoptions Together, Inc. came highly recommended from several friends. Anne attended an information meeting in early fall and we both became very excited about the possibilities of adoption.