the long and winding road...

Its been a tough week or so. On 8/2/06 my father in law finally lost his 2 year battle with cancer. I'm going to miss him. I was going to post about it earlier, but haven't felt up to it, maybe I will later.

On the adoption front, we are now at 180 days past LID. The current wait time has increased to 13 mos and appears to be getting longer and longer. When we originally started this process, the wait was 6 mos, now some worst case scenarios have the wait stretching to 3 years!!! I think the worst case scenarios are just that "worst case" but still. The end of July referrals went through 7/13, let's hope CCAA can get through even one day of August. Even if waits stabilize meaning they start doing 30 days at a time, we would not have a referral until 2/07 and if they continue doing half months it would be August or September of 2007. Travel would likely be around Thanksgiving 2007!! That requires a serious adjustment to expectations. When we began this process, I was amusing myself with thoughts of having Baby Girl home by Christmas of this year.

The boards are filled with comments about the situation-- anger, frustration. Some people are choosing to shorten the wait by going with a Waiting Child. It may not really be intentional, it just may be that this excrutiating wait has allowed people a lot of extra time to sort through the Waiting Child lists to find the child that is perfect for them. Some are seriously considering changing programs. I continue to check the Waiting Child lists each time my agency gets one, but have not yet found our future child there. I have investigated changing programs but that does not seem like a good option for us at this time.

Korea~ rumor is they're not taking any more applications with the plan to phase out their IA program all together.

Vietnam ~was shut down a long time and just reopened. Not really too sure about this one yet. The first referrals since the program reopening are just coming home.

Russia~ seems to be having lots of problems.

Kazakstan (sp?) ~it has that 5 week in country plus I'm not very knowledgeable about the process.

Guatemala ~very expensive, seems to be going through some growing pains.

So, yeah, that brings us back to China. Not only that but I have become so China adoption focused that its hard for me to even "think outside the box" on this one. I just feel very strongly that my daughter is there. I so hope I'm right.