Friday, December 31, 2004

Year End 2004

Dear Friends:

Today is New Years Eve. It is a time to look to the future and to look back at the year that has gone by. 2004 has been a good year for this friend house as Malcolm and I have been busy preparing for the new arrival to our family, our darling daughter.
This past Christmas marked our 1-year anniversary of the signing of our adoption agency application. By that stroke of the pen and with the ringing in of 2004 started us in the whirlwind of paperwork, letters of references, social worker visits, more paperwork, police clearances from the US and the UK, FBI checks, more paperwork, fingerprints, medicals, state clearances, more paperwork, a visit to the state capital of Pennsylvania, multiple phone calls to our agency, more paperwork, a very late night call to New Scotland yard, 3 visits to the British Embassy in DC, 4 visits to the State department, 3 visits to the Chinese Consulate in DC and more paperwork. All of this “Paperchasing” came to a finish where I made one visit to the Kinko's/FedEx and copied the completed documents required and sent the originals off to our agency in Colorado. Where they the agency translated all of the paperwork into Mandarin and sent it of to the offices of the CCAA in China. We heard officially that on August 30 we were officially logged into their system and so now we wait. The wait we were warned that it would be the most painful part of the adoption journey. Truthfully I did not believe them but they were right.
How the system works is that the CCAA works by months. In September they sent out the referrals out to those that had their paperwork logged in by March, October. April and so on. Sometimes things have happened which either doubles up the Months and sometimes things out of anyone's control like SARS can happen which can cause months of delay. No one really knows when they are going to send out the referrals next, not even the agencies. It is all down to China and of course Divine Providence. As one seasoned adoptive parents said to another perspective parent who was complaining during the wait, “Just wait till you meet your child you will be glad that you waited because you would not be matched with her if you didn't.” Awe, Divine Providence.
So as you ring in the New Year say a little prayer for our daughter waiting for us in China. We hope to get there as soon as we can.
We wish you ALL a Very Happy New Year. God Bless.
Taney & Malcolm

Friday, December 10, 2004

Referral update: December 10

Taney came into the family room this evening to tell me that June referrals were out and that this also included some from July. It is very early reports and we will know how wide the spread of referrals are for this month.

After the inital surprise, although I had been wondering when June was coming out, the reality that August DTC could be one month away is a real reality check. So mid January we could know so much more...

Keep posted for updates. Both of us are already grinning like cheshire cats at the thought of a few weeks to go.