The Roller Coaster

So now there's more bad news out there... the newest rumor is that the CCAA will not be sending out referrals this month (November), either, because now the new director "needs time to learn how things work". I think they've skipped 3 months so far this year! And even when they did send out referrals, the numbers were shameful.

But that's not the whole story; in order to get a true taste of what this roller coaster is like, I must first explain what the past few weeks have been like:

First we were hoping that since they skipped September, then only sent out a 4-day batch in early October, they would send another batch at the end of October (otherwise they were still crawling along at 2-day batches). Then we hit November and, since there were no new batches, we came to realize that that 4-day batch was indeed intended for September and October.

Then, a few weeks ago, the European agencies were all excited because they had heard that the CCAA had finished matching all of March 2006 (which would be another 3 days, but mostly everyone just wants to be done with March 2006 because it was such a huge month. April 2006 is much smaller, so most people believe that things will move at least a little faster once we get into April).

That rumor continued for a few days, then a conflicting rumor emerged that the CCAA had begun to match. How could they just be beginning to match if we already knew that they had finished matching all of March?

A couple of days later, there was another rumor that "packages were in the air, on their way to agencies". We all held our breath. Could this be the referrals? And is March 2006 in fact done? Could they maybe have even gotten into April???

Nope, all of those packages turned out to be other things; no referrals.

Then another set of packages were in the air...

No referrals.

Today the rumor is that they will not send out referrals at all this month; maybe next month.

What about the promise of a speed up in the fall? What about the assurances of "more referrals in 2009 than in 2008"? It's just not happening.

So you can kind of see what this wait is like for us. Only add to it our emotions and our strong desire to finally meet the little ones that we have been waiting for- and dreaming about- for so long.

A lot of people are beginning to think that this is all because of China's fears about the Swine Flu. Apparently they completely stopped all IA (International Adoption) back with the SARS epidemic for several months, but before they admitted that was the reason they gave out all kinds of excuses. Hopefully that is all that is going on here, that they are worried about this new "epidemic" and just want to see what happens, but eventually they will start back and send out referrals in huge batches! If not, then I just don't know what is going to happen.