One Year

Today marks our 1 year LID-versary; we have been logged in for one year today.

In the past year we have only made it through 34 days of LIDs, and we still have 1,075 to go. But we have made it through Review, which is great news!

This past year has brought a few ups, and many downs; there have been moments of excitement and rumors of good news, as well as a good deal of bad news- but such is life on the great roller coaster of adoption! We remain confident through it all, and completely certain that this is what we are meant to do. We will continue to wait, and to do whatever we need to do, until we can bring our little Caitlin home at last!

P.S./Update: We decided to celebrate our LID-versary with dinner at our favorite local Chinese restaurant!

Here We Go Again!

Paul and I have decided to go ahead and update our homestudy and paperwork for California. We had originally thought that we would only be in this state for 2 years before moving on, and so we assumed there would be little to no chance of us being here by the time we got a referral, so we allowed our paperwork to expire. Since it now looks like we will be heading to San Diego next (and thus sticking around in CA for 3 more years), we are going to go ahead and bite the proverbial bullet and get it over with. This way we can be current with our state of residence, just in case!

We have a new social worker from an agency here in CA, and we have been working with her to get a firm understanding of what we will need to do. The bad news is that it appears that we will basically need to start over from scratch; our old homestudy from Virginia is no longer valid (they are only good for one year), and none of it was going to be accepted by California anyway. The good news is that at least we have "been there, done that", so the process is not as overwhelming to me as it was the last time. Now I know where to go, who to talk to, and how to go about getting all the information and documentation we will need.

And so we begin again. We are finished with the preliminary application process; I am driving up to our new agency today to turn all those papers in, as well as some other things I went ahead and collected for them (since I know they will be needed, such as birth certificates, our marriage certificate, copies of our passports, our most recent physicals, etc.). Then they will schedule our first introductory interview/home visit, hopefully next week. After that we can begin to work on the actual homestudy.

As always, I'll keep you posted!

We Made it Through "Review"!!

I don't know how I missed this, but back on March 10th Rumor Queen reported that the CCAA has finished reviewing all files of families logged in through April 2009! THAT INCLUDES US (March 20, 2009)!!!!! If this is true, we never heard anything- and no news it GREAT news! This means we are cleared and our file has been moved into a new room at the CCAA. As far as the CCAA is concerned, as long as there are no drastic and life-altering changes, they have approved us and we will one day get a referral for a child (as long as we are willing to wait indefinitely)!

Hey, at least SOMETHING is moving! :)

Again, for a better explanation of the review process, please click here for my past post on "What's next in the process"...

UPDATE: I have spoken to our agency, and they have confirmed that we are in fact out of review!! WE ARE CLEAR!!!!

Oooohhhh, I hope so!!! :)

In Review???

Believe it or not, I have reason to believe that our file may already be in review with the CCAA!! According to Rumor Queen (the go-to website for families adopting from China), the CCAA has announced that they have reviewed all the files with Log In Dates (LIDs) up to December 31, 2008. They are moving incredibly fast, reviewing something like 6 months at a time right now, so I can only assume that we (with an LID of March 20, 2009) are currently in review!

Another person reported on Rumor Queen that their agency has told them that they are out of review. They have an LID of April 2009. If that's true, then we are out of review- and no questions were asked! We're clear!!!

For an explanation of the "Review Room" and the CCAA, please click here to see my previous "FAQ" post about "What's next in the process?".

6 More Marbles!

You read that right- SIX whole marbles!!! They have not referred 6 days since last June! The realist in me must point out that the actual number of families who received referrals was about the same as it's been because these were 6 smaller days (April 6-11, 2006), so this is not a sign of a speed-up. But many of us were afraid that the CCAA was just going to refer 2 days worth of LIDs each month, regardless of the number of families that included (and thus signaling the impossibility of us ever receiving a referral), so we are just ecstatic that they seem to be going by the number of families/babies referred each month instead of sticking to just 2 days a month.

Not only did they triple the number of days referred from what they've been doing, but they also sent these referrals out only 28 days after the last batch- even though Chinese New Year was this month, so the CCAA would have been closed for at least 5 days. Even with their break, they still managed to get them out in a timely manner. All of these things are good news for those of us who are so anxiously waiting!Jar #1 now has 1,075 marbles; we are 34 days closer to Caitlin!!