FINALLY, some good news!


After 14 months, we finally got some good news - we are out of review!! HOORAY!!!! If you don't remember, in the review room, the CCAA goes over each dossier with a fine toothed comb, and can contact our agency to ask more questions. They can also deny our application (actually, they can deny our application at any time, and while any dossier being denied is rare, it is EXTREMELY rare to be denied after you pass review). Now that our dossier has FINALLY passed through review, our dossier goes into a new place to wait some more, then goes to the matching room. This is where we will actually be matched with our daughter! There is a huge backlog of dossiers, so the wait after review can be awhile. (remember, they just matched through November 7, 2005...we're April 17, 2006, and most are predicting that we'll wait a total of 24-36 months) So while we have a ways to go, this is finally (and happily) a step in the right direction. We'll be celebrating...

Referrals and Some Math

Ok, first a little bit (VERY little bit) of news. Referrals for this month have landed, and it appears that they cover through November 7, 2005. That's 6 days of LIDs. Sigh...

Now for some math. I like to look at things logically, and this makes sense to me. We sent our dossier to China on March 28, 2006. Since that date, there have been 166 days of LIDs referred (5/25-5/30/05 were referred on 3/27/06). There are 160 days of LIDs ahead of us. So...if the CCAA maintained their average pace, we're about halfway there. Of course, there's nothing at all to say that they will maintain this pace. Most people think that things will slow down even further as they work through the November '05 LIDs, but will speed up a bit once they hit the '06 LIDs. (hopefully, that will average out) And if they keep referring 6 days of LIDs a month (like they did this month and last), we're looking at two more years of waiting. I'm really hopeful that things will speed up, and that China won't let the wait go much over two years. Of course, I said that about the wait not going over 18 months, yet here we are. Keep your fingers crossed that we'll see our daughter's face before 2009!

Other than being frustrated with the wait, we have been keeping busy. We got away for a one day mini-vacation to Williamsburg over Memorial Day weekend. We've been playing a lot of softball (though not always well...let's just say that we're in a division with teams that are a bit more competitive than us!) and planted lots of flowers in the backyard. And we're doing some traveling - Mara is going to Williamsburg this weekend for a girls' spa weekend (to celebrate our friend Shana's wedding...a grown-up bachelorette party!) and we're both going to Delaware next weekend for our cousin Emma's Bat Mitzvah. We'll also head down to the beach sometime this summer and out to Cleveland for Shana & Stephen's wedding.

Hope to have some more news soon (especially about that darn review room)...