No News...


...and hopefully that's a good thing. There's some rather conflicting rumors out there right now...a few that say the next few months will be big ones (and we're at the beginning of a speed-up) and one that says they won't even get to 11-21-05 in the next batch (which would slow things down even further). There's no telling which is true...hopefully it's somewhere in between.

We're working hard on renewing all of our paperwork. I hated doing it the first time, but at least I thought I would do it once and we would have our daughter home by now. This time I'm a bit more jaded, especially since the reality is that we'll likely have to do it a THIRD time before we travel. There's a chance we could travel within a year (so we would travel on this set of paperwork), but I'll admit it - the chance is slim, especially with the likelihood that no one will travel in August next year because of the Olympics. We're meeting with the social worker next week, so at least we're making progress.

This week we're traveling to Cleveland for Shana & Stephen's wedding. We're really excited. A bunch of us are going to the Red Sox-Indians game there Thursday night, we're going to go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and, of course, there's the wedding (and all the wedding stuff!) to go to! :) It is going to be a blast! Speaking of, we had a blast at the beach. Chris got a nasty sunburn, and I nearly got knocked out by a wave, but the trip was phenomenal. The picture is of us at one of our favorite places ever - Howard's Pub. I wish we could go back now! :)

7 More Steps Forward

One more post before we leave for the beach. We're going to Ocracoke Island, and I couldn't be more excited. :)

Referrals have landed, and they cover through November
14, 2005. That's 7 days of LIDs. Since our LID is April 17, 2006, that's 154 days in front of us. While I'm not excited that this batch only covers 7 days, it's still progress, and I'll take progress in any form!

We've had a frustrating week with our paperwork. We have to renew a lot of our paperwork in the next month or two, and we found out that there are new regulations in place in Virginia. It was a VERY stressful day Tuesday when we found out, but after a trip out to our agency Tuesday and a trip to the police headquarters for fingerprinting today, I think we're back on track. I just can't believe we have to re-do so much of the paperwork that we've already done, simply because of time. Grrrr....

The CCAA was in the US a couple of weeks ago, and the overall feeling of the visits was positive. They admit that the wait will likely extend out to three years, though I think we'll wait closer to 2 1/2. The really interesting thing is that they believe that once they get through the 2005 LIDs, they think that referrals will start to come in larger batches (15 days a month instead of 7). Most people believe it will take until the end of 2007 to get all the 2005 families their referrals. Then, if things speed up to 15 days a month, we would receive our referral sometime in late summer 2008. (so we would travel in the late fall...November '08ish) Crazy, especially considering that when we started the process the wait was 7-9 months (and that our agency coordinator thought that we would be home by Passover 2007 for sure. HA!). There's also a school of thought that things will speed up significantly after the Olympics, which would lend further credence to the idea of us traveling late in 2008. If nothing else, since we've been waiting, 173 days of LIDs have been referred. So, even with slowdowns, we're about halfway there. (is it strange to say "14 1/2 months down, 14 1/2 to go"?)

The wait has been really hard, and the notion that we're not quite halfway done is scary too. But at least we know that in the end we will have our little girl. There's a great article on msnbc.com about another family whose experiences are much like ours. You can read it here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17937816/
We're off to a Brewers game Saturday then the beach...hope to have some good news when we get back...