It has been a CRAZY month! It is hard to believe that one month ago we had just seen our baby's face for the first time. As you might imagine, I haven't slept much since we received our referral! Sure, I'm exhausted, but it's good practice (and good to know that I can function on much less sleep than I usually get!). So, what have we been up to? Well, other than being in full-blown panic mode (which Mara has been in for most of the past month), we are trying very hard to get everything ready for Hannah! We had NOTHING ready at all. We have used Hannah's room for storage for nearly 10 years. This was not a great idea. :) So we have cleaned everything out, made many many trips to the thrift store and the dump, and are down to the last few boxes (which have now been moved to our basement!). We ordered her furniture (thanks Bubbie & Zaide!) two weeks ago, and this past weekend painted the walls a beautiful princess pink! Mara will be steam cleaning the carpet tomorrow (that DOES sound like fun, right?), and the furniture arrives on Thursday! Just need to go and buy a mattress, some bedding (we picked out this set), and a bookcase and the room will be ready (well, ready enough) for Hannah! Sure, we don't have a lot of clothes (or anything else yet!), but it doesn't really matter, does it?
We've also been working on lots of paperwork. Mara went to the Chinese Embassy today with DeeDee & George, our new friends and travel partners (they received a referral for an ADORABLE little boy the same day as us from the same orphanage - we will be traveling to Kunming together) and got our Chinese Visas! The visa office for the Embassy is quite an experience, but the people who work there might be some of the nicest people we have dealt with through the entire process. If everyone in China is as nice as the women we dealt with today, we may never come home! :) Now we just wait for our TAs...our Approval to Travel to China. Once we receive our TA, our agency can make our appointments at the US Consulate, we can book our airplane tickets, and we can go get Hannah! I have no idea when this will happen. Our agency thinks it may be another few weeks, but I am keeping my fingers crossed that they are wrong and we will receive them this week (other families with other agencies who received their referrals on the same day as us have been told that their TAs are on their way...hopefully ours are too!). We will travel 1-3 weeks after we receive our TA, so keep your fingers crossed that they are in the mail!! :)
A big thank you again to everyone for all the kind wishes. I haven't been able to email or call everyone back, but please know how much it means to us. This has been a VERY long journey (ugh...whenever a contestant on a reality show says that, Chris rolls his eyes and says "Don't Stop BELIEVING!!"), but it is amazing to know how much Hannah is loved. I cannot wait to tell her how many people were waiting for her!
Visas in hand...one step closer to Hannah!
Introducing Our Daughter!!!
We are so excited to share pictures of our little girl with everyone!! Our paperwork is all dated at the end of October, so I'm assuming that that's when these were taken, but she's such a tiny little thing! (She's sitting in one of those bouncy seats...makes it easier to realize how tiny she is!!).
All of our paperwork is in Chinese - it will be translated for us this week - but some of it we can figure out. But as of the end of October, the report is that she is a deep sleeper (yay!), can hold her head up while lying on her stomach, visually follows moving toys, follows you with moving head 
from one side to the other, is active, fond of imitating, fond of playing with toys, and fond of playing games! Hopefully we will get the rest of the report translated soon - I'm so curious to learn more about her!!
To answer a few questions...no, we haven't picked a name yet. Even though we have been waiting for four years, this was really out of the blue! When the phone rang this afternoon, I was worried that our agency was going to tell us that something was wrong or that we needed to get a new piece of paperwork done! It has been a few hours and I
am still shaking with excitement! :) We don't know when we will travel, but it will likely be at the end of March/beginning of April. In 4-5 weeks we'll receive our approval to travel from China; that's when our agency can go ahead and make our appointments at the US Consulate and we'll find out when we actually travel!
It's insane to think that we've waited for four years, and now everything is happening at once, but it's very very exciting. I'll be digging out all of the "things to do after you get your referral" papers tomorrow, and we'll start doing some baby shopping this weekend! And, of course, I'll continue to post updates here! :)
HUGE News!!
After nearly four years, we have the most exciting news...this afternoon we received our referral from China!! Her Chinese name is Xi Xue Li and she was born on June 30, 2009. We have several pictures...I will post them later tonight! :)
This was a complete and total surprise...we have been told all along that our Log In Date is April 17, 2006, and the referrals that landed today only covered through April 5. BUT...ours was included!! We had sent our dossier to China at the end of March 2006, so it looks like we had been given the wrong LID, and in our favor! :)
She is in the Kunming CWI (the orphanage) in the Yunnan Province of China. We have a huge packet of information on her...unfortunately, most of it is in Chinese! :) Our agency is getting it translated for us, but they thought we would want to come and get her picture today! We hope to travel at the end of March/beginning of April...Mara has felt all along that we would be in China for Passover, and now it looks like that might come true!! :) This was truly out of the blue - we hadn't expected a referral for another 5 or 6 months - and we feel so very blessed! More to follow soon...
No News...Still...
Yes, that's right - we still have no news. It's been over a month, and not only has there not been another batch of referrals, there hasn't even been a single rumor. A few agencies think that we may see something next week, and one agency said this week that they are "preparing for matches" (whatever that means), but who knows. With the Chinese New Year coming up, I would guess we will see a batch right before they close for the holiday. I believe that they close for a week...a few days before and a few days after the holiday so that employees can travel home. In the past, the CCAA sends out a batch right before they leave, which looks like what will happen again this year. Traditionally, they like to "clear off their desks" before the New Year (cleaning for the New Year is part of the culture), so they get that last batch out the day before they leave so that they will come back to a clean desk and fresh start. Sometimes the batch before CNY is a little bigger, but not always. I would hope that they would cover at least 2 or 3 days of LIDs, but, once again, who knows.
With the first few days of April LIDs receiving their referrals in December, we've started to think about baby stuff for the first time. Chris and I went to Baby 2 Teen (a ginormous baby super store) last weekend to look at cribs, and I am going to go to Buy Buy Baby with an adoption friend to get some advice next week. It's all so overwhelming...if you have advice on what to buy (or what NOT to buy), I would love to hear it! :) Over MLK Weekend we saw my favorite band Eddie from Ohio in concert with our friends Josh & Annie - an amazing show, made better by the absurd opening band who didn't realize we were laughing at them not with them (truly one of the unintentionally funniest moments in a long long time!) Last weekend we also said goodbye to Chris's sister Martha, who is off to Swaziland for a year. (it's a landlocked country inside of South Africa) She'll be doing conservation research, which sounds really cool, though I can't even begin to imagine living in a tent for a year! (since I won't even stay at an EconoLodge!) And this weekend we are enjoying an unexpected snow storm! Thankfully this time it is all really light and fluffy snow, so even though we have had to shovel twice already, it was a much easier time than last month's snowpocolypse!
A No-News Update (again)
Yes, it's nearly Thanksgiving and we have nothing to report. Our agency emailed us to let us know that they think we will receive our referral in mid-March (though, they're just doing math - they have no actual information). There were all sorts of rumors swirling around earlier in the month, but still, no referrals have landed. The latest is that an agency in Europe reported today that there will be no referrals in November, due to the new director of the CCAA getting "up to speed." There is all sorts of speculation about this, especially with the already rampant speculation that things are going to stop all together because of H1N1. Just when we thought we were so close, right?
It's July...
Yup, it's the end of July, and we still have no real news. Referrals landed last week - they covered a measly two days of LIDs. Blech. The good news is that they were big days (lots of dossiers logged in), so if they keep up the pace of number of referrals, we'll see more days in the coming batches. It's hard to believe that I have been doing this for three and a half years now - each month trying to figure out how the tiny batch isn't as bad as it looks. I still think we will see a referral in December or January, but you never know.
We've been keeping busy...TOO busy. Our softball team made it to the playoffs, so we spent a weekend playing softball - we came in third place in the tournament! We celebrated Chris's birthday with a surprise visit from his brother Jonathan (who had the best timed surprise 1 day business trip to the east coast ever). And we have taken on far more in the world of home improvement than we shoud have. We finally are pulling up the old carpet & lineoleum on our first floor and installing laminate. In a stunning display of us overestimating both our skills and speed, we thought
that I could paint the kitchen on Saturday while Chris installed the dining room floor, and then he could do the kitchen on Sunday. Well...the floor takes MUCH more time then you would think to install. And the kitchen took two days to paint - two days, two coats of ceiling paint, 2+ coats of primer, and 2 coats of green paint. Not sure what was on our walls before, but it ate the paint. Our little townhouse kitchen ate nearly 4 cans of paint and primer. Really. It looks PHENOMENAL though. Chris has been working on the floor every day after work and the kitchen is pretty much done. Hopefully he will have some time this weekend to finish up the dining room and start the living room. And hopefully the new floor will be in by September! :)
Swine Flu? Really?
Well, I certainly didn't see this coming. If someone had told me three years ago that we would still be waiting for our daughter, I would have been shocked. But if someone had told me that we would be impacted by swine flu? Well...I can't say that I would have believed them. But here we are. No referrals were mailed this month (the last set of referrals went through 3-8-06 and were sent at the beginning of April), and every agency has a different explanation. Some agencies are just saying that they are late this month, and that the swine flu won't impact anything. Other agencies are saying that the CCAA has told them that they will be holding referrals for 20-30 days. Still others are saying that the CCAA is holding things until June. And yet another sent out an email yesterday saying that no referrals will be sent until September. Yes, you read that right.
So where does that leave us? Well, aside from the stress of not knowing anything (and the ridiculousness of the worldwide reaction to the sniffles), I am hoping that we won't really be impacted. The precedence that the CCAA has set from the SARS scare is promising. During that time, all referrals stopped, but the CCAA continued to make matches. Once all of the travel restrictions were lifted, they sent out huge batches of referrals (and more than one batch a month) to "catch up." We weren't going to get a referral this month anyways, so if they send out a larger batch next month, we would be in the same place. But I don't know. The not knowing is horrible, and the number of agencies that say that they have talked to someone at CCAA and have wildly different information is absurd. As Chris often says, we are adopting from a country that doesn't give out information, but this stinks.
As for the two of us, we are laughing in the face of swine flu, and flying to Mexico for our vacation on Monday. Really. Even after United cancelled our flights (would you believe that United has canceled nearly every flight to Mexico until JULY??), we have rebooked and are planning on spending a blissful few days on the beach in Cancun. No internet (so no monitoring the referral situation) will be a good thing. And hopefully we will come home to some good news.
Hope
It's been a crazy crazy month. REALLY crazy. First, no real adoption news. But we do have quite a bit of hope for the future. While the last month had the CCAA only refer 4 days worth of LIDs (so we're now up to 3/6/06...our LID is 4/17/06...), many agencies are saying that things will start to pick up in the next few months. The biggest reason that they are giving is the increase in the required orphanage donation. A few months ago, the donation was raised from $3000 to about $5000 (the new donation amount is in RMB, so it fluctuates a bit with the economy). That's a huge incentive for orphanage directors to get 
paperwork submitted. More paperwork means more babies available for international adoption and more referrals. So many agencies are reporting this that I am allowing myself some hope that we will finally see a speed-up and a 2009 referral.
In other craziness, we are redoing our kitchen. So it has been construction (and dust) central. A few weeks ago the KraftMaid cabinet truck pulled up to our house (the same truck that delivers to the houses on Extreme Makeover:Home Edition!) and we now have brand new cabinets and countertops! Our kitchen 
isn't quite put back together yet, but it is amazing to have beautiful new cabinets that aren't falling apart! :)
In even BIGGER news though, two of our closest friends, Shana & Stephen, had a baby at the end of February, and I became a godmother!!! Emily Talia is simply perfect (even those people who aren't her godmother think so!), and I was lucky enough to hold her when she was only 10 hours old! I am in awe of her, and so thankful that we live close enough that I can get my Emmy fix whenever I want!! :)
Other than that (which is quite a bit!), I have been super busy with work - I am working for a CPA during tax season (the same CPA I worked for last year). I really like the people I work with (and the office dog, Harley), but between that and teaching Sunday & Hebrew school...well...you get the idea! And Chris has been working long late hours a lot lately as well. We're also getting ready for softball season to start, as well as Opening Day.
It's All About the Numbers
Like many of my friends who are waiting to adopt, playing around with the numbers has become quite the hobby. It's all about how many days are referred and how many days are left in front of us in line. Right now, we have 60 days ahead of us. So, if they were to refer 5 days a month from here on out (not totally likely, since last month was only 2 days worth, and March 2006 is rumored to be a monster of a month in terms of numbers), we have exactly a year to go. There's also the math of weekdays referred...there are 40 weekdays ahead of us (because, of course, no dossiers are logged in on the weekends). So if they could just manage to refer FOUR weekdays a month, we will be home with our little one in 2009. Sigh...what crazy math this is. Referrals haven't yet arrived for December, but it looks like they will go through February 23, 2006. 6 days/4 weekdays. By my math, that keeps us on pace for 2009.
Speaking of numbers, many agencies announced today that the orphanage donation (a mandatory part of the adoption) will increase starting in 2009. The donation has been $3000, and apparently has been so for over a decade. It is now going to be 35,000 yuan, which is just below $5,100 at today’s exchange rates. This, of course, means that not only do we now need to find an additional $2100 to complete our adoption, but because the donation/fee will now be in yuan, it could fluctuate quite a bit depending on the exchange rate. Great. The one upside to this, though, is that because the orphanages will be receiving more money per adoption, they may be more motivated to get babies "paper-ready." In order for a baby to be adopted, the orphanage has a pile of paper-work to do that gets sent to the CCAA. There are many stories of orphanage directors who say that the compensation for getting the paperwork together is not worth it - so babies sit in orphanages. If that's the case, maybe this will help.
In non-adoption news, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving. In our annual charades tournament, the men won. I would post a photo from the medal ceremony (yes, I said medal ceremony...we take our charades REALLY seriously!) but it might go to their heads. :) And in two weeks we'll be flying out to California to spend Christmas with entire Surridge clan. 3 kids + 2 aunts + 2 uncles + 2 parents + 2 grandparents = lots of family fun. Be prepared for many pictures of our excessively adorable niece and nephews when we get home. :) And, as you probably noticed, I'm attempting to make our blog look a little nicer. If you know how to fix the strange spacing and the title, please let me know! :)
Shana Tovah!
Happy 5769! We had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We had nice dinners with my parents, and enjoyed break fast after Yom Kippur with friends. Holidays always make me a little sad that we don't have our little girl, but thankful that we have such wonderful family and friends. Hopefully 5769 is the last year we spend without kids!
In the middle of the holidays, China did send a batch of referrals - they got through February 15, 2006. So, a little movement forward. And there were some random referrals sent last week for February 16 (but not every agency got them). Hopefully next month will bring a huge batch, but if this pace keeps up we have less than a year of wait ahead of us. Some basic math...if each of the next referral batches (all the way up to ours) is only 6 days, we would get our referral at the end of August 2009. If they slowed down to 5 days a month, we would be at the end of October. But if they did 7 days a month it would be the end of June! Hopefully they can do at least a week of LIDs a month, and we can travel before Sherri & Ira leave Shanghai! :)
Not much else going on with us. I have been very busy working on Fall Kallah, a big regional youth group event that our temple is hosting at the end of the month. I am the chair of the youth committee, and it turns out that planning an event for 225 teenagers is more work than I thought! I'm really excited about it though, since I went to these events when I was in high school! We are also having a great season in softball. Our team is 7-3, and Chris has made a couple of spectacular plays in center field this season (and we are both hitting much better!). And, of course, I am losing sleep with the Red Sox in the playoffs! (TOTALLY worth it though!)
9 Days
Well, in what seems to be record time, the CCAA has sent out another batch of referrals! And...they cover 9 days of LIDS! Now, before you go jumping out of your seats, it's really only 4 business days, but I'm pretty pleased. I was worried that there would be no referrals at all this month, as the CCAA was closed for at least a day or two because of the Olympics (and work was likely slowed for more than that). The speed with which they arrived is also encouraging - 22 days in between batches means that even if they continue with small batches, an extra batch or two for the year would be a bit of a speed-up. And 4 business days certainly isn't the smallest batch we've seen. So, not such horrible news.
Other than worrying a little if they would impact our already slow adoption process, I loved every second of the Olympics. Chris and I stayed up way too late to watch the live events the first week (yes, it was 2 am before I went to bed more than one night!). And thanks to the magic of tivo (and a day of temping at an office that had MSNBC on next to my desk all day), I watched it ALL the time. I saw nearly every sport, watched every preliminary heat of the swimming events, and am still humming the music they played while they handed out the medals. (a side note - did you notice how the girls holding the medals looked the same at every site? They practiced for SIX months to look like that!) I was fascinated by the fact that Michael Phelps was front page news here every day while he was swimming, but in China he was a secondary news story. (and yes, I became an even bigger "Phelps Phan" than I was before!) It was amazing to see the different venues in China, and it was really nice for me to see the beauty of China without thinking about the excruciatingly long wait. (especially during the road races - I can't wait to see all those sites!) I'm sad that they are over, but glad to be getting back to a normal sleep schedule, and hope that the CCAA gets back to normal too.
Two Years
That's right - we have been waiting nearly two years. We sent our paperwork to China over two years ago (March 29, 2006) and we were logged in nearly two years ago on April 17, 2006. Never in a million years did I think we would still be waiting - in fact, I thought by this time we would be getting ready to send in the paperwork for a little sister.
There is a little bit of news - and I do mean a little. Referrals have started to arrive for April, so there are families who are starting to see their child's face for the first time - that's wonderful news. The not-so-wonderful news is that it looks like the cut-off date was January 9, 2006...4 measly days of LIDs. They're moving forward, and this batch is traditionally the smallest of the year, but still...it stinks. There are agencies who are saying that it will continue like this until the Olympics. This doesn't surprise me at all; I have felt for a long time that once we get past the Olympics things will get better. Hearing it from sources that are more "in the know" doesn't make it better, but it confirms my gut feelings. Hopefully the "post-Olympic" speed-up will be a big one.
In other news, I had a nice birthday. Chris took me out for Japanese food (YUM!) on my birthday, and my mom made me spaghetti & meatballs and a strawberry pie (my favorites!!) on Friday. And I got the most wonderful pictures from my niece Caroline! Last weekend we went into DC to see the Cherry Blossoms - I completely underestimated how crowded it would be, but it was BEAUTIFUL. And, of course, baseball season has started! The Nationals have a beautiful new park (which we will hopefully go to in the next week or two) and the Red Sox are defending World Champs - life is good! :)
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...