Road to Hana is Moving!

I've learned so much and gotten great support and inspiration through others' adoption blogs and that was key to my decision to keep this blog public - to pay it forward. As we inch closer to referral we are starting to think more seriously about preparing for our child's arrival. Part of that is ensuring privacy when the need arises. Blogger gives me the option of password protecting the entire blog, but I like the Wordpress option of password protecting individual posts better. That gives me more precise control over what is public and what is meant for family and close friends only.

I've moved all the posts and links from here over to The Road to Hana, Wordpress edition. Please update your links and Bloglines accordingly and I'll see you on the other side!

The Road to Hana

Politics vs. Child Welfare

Someone posted a link to this article on one of the China adoption message boards I read - it's an opinion piece, and in line with my beliefs about international adoption and how politics are ultimately sentencing many children around the world to institutional living, a detriment to their development, education and eventual success in life, often putting them at risk of falling into homelessness, crime and prostitution as they age out.

While I believe that in-country adoptions should supersede international adoptions, in many countries, there are far more children than families willing to adopt them. In these cases, it is better for the children's welfare to get them into families abroad rather than raise them in an orphanage. Unfortunately, politics too often holds the children hostage for the sake of nationalism.

Click here to read the opinion piece.

36 Months LID...3 years!

Our dossier has been officially logged in with the CCAA for 36 months - that's 3 years of official waiting in the slow line that is China adoption.  The wait is far from over, but we're at the point where it's unlikely - we hope - that our wait will continue to consistently stretch further and further with no end in sight as it has since we started this.  Our current estimate for referral using forecasting is January 2010.  Our agency is hoping we'll see referral this fall - they are hoping to see a slight speed up in referral rates soon.  We'll just continue waiting and see.

It's been a bit surreal, this journey.  When we logged in we were told to expect referral in 8-10 months, then that estimate quickly grew to one year and we've been expecting referral "in about a year" for 3 years now...Well that estimate should now start to ever so slowly go down.  "Should" being the key word here.  

April Stork Alert

April referrals came last week, covering Log in Dates (LIDs) March 7 and March 8, 2006.  Congratulations to all families who now wait to travel to their new children! 

There are 43 days left to refer until our LID of 4/20/06 is reached.  The current 12-month rate of referral is 4.83 days per referral batch, which come about once per month.  If this rate remains unchanged we can expect our referral in January 2010.   This is significant because it reflects our wait from current time to expected referral actually shrinking slightly after 3 years of expansion.  

As for our concurrent adoption attempt, we have put a limit on our patience and if nothing happens in the next few weeks, we'll be ending it.  I'll let you all know what happens - and what was going on.  Right now I'm thinking perhaps this fell into our laps last year to be a distraction from the long China wait.