Open for business

Well, our new blog is open for businee. Please click on the following link: http://journeytoourchild.blogspot.com/ to follow our journey. I will no longer be posting here, so make sure you book mark the new site.

Link to New Blog Coming Soon!!!

Stay tuned!!!

Vietnam!!!

Have no time for anything else, but I will eventually. Life is just hectic right now being the holidays and all. I can't wait to share more, but just don't have the time right now! Patience, please!

Our Decision is...

Uh, I got to unfortunately, sign off & get ready for work. But I should post this weekend. Sorry to keep you in suspense, but I have a train to catch in 45 minutes!

New Regulations for China adoptions

I don't have much time to post, but those of you who aren't involved in your own adoption might be interested to know this. The CCAA the governmental agency responsible for adoptions in China had a BIG meeting on December 8th and came up with the following regulations to lower the numbers of dossiers that prospective adoptive parents are sending in. Supposedly they have/are getting twice the number of dossiers than they have paper-ready children. They do have other children, but for some reason they aren't ready to adopt.

The New Regulations

Married couples only. No singles. Agencies may continue to submit singles dossiers within their 8% constraints until May 1, 2007 and then the CCAA will not accept any more single dossiers.
Married couples must be married over 2 years if there are no previous marriages. If there are previous marriages then the present marriage must be over 5 years. However, no more than two previous marriages will be allowed (it is unclear if this is two per person or two per couple)

Each parent must be 30 to 50 years old. No parent can be outside of this range. Upper limit can be 55 for a family in the waiting child program (and that “can be” kind of looks like it’s going to be on a case by case basis, not an absolute, but it’s hard to tell).

The CCAA wants healthy parents - no infectious disease, no mental disease (including depression or anxiety), no blindness, and no serious disease or disability. There is a note about waiting to see what the CCAA’s formal notice says, which sounds to me like they hope there will be more information in the formal notice about these things. There is another note that cancer was not specifically mentioned.

Both parents must have a BMI under 40.

At least one parent must have a stable job. Income requirement is $10,000 per family member including the child to be adopted. Family’s net assets must be over $80,000.

Each parent must have a high school education or higher.

No more than five children in the home including the child to be adopted. The youngest child in the home must be over 1 year old. Exceptions will be considered for the waiting child program.

No criminal record. There is a note about the CCAA not elaborating so we will again have to wait to see what the formal notice says.

The CCAA fees are also changing - going from $410 to $620

Well, we meet almost all these new requirements, except if there is a previous marriage, one must be married 5 years. Although, Kevin divorced in 92 and did not marry until after 11 years, we still need to meet the 5 year requirement and have only been married since September 2003. Therefore, after speaking to our agency, they recommended that we change countries; although the new rules don't go into effect until May 1, 2007 with all the things that must be done and all the governmental agencies involved, there is a very high chance that we wouln't beat the deadline, especially since our agency wants all dossiers in by April 1st, so they have enough time to check them and get them to China. So, we have decided to switch countries. We will love a child no matter what country. I am suppose to get a call from our agency's adoption consultant from the country we have chosen, but that means you will have to wait until I talk to them, before I let you in on what country it will be. Stay tuned for more information.

Received Finally!

Today, in the mail we finally received the packet from CHI, our adoption agency. I had to look at it briefly, but I'm being good and not going to really read it until after I finish a few things around here, namely finishing the Christmas letter. I've done the rough draft by hand, but I need to type it , edit it and have Kevin approve it. The e-mail that we received on the 29th approving us said the packet would be mailed out that day or the following day. The postmark though is stamped December 4th. Now that makes more sense that it would take 2 days or less to get here from St Louis.

Our 1st Snowstorm of the Season

Here are pictures from the snowstorm we had last Friday. They were actually taken on Saturday.





Still nothing in the mail. I'm taking a vacation day tomorrow, so if we don't receive it in the mail tomorrow, I'll send the woman who e-mailed me that it was on the way; even with the snowstorm, we should have gotten it in the mail by now; it has been a week or will by tomorrow. The main office is only in St. Louis, which is only about 5 or 6 hours from here. Maybe it got lost in the mail or something. Although, it is early, I am going to go to bed and just get up early in the morning; even an hour and a half extra sleep will feel great and then I am going to bed a little bit earlier than I do sometimes.

We're still waiting for the agency contract & other materials. I guess this is a way to prepare us for the long wait that is just getting longer. We also had a big snowstorm in the midwest. Our part of Chicagoland got over a foot of snow. And now the temperatures have been extremely cold, single digit lows near zero. It's hard to believe, but over Thanksgiving weekend, we hit record highs. It was so unseasonably warm, but a week later and everything is just the opposite almost. I wonder if they are still calling for mild winter. After the past several days, it sure doesn't feel like it. But things can change quickly here in Chicagoland. We could even be wearing shorts over Christmas. OK, maybe not shorts, but we have had some extremely warm Christmases in the 60's even. It would be nice, since Kevin & I are on vacation the week between Christmas and New Years. We will be staying home, unless we go up to the U.P for a few days to visit Kevin's family. When I get home, I'll post a few pictures of our snowstorm on Friday.

New referrals are on their way!

Congratulations to everyone of you, who are going to finally, see your babies' faces. For those of you without prior knowledge the China adoption world. The CCAA is the governmental gency in China that matches adoptive parents to their child who is waiting in China. Parents who's paperwork was logged in to China between August 26th and September 8th, 2005 will now be seeing their 1st glimpses of their child. They will probably travel in 6-8 weeks or usually, that is how it goes, but with Chinese New Year aroundthat time , it will probably be more like 10-12 weeks.

Now the big question will be, when will those referrals start flying in! Then in a few weeks, there will be the big question as to whether there will be another batch of referrals before the end of the year! There had been a lot of rumours a week or so ago that the CCAA may start rolling out full months and then the wait would begin to stabilize. But since they only covered 19 days, it does not look like the wait will be stabilizing in the near future. At this pace and the fact that we are only at the very beginning of the process, who knows when we may actually have a little one. Ithink the wait is now about 15 months from LID (Log-In-Date - when you are officially in the computer system in China) to Referral.