This post may be my longest post yet and for wordy me that's saying something. However, it has been a really long wait! We started the process in October of 2005--5 years, and we still do not have a child through adoption. I guess I'll just write more than one post on this issue.
When we found an agency the wait for many families the last 6-12 months before us was 6 months. However, even at our first meeting the wait was starting to grow. Our agency's stock phrase was "people recently waited 6 months for a referral, but anything could happen."
Referral Date LID Length of Wait
| 2005-11-10 | 2005-03-31 | 224 days | ||
| 2005-10-03 | 2005-03-15 | 202 days | ||
| 2005-09-01 | 2005-02-26 | 187 days | ||
| 2005-07-29 | 2005-01-27 | 183 days | ||
| 2005-06-24 | 2004-12-20 | 186 days | ||
| 2005-05-25 | 2004-11-19 | 187 days | ||
| 2005-04-18 | 2004-10-19 | 181 days | ||
| 2005-03-17 | 2004-09-16 | 182 days |
Instead of processing one month of LID's a month, the CCAA started taking two months to go through one month of LID's. We saw this and accepted it. We spent the next 8 months getting all our paperwork done and sent to China.
Referral Date LID Length of Wait
| 2006-08-24 | 2005-07-22 | 398 days | |
| 2006-07-26 | 2005-07-13 | 378 days | |
| 2006-06-26 | 2005-06-28 | 363 days | |
| 2006-05-26 | 2005-06-15 | 345 days | |
| 2006-04-27 | 2005-06-06 | 325 days | |
| 2006-03-27 | 2005-05-30 | 301 days | |
| 2006-02-27 | 2005-05-25 | 278 days | |
| 2006-01-25 | 2005-05-13 | 257 days | |
| 2006-01-02 | 2005-04-25 | 252 days | |
| 2005-12-08 | 2005-04-14 | 238 days |
While we paperchased the wait for waiting families went from about six months to a little over a year. Our agency warned us it was now taking a year, but anything could happen. We looked at the numbers and did our own math. Taking a LID of 8/15/2006 and assuming the speed stayed at two months to go through one month with 13 months of referrals before us (2 x 13=26), we settled in to a 26 month or about 2 year, as we told people, wait.
Oak got a vasectomy so we could focus on our adoption and we started saving every penny towards said adoption. Two years wasn't the ideal wait, but it gave us more time to save, and it gave me more time to get back to normal after SnapDragon's birth.
For the first year of waiting only our family and close friends knew. After a year it became too difficult for overly honest me to demurely smile in answer to the question, "Are you done?" "Well, actually...my husband got a vasectomy, so yeah, except...we have a child waiting in China for us. No, we don't know who she is. We are probably about two years from going to get her. She might not even be born yet."
Yes, during that year wait the length between LID and referral stretched out even more. We now only had 8 months of LID's in line before us, but it was taking about 3 month of referrals to go through one month. 3X8=24. Are you seeing a pattern? It doesn't matter when you met me in the adoption process, our answer has always been "we'll have our child in about 2 years." If you met me this week (as many of you have) our answer is still the same.
I think that's all for this post. I'll leave you with one last chart that brings us up to 8/2/2007--one year after our documents were sent to China.
Referral date LID Length of Wait
| 2007-08-02 | 2005-11-21 | 619 days | |
| 2007-07-03 | 2005-11-14 | 596 days | |
| 2007-06-06 | 2005-11-07 | 576 days | |
| 2007-04-30 | 2005-11-01 | 545 days | |
| 2007-04-09 | 2005-10-26 | 530 days | |
| 2007-03-05 | 2005-10-24 | 497 days | |
| 2007-02-01 | 2005-10-13 | 476 days | |
| 2007-01-02 | 2005-09-27 | 462 days | |
| 2006-11-30 | 2005-09-08 | 448 days | |
| 2006-10-30 | 2005-08-25 | 431 days | |
| 2006-09-22 | 2005-08-09 | 409 days | |
| 2006-08-24 | 2005-07-22 | 398 day |
Go here for the next installment
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