Welcome!

Hello everyone! Thanks for visiting our blog about the upcoming adoption of our second daughter (or son!). For the time being, we are calling her Mei Mei which means ''little sister'' in Chinese. Fitting, since she will be Cara-Li's little sister. Cara-Li is Jie Jie which means ''big sister''. OK. Enough with the Mandarin lessons! On to business.

I would like to take a moment to review important dates concerning this adoption. I am doing this mostly for our family as a log and to keep track of what happened when. For those of you who are interested, please read on. For those of you who are not, thanks for visiting and I will be updating this blog shortly when we receive further information.

May 1, 2005: Officially decided that we would adopt for a second time.
May 12, 2005: Signed on with our agency, Formons une Famille (FUF).
May 13, 2005: Sent forms to Centre Jeunesse in order to start the process.
July 5, 12, 15, 2005: Interviews with our social worker to complete our Homestudy.
August 8, 2005: Homestudy is sent to FUF which is then forwarded to the Société d'Adoption Internationale (SAI).
August 17, 2005: R5 is received from SAI. This is the form that is needed to go to court.
September 19, 2005: Court date. Adoption is approved.
September 30, 2005: Our completed dossier is brought to FUF for review and translation.
October 31, 2005: Our dossier is sent to China. This is our DTC (dossier to China) date.
November 11, 2005: Our dossier has been logged in in China. This is our LID (log in date), the most important date to remember. Everything after this will be referred to this date.

Now, let me now explain to you the referral process. Once you have this very infamous date, the LID, you pretty much sit around waiting as we have since Novemebr 11, 2005. Yes, folks... 2005! That means we have been waiting for 16 months. That is almost double the normal gestation period of a human being! OK. That aside. You wait and you wait and then finally you are close. Example. Last Monday, March 5th, referrals (this means the matching of a child to a family) came out up to October 24, 2005. This means that anyone logged in Oct. 24th and prior received a phone call to inform them that they are now proud parents of said baby. Well, you might say that with an LID of Nov. 11th that we are really close. Yes, in effect we are. But things are moving so slowly. In that on March 5th, only 11 days of referrals were done. Which means that if we were to be in the next batch of referrals (beginning of April), they would have to match 18 days worth. Which is very unlikely. Therefore, we can guesstimate that our referral will be received in the May batch. We hope!

So what do we do in the meantime? Well, one would think may be... prepare for the arrival of 2nd baby, get baby room ready, go through Cara-Li's baby clothes, shop, pack, read up on things, etc. OR just sit around and do absolutely nothing! That is what I am doing... absolutely nothing!