Christmas and CCAA stuff

Jen and I are both on vacation this week, we were hoping to go on a little skiing trip but there isn't any snow anywhere in New England. So we are just taking the time to relax. We did send a letter out to the USCIS today as our fingerprints are about to expire and we will need to be re-printed. Hopefully we will hear from them within the next few weeks so we can get that taken care of. We had a nice quiet Christmas, spent time with family, pretty low key. Grace got a few presents as well. Grammy and Grandpa got her a snowsuit. Uncle Stephen, Aunt Maura and the girls got her an Asian Cabbage Patch Newborn. And Grandma King got her a piggy bank.



I found something really cool this morning as well, Love Without Boundaries has some pictures of the CCAA's new building. One of the pictures is of a shelf of all of the waiting dossiers. We assume that our dossier is on that shelf somewhere. This is about as close as we are going to get to getting an ultrasound pic. I have been wanting to make a donation to this organization and a note on the page asks for a donation if you use the pics. They do some great work in China so we made a donation and here is the pic.

New CCAA Rules

A few weeks ago the Chinese adoption community was buzzing about a meeting that the China Center of Adoption Affairs had regarding new rules for adoptive parents. The reported details of the meeting were that as of May 1st 2007 China will no longer accept applications to place children with parents who:

• Are Single
• Have been married less than 2 years
• Have a BMI over 40
• Are under 30 or over 50
• Have been divorced more than 2 times
• Have been treated for infectious disease, depression or anxiety
• Have net assets under $80,000
• Do not have at least a high school education
• And a few other random things

Fortunately Jen and I would not be affected by any of the new restrictions and since we have already sent our application to China it is expected that we would be grandfathered in even if we fell into the above restrictions. There are a lot of people though that were hoping to adopt in the coming year and will no longer be able to because of the new rules. Also many couples who have already adopted once from China will now not be able to go back to adopt a mei mei (little sister). The odd thing is that the CCAA has not officially released a statement about these new restrictions. Because nothing official has been released and some of the restrictions are open to interpretation there seems to be some confusion regarding some of the restrictions. Some agencies are posting/reporting the restrictions as fact but the details are being interpreted differently by each agency. We haven't heard anything from our agency about the new rules, which is good. I think they are waiting until something official comes out rather than speculate. This week the media picked up on the new restrictions and there were articles in most of the major papers including this one in the Boston Globe. Hopefully something official will be released soon so we all know for sure what these new restrictions will be.
The next batch of referrals should be coming out soon as well. There were rumors that they would be here before Christmas, another rumor that they would be here after Christmas and yet another rumor that they will not be here until next year. One of the rumors has to be right but s usual nobody has any idea when.

Jen finished up her Christmas shopping a few weeks ago and I as usual haven't started yet. We are planning a low key Christmas this year, we didn't decorate the house or put up a tree. We are just planning to visit with family and save the big celebrations for when we have Grace home. Jen and I did buy each other a special gift for Christmas though, we have a vacation in Jamaica to look forward to in February.

11 Month as Christmas Cards

We were hoping this would finally be the year where we could send out Christmas cards with a family picture including Grace. Instead we have to settle for this:

We usually keep the door to the nursery closed so when Lucy gets a chance to go in there she has to investigate everything. I guess she decided that the changing table was for her. Today is also kind of a milestone for us as it is 11 months since our Log in Date. Sometimes it feels like the past 11 months has flown by which gives us some hope that the remaining months will go by just as fast.

CCAA December Update

The China Center for Adoption Affairs website was updated late last week that they have finished placement of children with families have log in dates up to September 8, 2006. That is fourteen days worth of Log in Dates which seems to be about the average they have been referring the past few months. Based on an current average of about 15 days of LIDs referred per month, this would put us at getting our referral sometime this summer. But we really hate to set our expectations based on current averages because as we have seen so much can change month to month. For anyone who happened to see Jen's parent's 50th Anniversary announcement in the Lowell Sun this weekend, it was a misprint that we recently adopted Grace. It was supposed to read that we are waiting to adopt Grace.