CCAA Visit To the US

Apparently the China Center for Adoption Affairs was visiting adoption agencies in the US last week. Our agency mentioned something about it in their last monthly update but we haven't heard anything from them about it from them yet. The purpose of the meeting seemed to be for the CCAA to see how the children are getting along in their new families. But some agencies seem to have allowed some waiting families to attend the meetings. It doesn't sound like they were allowed to ask them any questions about the wait directly but some interesting information did come out of the meetings. This information has been making its way around the China adoption forums and Rumor boards....

• The wait times are going to continue to increase and could reach 3 years. I think we know at this point that the wait is going to continue to increase unless they start referring full months again. I don't think we will have to wait 3 years but will most likely have to wait at least 2 years in total.


• The CCAA received 30,000 dossiers in 2006 and 10,000 dossiers through May of 2007. To calculate how many total families are waiting for a referral we would need to add in the last two months in 2005. Assuming they received about the same number per month in 2005 that is about 2,500 dossiers per month. So that comes out to about 45,000 families waiting for a referral.


• The CCAA is currently referring 600 to 700 babies per month. So if we figure they got 2,500 dossiers a month in 2005 and they need to get through 2 months worth of referrals to get to us that is around 5000 families in front of us if they refer 600 babies a month that means it should take about 7 months for us to get a referral.


• Abandonment of children in China is decreasing. This is definitely a good thing for the children but is one of the factors that has added to the increased wait time. It makes sense that as the Chinese economy grows and strengthens and more of the people are lifted out of poverty there will be less abandonments. Seems you can't read a newspaper lately without seeing an article about the changes occurring in China.


• Domestic adoption in China is increasing, only 1 out of 5 of every adoptions is international. When we started researching Chinese adoption we read that one of the reasons that there were so many babies available for adoption in China was because the Chinese did not like to adopt. Apparently China has been encouraging their citizens to adopt. With a population of 1.3 billion there must be many childless couples to adopt these children. I think this has something to do with the Hague convention for adoptions that China is implementing. The basis for adoptions for the Hague is that children should be kept with their birth families. If that is not possible they should be adopted domestically and only adopted out internationally as the last resort.


• The CCAA is trying to get more orphanages to submit babies files for adoption but it seems that the orphanages may not have the resources. The incentive for the orphanages to submit paperwork is the $3,000 fee that we pay to them. But if they can adopt these babies domestically without having to prepare as much paperwork that is probably what they are doing. There is also talk of increasing the fee to get more orphanages to submit their paperwork, although I am not sure that is the right thing to do if the babies can be placed domestically. Although if there are babies that are not being placed domestically and they are just sitting in orphanages we would be more that willing to pay an increased fee to help them get the paperwork going.


• The CCAA is committed to the International Adoption program, they say to have patience and we will get a baby. To be honest there have been times throughout this process that Jen and I have gotten so numb and truly felt that we will never get a child. It is nice to know that China is committed to the program and is not planning to shut it down because the wait is so long

Lots of good information here, although most of it is second hand so we are considering it with that in mind and looking forward to what our agency has to say in their next monthly update. Most of it is what we have been hearing all along so there are no big surprises. With all of the above info in mind it is pretty easy to see why the wait times have increased so significantly. But we are inching closer, not sure how accurate my 7 more months calculation above is but it seems like it could be realistic. Although since we started this process the wait has consistently been 6 to 7 more months so we are prepared to wait longer or as long as we have to.

Wild "King"dom

Nothing new this week in adoption news, not really even any rumors out there, which is kind of odd. I am sure we will here some rumors this week though and will probably see referrals the week after. Since there is nothing new in adoption news I figured I would write about some of the fun going on in our back yard recently. We have been in our house for about 5 years now and although we don't really live out in the country we have have quite a few little critters taking up residence. Anyone who knows Jen knows that she is quite an animal lover, especially cats. So it was to her delight when during the second summer living here she found a litter of kittens living under our shed. Unfortunately they were feral so she couldn't run out and play with them. We didn't want them to continue to multiply so we decided to just borrow a "have a heart" trap and catch them and bring them to the local MSPCA so they could find them homes. Unfortunately we couldn't catch the mother so she had another litter the following summer. We caught the mother the second time around so we haven't had any kittens since. The next summer we had another family living under the shed, this time it was skunks. While the little babies were cute we didn't attempt to trap them. We left them alone and they left us alone. Not sure what happened to them but we haven't seen much of them lately. This year we seem to have a bit of a zoo.....



This little guy is usually lounging in our yard when I get home from work, he doesn't seem to be too afraid of people given that he let me walk right up to him to take this picture. Make me a little nervous for him with some of the other animals in the area.

I am not exactly sure what this thing is but we think it is a groundhog. It has dug a hole in my yard that is about 8 inches across, we are pretty sure that is where he lives. He is really shy though, I had to sit on my deck for about an hour and sit really still waiting for him to pop out.

This is the guy that makes me a bit nervous for the bunny. It is some type of hawk and it is huge. There are actually two of them that live at the bottom of our street. We had an incident with him last summer when I was out on the deck with our cat Lucy and the hawk landed on the tree branch above her and was contemplating swooping down on her. They kind of stared each other down for a few seconds and Lucy arched her back and fluffed up her tail to appear intimidating. I was really curious to see how it was going to play out then thought better of it and brought Lucy inside. I really doubt the hawk could have flown away with her but I really didn't care to find out. We also have an opossum living under my neighbors shed at the corner of my yard, although he is not very photogenic and only comes out at night so I haven't been able to get a picture of him.

Oracle Bones - A Journey Through Time In China

Oracle Bones - A Journey Through Time In China

by Peter Hessler

Oracle Bones is Peter Hessler's follow up to River Town where he writes about his time in the Peace Corps teaching English at a college in China. Oracle Bones follows some of the author's students and friends as they try to make their way in the fast changing China of today. There is also the story of an Uighur (Chinese ethnic minority) friend of his that emigrated to the United States right before the September 11th bombings. The book jumps back and forth between these stories and those of the archeologists who studied the Oracle Bones. Oracle Bones are ancient animal bones or turtle shells that were heated until they cracked and the cracks were used to tell the future. It is thought that the writing from these cracks is the oldest written Chinese language. Sadly, many of these artifacts were destroyed during the cultural revolution. If you read River Town the book may seem a bit repetitive as the author recycles some of the stories from his first book. I did enjoy the book but not as much as River Town, Oracle Bones is a bit more fragmented and doesn't really have much of a flow to it. I am sure there many connectiions and parallels that can be made comparing the past and future in the book but most of it wasn't too obvious to me. I am looking forward to Jen reading the book. With her being an English major she may pick up on more than I did.

Top 10 Ways You Know You've Waited Too Long For a Referral From China

Not much new in adoption related news, we are still two or three weeks away from the next batch of referrals. Not even much for rumors this month which is probably a good thing. Jen finished up school for the year last week so she is getting started on her summer vacation. We really don't have any big plans for this summer though. One of Jen's goals for the summer is to finish Grace's 100 good wishes quilt. Jen and I were joking around the other day about how much longer we have been waiting for a referral than we originally expected so I challenged her to come up with a David Letterman Style top ten list to post, pretty funny I think....

Jenny's Top 10 Ways You Know You've Waited Too Long For a Referral From China:

10. You've stopped telling people you're adopting from China because chances are the next time you run into them you'll still be waiting.

9. When someone tells you a far off date in the future as 12-18 months you think to yourself "wow, that's coming up so soon!"

8. You know people who have had two kids in the time you've been waiting for a referral from China.

7. The last Olympics were happening when you started trying for a family and there's a good chance you'll be in China for the '08 Olympics there.

6. You know couples who have gotten engaged, married and had a baby all while you've been trying to start a family.

5. You try out all the baby stuff on the cat to "practice"--and you take pictures to post on your website because there's no other news to report.

4. You automatically convert the time to Beijing time in your head because you think maybe the CCAA is working on referrals.

3. Your nursery bedding has been discontinued.

2. You've had to dust cobwebs off the changing table in the nursery.

1. You've gone on your last childless vacation.....5 times!!!

17 Months

We almost let slip by that last Tuesday was 17 months since our Log In Date. The CCAA also updated their website last week to confirm that the cutoff date was November 7, 2005.

Comparing The Years - June Edition

We got an email from our agency this afternoon that referrals have arrived and covered Log In Dates through 11/7/2005. They received 8 referrals this month, 7 girls and one boy. The CCAA still hasn't updated their website but we are pretty sure that 11/7 is the cutoff as other agencies are reporting it as well. So this means that they did 6 days of referrals again this month. Not the increase that we were hoping for but at least it is not less days. Last month I posted a table comparing the number of days referred last year to the number of days referred this year. There appears to be a trend over the past 8 months although there are a few anomalies here and there, this month being one of them. I do think it is worthwhile though to keep an eye on it in hopes that the upward trend from last year continues into this year. Although based on the number of Log in Dates thought to be in the rest of November I fear we will continue to see a few more small batches. I have created a chart for those that are more visual that paints a pretty interesting picture.

Our Visitors

Still no news on the next batch of referrals, we are hoping that we will hear something at some point this week. The early rumors were that this batch was going to be really big and get through the middle of November. While this would have been great and we would love to see it happen we really never believed it. Early last week there was another rumor floating around that they were going to only get through 2 days of referrals. Then there was another rumor late last week that they were going to get through 6 days which is probably more likely although we hope that they get through at least a couple more days than that. We got some interesting mail this past week in the form of a check from Google for the ads I have up on this site. I put the ads up about a year ago not expecting to earn any significant money. My earnings started out kind of slow but over the past 6 months I have been averaging around $10 a month. We are obviously not going to be able quit our jobs and retire from the advertising but a couple $100 checks a year are a nice little contribution to Grace's college fund. I am actually a bit surprised at the amount of traffic that this site gets. We started this site just as a sort of journal for our friends and family to keep track of our progress with the adoption. But it turns out more than half of the traffic to this site is from people we don't know which is fine with us as we really like following along with other people's adoption websites as well. It does make me a little nervous though that we get so many strangers looking at our website since we have some pretty personal info up here and we plan to post pictures of Grace once we get them. I started tracking all visitors to this site about a year ago just to make sure I wasn't getting any weirdos visiting the site. The tracking software I use allows me to see all kinds of cool info about who is coming to the site. Although I can't see exactly who is coming to the site it gives me a pretty good idea. I can see the city and state where the the computer is that the visitor is coming from. I can see the Internet Service Provider (Comcast, AOL) that the user is using or if the visitor comes to the website from a work computer I can see the company name. I can also tell how the visitor got to our website, if they linked from another website or if they found it through a search engine I can see what they typed it to find it. Maybe it is just the computer geek in me that finds this interesting but I thought you might find some of these statistics interesting as well

This is the main statistics summary screen. Since I started tracking I have had almost 8,500 visits to the website and those visitors viewed my pages over 23,000 times.

I have been averaging about 250 visitors and 1000 page views a month. Although the last two months my traffic really increased because the chart that I created comparing referral trends last year vs. this year got posted on all kinds of other adoption websites and really increased my traffic.

What I find most interesting is where the visitors are coming from. The dots on the map above represent where the last 100 visitors to my site are from. The majority of the traffic comes from the US but I get a significant amount of traffic from Canada, Europe, Australia and even China. The first time I got a visit from China I got a little nervous as I thought it could be the China Center of Adoption Affairs checking up on me but I think it was just a parent in China getting their child who went to my site. Last month our website was posted on an Chinese adoption forum in Denmark. I tried to get on the website to see what they were saying but the website was in Danish so I couldn't read it and figure out how to register. So if you don't know us don't be afraid to leave us a message on our guest book and say hello.

Feeling Patriotic and a Trip to the zoo

Nothing better than a long holiday weekend to keep your mind off the long wait to adopt from China. We had a pretty busy weekend. We traveled down to Maryland to watch Jen's nephew graduate from the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Pretty appropriate place to be on Memorial Day weekend, we are very proud of Ryan as he embarks on a career defending our freedom.

We also took a trip to DC to take in a couple museums and check out the Pandas at the National Zoo. We had a tough time getting any pictures of anything else other than panda butt, although this one came out Ok.

These guys were much more willing to smile for us. It was a fun weekend all around but now we are back and ready for referrals to arrive. There is still not much floating around in the way of rumors. There is still a rumor that this is going to be a big month and they are going to get to the middle of November. We would love this to be true but really don't believe that it is going to happen. Referrals should be arriving late this week or sometime next week so we will post an update when we hear anything.

Waiting

We are still about two weeks away from the next batch or referrals arrival. There are rumors floating around that it is going to be a bigger batch that what we have been seeing. This flies in the face of logic though as November is supposed to be a very big month so we are not getting our hopes up for anything more than 9 or 10 days of Log in Dates which is what they did last year and this year seems to be trending pretty close. Will be interesting to see if the trend continues, although we would love for it to be wrong and refer more than 9 or 10 LIDs. The rumors tend to be funny though, they are usually really optimistic around the middle of the month and then tend to get more accurate as we get closer to when referrals arrive. So we will probably have a better sense of how far they will get by next weekend.

King of Queens

Jen and I recorded the final episode of "King of Queens" last night and finally got around to watching it tonight. For those who do not know this was the finale where they go to China to adopt a baby. Whenever TV shows (especially sitcoms) try to take on adoption they never get it right and this was no exception. We never really watched the show but did catch an episode here and there so we get the gist of it. Now we realize that this is a comedy and it would be pretty boring for them to go through the two year plus wait it takes to adopt from China. So it didn't bother us that it took them two days to complete the paperchase.....It took us four months. It didn't bother us that they got their referral in a week......we have been waiting over 16 months. It didn't bother us that they got a referral for a 4 day old baby......the youngest a baby is at referral is 6 months old. Unfortunately 90% of the population that doesn't know anything about Chinese adoption will see the show and think that it is that easy. What did bother us were some of the stupid comments they made during the show. Carrie says "I've ordered Chinese food before but never a Chinese baby". Then Carrie finds out that she is pregnant and they perpetuate the stupid myth that infertile couples will get pregnant once they adopt and can finally relax. Uggg.....Now I know this does happen but I cannot tell you how many people after learning that we are adopting have told us that we will get pregnant after we adopt. Ummm, we had 6 failed IUIs and 3 failed IVFs, probably not going to happen. There were more stupid comments as well. After Doug finds out that Carrie is pregnant he points to the new Chinese baby and asks "what are we going to do with that one". And then says "I guess we will have two babies with very different shaped eyes". That is just not funny, and kind of racist. Also whenever they said the baby's name, Ming Mei, they would run the laugh track as if her name was a joke, still not sure why that was funny. Now maybe since we are adopting from China we are hyper-sensitive about the subject and again we realize it is a comedy but there are some things that shouldn't be joked about and thrown lightheartedly into a 60 minute sitcom for sweeps week ratings.

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mother's Day to all of the Mothers and Mothers-in-waiting out there. We had a pretty low key day today, Jen went out with a friend and I stayed home and did the house/yard work. Mother's day is tough when you are waiting but we are hoping we don't have too much longer to wait. There is a scary new rumor floating around that China may temporarily stop accepting new applications because there is such a backlog of families waiting to adopt. I read somewhere that there are between 25,000 and 30,000 dossiers in China waiting to be matched with children. At the rate they are going now it will take at least 3 years to get through this backlog. So I guess in a sense it would makes sense to hold off on accepting new applications to catch up a little. Rumors like this are rough for people waiting to turn 30 to be eligible or people planning to adopt a second child and keep their children close together in age. At this point though it is only a rumor so we aren't really concerning ourselves too much with it. We also heard tonight that one of the reality shows that Jen and I watch, Survivor, will be filmed in China next season. While I am sure the show won't focus on the culture and history of China, it will be cool to watch a mainstream show filmed there.

CCAA May Update

The CCAA updated their website tonight confirming that November 1st was the cut-off date. See update below. Last Saturday marked 16 months of waiting since our Log In Date. It is tough not to know exactly how much longer we have to wait but Jen and I have been keeping busy lately with spring cleaning and landscaping work around the house to prepare for our summer outdoor activities. This usually means cookouts on the deck and enjoying a couple drinks with friends. With just a little luck this should be our last leisurely summer on the deck. Next summer we want to be chasing Grace around the back yard.

Comparing The Years - May Edition

We got an email from our agency that referrals came in today. They only got three referrals this time for for Log in Dates through October 31st. Rumors are that the CCAA has referred through November 1st, although they have not updated their website yet so we don't know for sure. If this is true it means that they got through 6 days which is definitely better than the 2 they did last month but still is not a lot. They still have to get through 65 more days to get to our Log in Date of January 5, 2006. I posted a chart last month comparing referrals last year to this year that seems to show that the number of Log In Dates referred this year is trending very close to last year. The number of days referred this month is again very close (off by one day). So if the trend continues the number of days referred should increase over the next few months. I updated the chart and added in the next couple batches from last year to project out what things could potentially look like if the trend continues.

DTC Group Get Together

We got together this afternoon with our DTC Group. These are the people from our Adoption Agency who have the same Log In Date as we do so we will be traveling to China together. Some of the couples are going to adopt their second child and brought their little ones to the get together. It gave us a little hope that there really will be a child at the end of this journey. We had a lot of fun and it was great to talk to a group of people in the same situation as we are who really understand what we are going through. The consensus at the get together seemed to be that we will get our referral in November and travel in January. Not much news on the next batch of referrals. There is a chance that they will arrive this week but we also heard that there is a Chinese Holiday this week so the CCAA may be off for part of the week. So next week is probably more likely for referrals arriving.

Quilting

We are closing in on the time of the month when rumors start flying around regarding how far they are going to get with the next batch of referrals. There is nothing out there yet though, we just hoping they get through more that just two days like the last batch. Jen was on vacation last week so she was able to get started on Grace's quilt. I posted a picture below of all of the squares laid out on our dining room table. We got a nice little surprise the last couple days as well. The sun!!! After a week of rain and some snow last Sunday it looks like Spring may have finally arrived in New England. Sunshine and warm weather always helps to lift our spirits.

CCAA April Update

The rumors were true, they did only refer 2 days worth of Log In Dates. The update from the CCAA website is below. The odd thing was our agency got 20 referrals, which is a lot for them since they are a small agency. I went back though all of our emails from them for the past 15 months and the average number of referrals per month that they have received is 8.2. I also read on one of the adoption forums that some other small agencies got more referrals than they usually do. So it is possible that the 25th and the 26th were really heavy days and things will get back to normal next month. We will just have to wait and see. I have a feeling though that we are in for some small batches the next few months. We did get a little surprise in the mail on Wednesday, our USCIS approval. They got the document back to us pretty quickly this time although they got our address wrong. Our agency told us not to worry about it so I guess we will leave it as is. Not much else going on here, were are dealing with the ever extending wait as best we can and just hope that things will stabilize a bit soon. Needless to say, this was a rough week for us and all of the other waiting families.

Comparing The Years

This past Thursday marked 15 months since our Log In date. Referrals didn't arrive last week as we expected. They are expected to arrive early this week but we may be in for some bad news. Rumors are that they only referred 2 days worth of Log In Dates. We haven't heard anything official from our agency or the CCAA but it is looking like it may be true. If it is true we hope it is just an anomaly this month but it will most likely push us out to traveling in 2008. I compiled an interesting table below that starts with the first date that they started referring less than a month, which is when the slowdown in referrals started. I compared the number of days referred last year to this year and interestingly every month except January has very similar number of days referred. It really slowed down on the March 2006 referral date when they only referred 5 days. This corresponds to this next referral batch which may be for only 2 days. This probably is all just coincidental but if last year's pattern continues this year we could be in for a couple months of small batches of referrals.

USCIS Update

We finally got all of our paperwork together for our USCIS approval. That will go out in the mail on Monday. We have heard that approvals for renewals from the Boston office are coming back pretty fast so we expect we will hear something back within a couple weeks. Rumors are that referrals will be coming in early this week and that they may cover up to very early November. Early November would be good but we are just hoping that they get to at least October 31st. This week we also created a new page on this site with all of the books related to adoption and China that we have read. We wrote up a quick review of each book and will be updating with other books as we get through them. You can get to the page by clicking Book Reviews link on the right.

More USCIS stuff

We are making some progress on getting our paperwork together to renew our USCIS approval. We have been dragging our feet a little but we have some time to get the application in so it is no big deal. The first time around we made extra copies of all of our documents so we can just use those to renew, so that should save us some time. Since we are nearing the end of the month referrals should be out soon. We don't expect to hear anything this week, most likely next week or the week after. We are tempering our enthusiasm for this batch as the last 7 days in October have many families logged in so we are hoping they get through at least October 31st. November is rumored to be a big month as well so we are expecting the next 3 - 5 batches to be smaller than normal.

China Ghosts - My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood

China Ghosts - My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood

by Jeff Gammage

In China Ghosts the author tells the story of how he became a father to a daughter from China from three distinct perspectives. The first part, as he and his wife paperchase for their daughter, describes how he was initially very happy living a childless life. He saw no need to give up his freedom and take on the responsibility of a child. But to appease his wife he agrees to adopt a baby girl from China. His perception changes drastically once he receives his referral picture and travels to China to finally meet his daughter. The second perspective is when the author begins to bond with his daughter and finds a part of himself that he didn't know existed. He finds himself a changed man, not just that his life has changed now that he is a father but a profound love that has changed his very soul. The third and probably most interesting part of the book is when the author explores some of his conflicting feelings about his daughter's adoption. He is very grateful for the gift that China has given him but at the same time realized that the adoption of his daughter has caused great pain for his daughter's birth family and ultimately for his daughter who most likely will never have the chance to meet them. Most books about adoption from China are written by women so it was nice to read something from a male point of view for a change. I would definitely recommend reading this book, it is very well written and a pretty easy read.