Homestudy Update and Other Stuff

This past week we sent out all of our documents for our homestudy update. In a couple weeks we should get our updated homestudy back from our social worker that we will need to bring with us to China. Referrals should be coming this week, rumors are that they will cover through the August 23rd. This would be 13 days of referrals which is less than last month but not really surprising as the 24th is understood to have many families logged in on this day. I think we have resigned ourselves that a speed up is not going to happen. Today Jen went out for lunch in Boston at PF Changs with some of the women from our DTC group. They had a little baby shower for each other and had some good food. Jen came home raving about the food and I was a little jealous so we are going to have to take a trip there after work sometime soon. While Jen was out shopping for a baby shower present she saw this:


She just had to get it for Gracie. I didn't even realize that they still made them. I always thought these dolls were kind of ugly but Jen loved hers and still has it I think so I am sure Gracie will love it as well.

Full Weekend

Jen and I are a bit tired tonight, we had a crash course in childcare this weekend. Jen's brother and his wife planned a night away so we took their three girls (ages 2, 5 and 9) for the weekend. The kids were really well behaved but it was quite a shock for us to go from no kids to 3. We started our weekend with them yesterday around noon when the kids were dropped off. We took off to a local farm to check out the animals and go for a hayride. Interestingly, while we were there we saw four FCCs, this is Jen and my codeword for when we see a family with children from China (we usually stare at them and sometimes follow them around but never get up the nerve to say hello). We picked up some pumpkins for the kids and then it was time to head over to church. Church was interesting. There was an elderly gentleman behind us who kept making random comments and I guess assumed we were a family because as we were leaving he told me I must really have my hands full with four women in my life. I didn't really feel like explaining to him that we weren't their parents so I just kind of laughed uncomfortably and left. I guess it is a pretty easy mistake to make as the kids do look a bit like Jen. But his comment got me thinking about how our family will be perceived once we get Grace home. Because we were all the same race and looked alike the guy assumed we were a family. But I think most people wouldn't even think twice or comment about it. Grace will not look like either of us, we are going to have to get used to people looking at our family and wondering what our deal is, asking questions and making comments. Some of these comments I am sure we will perceive as rude. The church experience made it really hit home that we will probably never be able to blend in as most families do. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing just something we will need to be prepared for and get used to. After Church we picked up some Chinese food and watched Herbie Fully Loaded on DVD. We put the kids to bed around 9:30 and we crashed pretty soon after. The youngest woke up a few times crying probably because she didn't know where she was. I woke up every time, I think Jen slept right through, a sign of things to come? They woke up around 7 and Jen went down to put Nickelodeon on TV for them, I went out to get donuts. After breakfast I needed to entertain them while Jen got ready. We played a game they called "Get scared by Uncle Steve". Since we don't have kids we don't have any masks, toys or props but I improvised with blankets and what I could find, you can make a pretty scary monster with a laundry basket and an old sheet. They left this afternoon and we crashed and watched the Patriots game. It was a fun weekend for us, our cat Lucy, on the other hand, was not impressed. She spent most of her time in the basement and would just meow when she saw me as if to say, "get them out of here". There was a little incident this morning as well where she bit one of the kids, no damage, blood or tears so all was well. I think it was good for her though, she is going to have to get used having a little one around eventually.

9 Months

Today marks 9 months since our dossier was logged in at the China Center for Adoption Affairs. As tough as it the wait has been, what makes it so much more difficult is that we have no idea how much longer the wait will be. When our friends and family ask us how much longer, all we can say is "we don't know". Realistically I think we probably have another year to wait. I hope I am wrong but we just can't get our hopes up that things are going to speed up only to be disappointed when they don't. Along with the longer wait comes the expiration of some of our forms. We finished our home study last November and it is only valid for one year so we need to get that updated. I think all that means is a visit by our social worker to ensure that nothing has changed in our lives, have our criminal background checks redone and pay a fee. We will probably be calling to get that process started next week. Hopefully we don't need to have all of our forms redone and notarized as well.

CCAA September Update

The China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) updated their website last night that they have finished placement of children with families registered before August 9th. That is 18 days worth of referrals which is twice as much as they did last month. Although, most of the rumor sites are saying that the beginning of August had very few registered log in dates so this may not be a sign that things are speeding up. They still have to get through 5 months of Log in Dates to get to us but it is significant progress so we are excited. Haven't heard anything from our agency yet whether they received any referrals this month but we should hear from them within the next couple days. The other part of the CCAA website update says that they have finished reviewing applications registered in December 2005. Since we were registered in January they should be reviewing our application now. Kind of odd to think that someone in China could be looking at our application as I write this.

Bathroom Remodel

We finally got around to taking some pics of our bathroom remodel.....

Before

After

We are pretty happy with the way it come out. It was definitely in need of an upgrade from the bad 80s decor. Jen is trying to talk me into buying an LCD screen to mount on the wall so she can watch Oprah and have a bath. I guess Gracie could also use it to watch cartoons while she is taking a tubbie. We'll see. Not a whole lot of rumors on this month's upcoming batch of referrals. We are not sure what to expect based on last month's small batch. But still hopeful that things will start speeding up. We should know for sure late this week or early next week.

Football

We took off this past weekend to visit Jen's family and take in some college football. The home team won and the weather was great so everyone was happy. I feel like it wouldn't be appropriate not to say something today on the 5 year anniversary of September 11th. We always feel pretty patriotic when we are down in the Washington area but to see all of these brave young men and women preparing to stand up and defend our country really humbles me. All I can really say is Thank You..
Nothing really going on in adoption news, Jen and I did finish up our Hepatitis vaccinations last week, so I guess that is one less thing we have to worry about. Our bathroom remodel is finally finished as well. We just need to touch up some paint and hang a couple things on the walls and we are back to normal.

8 Months

Tomorrow marks 8 months since our Log In Date. Some days is seems like the time has gone by pretty fast and some days it feels like we have been waiting forever. It has definitely been like a roller coaster ride. I spend a lot of time reading other waiting families' websites and blogs as it is nice to get some perspective from people that are in the same boat as we are. Have noticed recently that morale seems to be pretty low with many waiting families. The common theme seems to be that we just have no idea how long the wait is going to be. A few families just can't deal with it and are switching to domestic adoption or other countries. This is not something Jen and I have ever considered, we wish we knew how long the wait is going to be but we don't and we know our daughter is in China. We attended a wedding this past weekend for saw many of my family members who excitedly asked us if there was anything new with the adoption. It was tough to have to say again and again, no, nothing, no idea when we will know. It is nice to see people genuinely excited for us but at the same time it is difficult to tell people that we have no idea when Grace will be coming home. To give us just a nibble of good news the China Center of Adoption Affairs updated their website last week that they have finished review of adoption applications registered in their office before November 30th 2005. So this means that they are now working on December and since we are logged in January we should be next. I read somewhere that they actually work on two months at a time so they could actually be reviewing out application now. From what I understand the review process is just to make sure all of your documents are in order and you meet all of the requirements. Sometimes people will get a call requesting additional information, we have our fingers crossed that we will make it through OK. I think we will breathe a little easier when the website reads that they have finished reviewing applications registered in January. See the latest screen shot below.

August Referrals

This month's batch of referrals arrived at our agency yesterday, they had only 4 referrals in this batch with log in dates of July 14th 2005. We have heard that this batch had referrals up to July 22nd but our agency didn't have any LIDs between the 15th and the 22nd. Unfortunately this is only 9 days worth of referrals. Last month they did 15 days which was a few more days than the previous month so it looked like the trend was to refer a couple more days each month. Now we are not sure what to think, probably just a coincidence that they were referring more days each month. The pattern of the referrals coming in was a little different this month as well. Usually around mid month rumors start flying around, some good, some bad, and by the end of the month someone in the know will leak how many days will be referred for the month, then referrals arrive a few days later. This month there weren't really any rumors except that referrals would be coming out next week or early September and then on Thursday people started reporting that they were getting referrals. Not sure what to make of this, maybe the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs is getting a little more strict with the information that they release. Probably a good thing as these rumors can drive a person crazy. We have heard that August is a light month so as long as they can get through the rest of July next month August should go pretty fast, we hope.

Jen starts back up at school next week, when we started the adoption process we were thinking that we would probably have the baby by now and she would take some time off, now it looks like she will most likely be working the full school year based on how referrals have slowed down. I guess this just means that we can take our 5th last childless vacation this winter. Something to look forward to. We are still not completely done with out bathroom remodel. The tub and toilet are installed but still no sink. At least we have a partially functioning bathroom now. The sink should be installed next week. We also realized that we need to get the electrician back in to move a light fixture. We bought a new medicine cabinet/mirror and it is shaped a little differently from our old one. I can only see half of my face when I look into it and I am not very tall. So we need to move it up about 6 inches but there is a light fixture above it so we need to get that moved first. We did take the new whirlpool tub for a test-drive this week, very relaxing, definitely a good investment.

5 Year Anniversary

Yesterday Jen and I celebrated our 5 Year Anniversary. We went out to dinner to celebrate and spent a ridiculous amount of money dining at a local restaurant called Silks at Stonehedge Inn. We have been there a couple times and the food and wine is always great. The first time we went we had only been dating a few years and it was our first time in a fancy restaurant. We were so out of our element, funny how much we have changed since then. Someone once told me that life never really turns out how you expect it to. If you would have asked us on our wedding day where we thought we would be in five years, I guarantee we would not have said we would be preparing to travel to China to adopt a baby. I expect we would have said happily married with a couple kids. We are happily married, we are just going about having the kids a little differently than most. We are still working on getting the nursery set up. Our current project is cleaning out the closet. Right now it is being used as Jen's seasonal closet and various other storage, so we needed to get some more closet space. So off we went to IKEA and bought a new wardrobe. We needed some bookcases as well so I took a couple vacation days this week and have been putting together furniture for the past couple days. This prompted us to clean and organize our basement which is a good thing as we hope to use it as a playroom for Gracie.

I wish I had a before pic but this is how it looks now.

This is the other, unorganized side of our basement, where we are storing some of the big boxed baby items.

We are hoping to get everything done this weekend, need to go to Babies-R-Us as the mattress is on sale, which we think is the last big item we need to get. We expected referrals to come this week but they didn't. Looks like they will be coming early next week and will cover Log In Dates through July 13th as was rumored. Although this isn't official yet, the China Center for Adoption Affairs website hasn't been updated and we haven't heard anything from our agency.

Working on the Nursery

We finally have sorted through most of the shower gifts and have them pretty much organized. We have been working on putting the nursery together now that we have stuff to put in there. I will post some pictures when it is complete. We need to get a few more things but are waiting for them to go on sale. The difficulty now is having to look at a completed nursery everyday and we have no baby in there and no real idea of when we will get her. We may need to keep the door closed for a while so that we don't have to see it every day. The next batch of referrals should be coming out this week. There have been rumors that the China Center for Adoption Affairs building is moving and that could delay referrals a bit. The rumors also seem to be saying that this referral group will cover people with Log In dates up to July 13th. This would be 15 days which is 2 more days than last month but unfortunately not a full month as some people in the adoption community were expecting. So our best case scenario of getting our referral in January 2007 is probably not going to happen. We are now looking at getting our referral sometime between February 2007 and July 2007.

Baby Shower

This was a pretty busy weekend for us. On Friday we had a 50th Anniversary party for Jen's parents. Lots of family were up for the party and we had a really good time. Yesterday, Jen had a baby shower. It was so nice to have so many friends and family supporting us with the adoption. We got so many nice gifts, Grace is definitely not going to go without anything. We are still trying to sort through everything and probably will for the next couple of weeks. Today we went to Babies R Us and used some of the gift cards that we got on some of the registry items that were not purchased. I have enough toys and furniture to put together to keep me busy for months. Some pictures from the shower below. We'll post some more as we get them.

CAWLI Picnic

We had a fun day yesterday. We attended a picnic hosted by some families from our adoption agency. There were about 20 families there with children adopted from China as well as quite a few waiting families like us. It was nice to see so many happy families, some with more than one baby from China. We also got to meet a couple more families from our DTC group who we will probably be traveling to China with. We are now a year in since we started the adoption process last summer. It has gone by pretty fast. We hope that the remaining wait time goes just as fast. Hope everyone has a great holiday weekend.

CCAA June Update

The image below is a screenshot I took of the China Center for Adoption Affairs website as of Thursday. They have finished placement of children registered before June 28th. This means that they got through thirteen days of referrals this month. It is good news that they are processing a few more days each month. Although the wait now is at the 1 year point, in order for us to get our referral in January (1 year) they would need to start processing full months of referrals from this point forward. Not sure how likely that is but there are rumors that May and June 2005 were really heavy LID months and July and August are much lighter. I guess we wait and see. Our agency hasn't received the referrals yet, probably will early next week. The other part of the CCAA website update is that they have finished review of applications that they received before October 31st. They got ours in January so we are about two months away from the review room. Once it gets to the review room it is checked over to ensure everything is in order and sometimes they will request additional information from us. Apparently our application has been just sitting in some office in China for the past 6 months, nobody has even looked at it yet. Jen finished school this week so she is happy to be on her summer vacation. We don't have any big vacation plans for this summer as I am trying to save my vacation time for the trip to China and then take a couple weeks off afterward. We are planning to do a little remodeling on our upstairs bathroom this summer. We aren't doing it ourselves though, just hiring someone to replace the tub, fixtures and retiling. This will be the first major work we are having done to our house so it should be interesting.

Adoption Class

I know I haven't updated the site in a while but there hasn't been much adoption related stuff going on. We were pretty busy this weekend though. Yesterday we attended another adoption class called "Adjustment of Internationally Adopted Children". The class was given by the mother of two grown children adopted from South America. Got some good information to help prepare ourselves for when we bring Grace home. On the way home we stopped at the Samsonite Outlet and bought our luggage for our trip to China. We ended purchasing over $600 worth of luggage, fortunately we had some gift certificates from our credit card points so our out of pocket expense was significantly less. I got my first "Happy Father's (to be) Day Card" and many happy Father's day wishes so that was pretty cool. This is about the time of the month that the rumors start swirling about the month's referrals. All seem to be pointing to a few more days than last month. We should know for sure this week or next.

PTAG

We attended our Parent Travel Advisory Group Meeting yesterday at our adoption agency. It was great hearing all of the travel stories but also a reality check that things don't always go perfectly while over in China. The director of our adoption agency stopped by the meeting as well. This was our first time meeting her and she is an amazing woman, we could listen to her speak for hours. The reason we decided to use our agency is because of all of the good things we heard about her. You can really see the love she has for the children and China. She talked a little bit about the growing wait time but basically told us not to pay attention to any of the rumors because nobody really knows what is going to happen. I think at this point Jen and I are at peace with the growing wait time, we realize that we have no control over it so there is no use worrying about it.

Referrals

We got an email from our adoption agency on Friday stating that they had received this month's referrals. This batch went through people with a Log In Date of June 15th, so that is 9 days of referrals since last month. The number of days seems to be increasing by two days each month. Not a very big increase but at least it is an increase rather than a decrease. People keep asking us when we will be bringing Grace home and the honest answer is we really don't know. If the wait time stays around 12 months like it is now we should be getting a referral in Jan 2007 and traveling a month or so later. But that is IF the wait stays at 12 months. There is no way to tell what is going to happen with referrals between now and then. So, we not-so-patiently wait. I can say we are enjoying sleeping late in the morning spending late nights out in Boston, things we won't be able to do soon enough. Next Saturday we are attending a Parent Travel Advisory Group Training session at our adoption agency. This meeting is presented by parents that have already traveled to China. They will advise us on what to expect while traveling in China and what to pack. Should be an interesting meeting.

Too Much Rain

It has been a pretty rough week. Last Sunday night all the rain that we had been getting caught up to us and our basement flooded. Not too much damage, just a soggy carpet. Some of the flooding was pretty serious in our area. A lot of people have some pretty serious damage, so we aren't complaining. Jen's school was canceled for the week so she went to her brother's in Florida to get away from the rain. I also found out that there were some complications with surgery that my brother was having. Still not sure what exactly is going on with him, hoping to get more info later this week and that everything will turn out OK. Nothing new to report with the adoption. Referrals should be coming out this week. The rumors seem to be saying that this group will include a couple more days than last month.

Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mother's Day to all of the mothers and mothers to be out there. Last year Mother's day was a bittersweet time for Jen. We were in the midst of fertility treatments and were in church on Mother's day, the priest has all of the mothers stand to be recognized and it was so rough to see Jen's pain as she couldn't stand because she wasn't a mother yet. This year there were only happy tears. Even though the process is going rather slow we know that most likely by this time next year she will be a mom. We spent the day today visiting with our moms. We also finally got around to installing the ceiling light in Grace's room today. The rumor mill is starting to pick up regarding this month's referrals, all seem to be positive rumors but they are just rumors at this point so we aren't taking them too seriously yet.

4 Months

Friday was the four month anniversary of our Log in Date. Based on the current time frame we should be about 1/3 of the way through the wait for a referral. Yesterday, Jen and I went to the Peabody-Essex museum in Salem, MA to see the Yin Yu Tang house. This is a late Qing dynasty house that was originally located in China that has been brought over here and rebuilt. You get to tour the house and see how they lived in China. A wealthy family lived in this house for Eight generations from about 1800 to 1982. Should be a fun place to take Grace to someday.

Baby Care Class

I changed My first diaper

We attended our baby care class yesterday and had a lot of fun. Since Jen is an old pro at this type of stuff she let me do most of the work. I changed my first diaper and it wasn't that bad. Albeit, it was a doll and not a squirmy, screaming child with a poopy diaper. There were 6 other couples in the class with us. One couple is adopting domestically, another is adopting from Korea and another from Guatemala. There were two other couples adopting from China, one of the couples is using the same agency as we are and has the same Log In Date so we will most likely be traveling to China with them. It was great to meet another couple that we will be traveling with. In the class they went over basic care and safety stuff. They also explained how to use some of the different types of bottles. Jen has been bugging me participate in the 6 Weird things tag so....

6 Weird Things About Steve...

1. I can't wear hats. They just don't look right on me, not sure why, maybe I have a weird shaped head. When I do wear one I get comment like (if the person is trying to be nice) Oh, Steve, I have never seen you in a hat. This is usually said with a smirk on their face. Or, if they are not trying to be nice.....Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
2. I have a phobia about things being put in my eyes, like eyedrops. I just hope I never need to wear contact lenses. Probably stems from the eye surgery I had when I was a kid.
3. When I was in college I taught computer classes at a lock-up facility for teenage girls. These girls were there because they were too young to be in prison. On my first day there I saw I girl being taken out in @nkle sh@ckles. Definitely a weird experience. (I had to use the @ to replace replace the a's because some pervs were finding this website through some inappropriate web searches).
4. A few years ago, driving home from Jen's house I hit a guy with my car. He was running from a crime scene chasing another guy with a piece of metal. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, slammed on my brakes then watched him fly over the hood of my car. He wasn't severely injured but they did take him away in an ambulance. The good thing was I slowed him down enough so the guy he was chasing got away. So I may have saved someone's life.
5. I am the tallest person in my family.....and I am 5'-6"
6. My name is Steven King, enough said.