Someone online likened the wait for a referral from China to a roller coaster ride, and I have to agree with her. Rumors about what CCAA is doing, how many paper-ready babies (babies ready to be matched with a family) they have in a given month, how many LIDs they will process each month, and when they will send out referrals and travel authorizations fly across the internet every day. I read a lot of these rumors because I want to know what's going on with the program. There are some 20,000 or so dossiers in "adoption purgatory" right now - waiting for CCAA to assign them a baby. CCAA releases referrals once a month, and the big questions right now are "How many babies are being referred next week? How many LIDs did they complete?"
The rumors throughout the month of May have ranged from referrals through LIDs of mid-November 2005 to referrals only through the first few days of November 2005. At first, we read that CCAA would likely get into double digits, possibly even getting as far is November 21, 2005. Just yesterday though the bad rumors started pouring in - that CCAA might only be referring babies to families logged in between November 2 and November 7th or 8th. Ugh.
This is TERRIBLE news. If CCAA doesn't pick up the pace soon, we will easily be dealing with a three year wait for our daughter once we are logged in. I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach over this. Hubby and I had decided that three years was the longest we were willing to wait between LID and referral. If CCAA continues to send out small batches of referrals, I just don't see how we could possibly adopt from China.
Here is the problem with a long wait:
1. We really don't want M to be more than five or six at the oldest when she finally gets a younger sibling. She'll be two when our dossier goes to China.
2. Every 12 months or so, you have to update your homestudy. This costs several hundred dollars. If you move, add to your family, change jobs, etc., you have to update your homestudy. Again, this costs several hundred dollars, depending on the homestudy agency.
3. Every 18 months, you have to redo your USCIS paperwork. The cost is going up from $545 to file the I600-A and $140 for fingerprints to $750 for the I-600A and $160 for fingerprints. USCIS is reportedly going to give parents one free redo of their paperwork, which is nice. The problem is that you file the I600A before your dossier ever goes to China. So about a year or so after you're logged in, you have to redo the I600-A and redo your fingerprints (which for us means a four hour round trip drive to the nearest USCIS office). Oh, and the USCIS paperwork requires an updated homestudy, so we have coordinate updating the homestudy with the filing of the USCIS paperwork. Basically, this will add a minimum of another $1000 or so onto our adoption costs.
4. Our lives have to be put on hold while we wait for a referral. We can't move, change jobs, or add to our family without updating the homestudy. We can't take a big vacation because Hubby needs to save his time off for the adoption trip. We can't do any costly remodels to the house because we need to be saving the money for the adoption. Three years is a long time to put your life on hold like that.
5. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that something could happen that will affect our ability to adopt from China. CCAA has the power to change the rules whenever they want, and they have the power to shut down the program. If they want to say "Sorry, we're done. We're not referring any more babies," they can do that, and there's nothing we can do about it. This is true of any country of course, but so much can change in even a short period of time in international adoption that the idea of waiting years on China makes me a little nervous.
6. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that people will jump ship from China and look to other countries to adopt. That's great if they are in line ahead of us with earlier LIDs, because if enough people pull their dossiers, the line will eventually speed up. But if we decide after waiting however many years for a Chinese adoption that we just can't wait any longer, we may find that other programs are deluged with dossiers from families who would have adopted from China if the wait weren't so bloody long. Already referrals from Vietnam, Ethiopia, and other countries are taking longer than they did just a few months ago. Agencies that used to quickly place baby girls for adoption from Vietnam are now posting on their websites that families wanting to adopt a child under two must be willing to accept a boy. I worry that we'll wait in line for two years or so, decide to look at other options, and find that starting over in Vietnam or elsewhere will mean ANOTHER two years or more of waiting.
I'm feeling very frustrated today by the roller coaster ride that is now Chinese adoption, and I'm honestly not sure if I want to get on this particular ride.