Rumors are flying this way and that way about the China program and how many LIDs will receive referrals in early August. We've heard a rumor that CCAA may actually finish November and get into December 2005 LIDs with the next two batches of referrals - ie August and September 2007. This would be HUGE if it actually happens. If it did happen, they could get well into January 2006 LIDs before the end of the year. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed or holding my breath that it will actually happen, but it would be nice.
Hubby agreed to look into Kazakhstan with me. We'd automatically rejected it after hearing that we had the option of either a 6 week in-country stay or two trips, one of 3 weeks and another trip about a week in length. That's a long time to be overseas, especially if you're not by the beach or in some well-traveled tourist locale like London or Paris. It would be especially difficult if we couldn't take M. with us. But we keep coming back to Kazakhstan as a possibility. We could adopt a baby girl who'd likely be under a year old when we travel. The orphanages are supposedly very good and the children fairly healthy. And it turns out that some of the bigger Kaz agencies actually have an escorting program. We'd still have to travel for the first trip of about 3 weeks, but then instead of returning to Kazakhstan a few weeks later, our child would be brought to the US. Cost-wise, escorting appears to be about the same cost as it would be for Hubby and I to fly back to Kazakhstan, stay a week, and bring our daughter home.
On to domestic matters... I have decided to go back to work. If we are going to adopt, we need to get our finances in order, and that will happen much more quickly with me working. We lucked out and nabbed a spot for M. at a really awesome daycare center, so I'm very happy with that. I'm currently job hunting, and I hope to find something soon. I'm nervous about the idea of leaving M. after being at home with her for such a long time, but I'm sure she'll do great in the new center.
Hubby and I have been pondering the 3rd bedroom in our house and still haven't made any progress with it. It is ostensibly going to be an office/guest room until we welcome a second child into our family. We don't know how long it will be before another child arrives, so we're unsure how much time and money we want to invest in creating a nice office/guest room. I mean, I don't want to run out and get nifty office furniture and guest linens and paint the room and all that if it's going to be turned into a nursery in another year or two. But we also can't just leave the room like it is either. As of right now, about 2/3 of the room has been primed. We stopped when we realized we weren't sure what color we were going to paint the space.
Along the same lines, we've also been debating what to do with the master bedroom. The existing furniture is not in the best shape, and we'd like to replace it soon. I came up with an idea for a very neat arrangement of furniture in the space that would allow us to put the computer in our room, which would then make it much easier to convert the 3rd bedroom into a nursery. Hubby likes the idea, but it will involve a lot of work. We're talking about building a new headboard, an armoire, two night tables, and a desk, PLUS creating a custom storage system in the master bedroom closets that will allow us to store most of our clothing in the closests instead of in dressers that take up a lot of space in the room.
You know, when I look at that list of furniture, I can't help but think that maybe we should get in line for China. If we go with a quicker adoption program, I'm not sure we could accomplish all of that before the next baby arrives.
That is how far the CCAA got with their referrals for the month of June. They stopped with the November 1, 2005 LIDs last month, so they only made it through six stinking days. I felt sick to my stomach when I read that. November 2005 is supposed to be a huge month in terms of dossiers logged in, so at this rate, it could take six months just to get through November. We likely won't see 2006 LIDs referred until next year!
What does that mean for us? Well, the earliest we could likely be logged in because of my age is sometime in August 2008. CCAA is still in early November 2005. For us to get a referral from China, CCAA will have to work through all the dossiers logged in between November 2005 and August 2008. We had previously figured that if CCAA referred made it through November by August (this was based on an earlier rumor that June 2007 might see a big batch of referrals, which ended up not being the case), and then referred three week batches every month until they got to August 2008 LIDs, we would have a referral in just under THREE YEARS from our LID. So somewhere around late summer 2011. M would be five years old. We felt like that would be doable for us, because baby #2 would likely be close to a year old, making our girls about four years apart in age.
But now... I'm just sick over another month with only six days of LIDs. If CCAA continues to refer six days of LIDs, it will take FIVE YEARS just to go through ONE year of LIDs! M could be a teenager before her sister comes home! Seeing this all laid out in excel makes me furious at the adoption agencies who continue to insist to prospective adoptive parents that the wait for a Chinese infant will be about two years. In what universe??? The ONLY way the wait will be two years is if 1) a large percentage of the people already logged in drop out, pull their dossiers and go somewhere else and 2) the CCAA goes back to referring a month or more of LIDs each month.
I'm inclined to just say "forget it" and move on, but Hubby and I really have felt called towards China. We're not quite ready to give up. So for now, we are watching and waiting, ever the eternal optimists, hoping for some miracle to occur in the Chinese adoption program, hopefully before it comes time for us to begin the paperchase.
I spoke yesterday with one of the few US agencies that places children from Japan. It was a good conversation in that I found out that the total estimated cost - including travel and government fees - to adopt from Japan through this agency is about $41,000. That beats the $50,000 or so that I've been quoted by a few people.
The downside is that this agency will not reveal the name of the Japanese agency they work with until after you've signed the agency contract and paid some of the fees. They told me that they don't want anyone contacting the Japanese agency directly. Well, duh! Of course they don't want that - the Japanese agency might tell them that they don't NEED an American placement agency!
So now Hubby and I are wondering how much it would cost to adopt directly from the unnamed Japanese agency without paying the middleman. If we could get the costs well below the $41,000 the American agency quoted, Japan becomes a more realistic option for us.
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.
On Thursday night we participated in the online seminar that a multi-country agency was hosting. This was the same agency who had the technical glitch in getting us signed up for the seminar. It was a pretty basic, "this is who we are, this is how each country program works, this is why we're really great and you should hire us." They were very upfront about wait times, things that would disqualify you from certain countries, etc. One person did all the talking while a second person answered questions people typed to her during the conference.
I typed a question about their Taiwan program. You see, the US State Department doesn't list any requirements for the length of marriage when adopting from Taiwan, so any requirements seem to be agency-specific. Most agencies seem to want adoptive parents to be married at least two or three years, and they seem to prefer couples who've been together for longer than that. Hubby and I have been married for three years, but we've been together for five. This particular agency stated that couples were required to be married for five years. Now, I KNEW this was an agency requirement and not a Taiwan requirement, and I knew from the talk the agency rep was giving that Taiwanese birthmothers, who are involved in the selection of adoptive parents, prefered educated couples who'd never been divorced, who were financially stable and who only had one or two children in the home. Well, that's us!
I typed in a question directly to the agency rep explaining that we'd been married three years, together for five, both had college degrees, owned our own home, had never been previously married, and had only one child. Would they approve us for Taiwan? She typed back a few minutes later, YES, we would approve you. I asked if they could do some sort of pre-approval process, because I didn't want to go to the time and expense of compiling a dossier only to have it rejected in Taiwan. She wrote back that it was not a problem - they would approve us based on our application, and we would not have anything to worry about.
I left the web conference feeling pretty good about the agency and their programs, but I still had a lot of questions that needed to be answered, so I called back the next day and left a message for the woman who'd done all the talking on the conference the night before. She called me back and addressed me by the wrong name. She claimed to have misheard my phone message. I thought it was strange, but I put that aside.
I asked about the Taiwan program and said something about how we'd been married for three years. She immediately broke in and told me that we didn't qualify for the program. I was a bit taken aback and explained that her colleague had told us last night that we most certainly DID qualify. She cut me off and said, "oh, no, she is totally mistaken. I don't know why she would tell you that. I'll have to have a talk with her. But regardless, you don't qualify, so Taiwan isn't an option for you." I gritted my teeth for a moment and said that I understood that this was an agency requirement, not a country requirement, and she cut me off again to insist (incorrectly) that no, this was a country requirement.
Okay, moving on... I asked about their China program and discovered that it is extremely small. China is at the top of our list right now for country programs, and we want an agency that has a strong Chinese adoption program. But, I figured that while I had her on the phone, I could at least ask some general questions about Chinese adoption, the paperchase, travel, etc. It went downhill from there.
I asked how many times we'd need to redo our I-600A, as the USCIS paperwork is only valid for 18 months. It costs $545 to file your I-600A and another $140 for both parents to be fingerprinted. Add in a couple hundred more for a homestudy update (required by USCIS), and you're looking at $1000 or so just to redo the USCIS paperwork. She insisted that we didn't have to redo it, we could just get a renewal for a small fee. Now, I've talked to probably two dozen families online in the past few weeks, all of whom have just redone their I-600A. They have all told me that 1) there is NO renewal process with the USCIS. You HAVE to redo the I-600A to get your 171-H and 2) You HAVE to pay the $545 fee plus the $140 to be re-fingerprinted. I told agency lady that I was pretty sure it was going to cost us $1000 to get a new 171-H, and for budgeting purposes, I was trying to figure out whether we'd have to redo it once or twice. She got snippy and said that she'd been working in international adoption for years and was CERTAIN that we could renew the paperwork, and that it would not cost anywhere near what you pay the first time you do the USCIS paperwork. Um, okay. I don't care how long she's been working in international adoption, she's wrong.
She said during the online web conference that the wait time for a referral from China was not likely to increase to more than two years. I asked her about that, and she said, "oh, well, it could change, but we don't think it will get longer than that." I said, "Really? Could you share with me why you think that? I really don't want to wait too long for a referral, but just based on the calendar and where CCAA is now with LIDs, we figured that they'd have to refer three weeks of LIDs per batch every month until they hit August 2008... and if they do that, we'd have a wait of almost THREE years." She stumbled around that question a lot, and it was obvious that she knew very little about her own agency's Chinese adoption program. Honestly, I think I knew more than she did.
I asked a few more questions, and our exchange was polite. At the end of the conversation, she thanked me for calling, and as she said goodbye, she called me by a second wrong name.
It was a very strange experience, and needless to say, we scratched that agency off our list pretty quickly!
Korea is on our list, but I'll be honest - it's not at the top. For whatever reason, Korea limits the agencies you can use. Based on where we live, we have a choice of three agencies. I crossed one off the list pretty quickly. Of the two remaining, I'm not completely sold on either one. Both are good agencies. Both also have programs in China and Vietnam. I don't know though... I just haven't had this feeling of "oh yes - THIS is who I want to work with for our adoption."
South Korea's international adoption program has been in place since the end of the Korean war. It's been a very stable program, although I've heard rumors that it may slow the number of referrals until the program eventually closes. I don't know how accurate this is - just something I've read on multiple websites. Right now the wait time to adopt from Korea is increasing, and we're told it will likely continue to increase.
We would have the option of either traveling to Seoul to pick up our child or having the child brought to the US. The escort option is nice because we wouldn't have to worry about leaving M. here. But then, we'd miss out on the opportunity to see our child's native country. That's pretty important to us. If we did travel to pick up our child, it would be a very short trip. About three business days. In my humble opinion, that is not long enough to see the city or the country. And it's a LONG way to fly for just three days. The other factor with traveling is that we would not actually be able to take custody of the child until we're ready to leave. I'm not crazy about that. Cost-wise, there isn't much of a differential between going to Korea and having the child brought here.
We're keeping Korea on our list for now, but I don't think it's the right program for us.
I've spent a long time looking at agencies online, and I thought that I had a decent list of potential agencies. Based on what they'd posted on their websites. I am learning the hard way that it is a lot more difficult to choose an agency than I thought it would be. Hubby is interested in hearing what I learn from conversations with agencies, but at this point, he doesn't want to mess with it himself. That's how it works in our marriage - out of an entire universe of possible choices, I narrow it down to a few, perhaps three or four, and Hubby works with me to choose between those.
I'm taking a very critical look at just about everything about an agency, because let's face it - these are people we're counting on to get our child safely to us and get us all home with all the i's dotted and t's crossed in our mountain of paperwork. I've been very upfront with the agency staff I've spoken to and explained that we aren't planning to start the paperwork until early next year, but that we want to take our time and make sure we're chosing the right country program and right agency for our family. If they're dismissive of us because we aren't willing to fill out paperwork and start today, they're off the list.
We've decided that we definitely want a multi-country agency, and it needs to have a solid China program as well as a good program in Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, or any combination of the above. If we decide to go with Korea, we are limited to just three agencies, all of whom have programs in China and Vietnam as well. Honestly though, none of those three agencies are at the top of my list right now, so we'd likely only use them if we choose Korea.
Last week we were scheduled to participate in a conference call with a multi-country agency here in our state. It was about their China program. Now, I don't know if this is indicative of the dwindling interest in Chinese adoption due to long wait times and increased restrictions on who may adopt, or if this is indicative of an agency that doesn't know that you NEVER schedule something during the season finale of Grey's Anatomy... but Hubby and I were the only people on the call. Well, actually, Hubby spent a lot of time chasing M. around the house, so really I was the only one on the call with the agency staff the whole time. It was a really strange call. One of the agency people had a bad New Jersey accent, which is not something you hear often in our neck of the woods. She seemed more interested in telling me how great the shopping is in China and how CHEAP (she emphasized that word repeatedly) everything is over there than in actually talking about the future of the program. Um, okay. They also dodged several of my questions instead of giving straight answers. I'd say it was totally a waste of my time, but at least it showed us that we don't want to use this agency.
Tonight we're scheduled to participate in an online teleconference. At least, I think we're scheduled. I followed all the instructions on this agency's website to sign up for their event, and then received an email late last night telling me that due to some technical glitch, we were actually signed up for an event this December, and could we please go back to the site and re-register? I went back this morning, couldn't figure out how to re-register and finally gave up and emailed the agency. IF I can get us re-registered for this seminar, we'll participate. I'm willing to give this agency the benefit of the doubt - technical glitches happen to all of us at one time or another - but in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, "if they can't get their online system to work here in the US, how will they handle problems while we're traveling in Vietnam or China?" On the plus side, they do have a remote staff person who lives a few miles from us and whose children attended the same elementary school M. is going to attend. So even though the agency's main office is in another state, they do have a person nearby we can talk to, meet in person, etc.
About two weeks ago, we talked to an agency recommended by good friends of ours. They used the agency several years ago for a Russian adoption and were very happy with the level of service provided. I spoke to someone in their China office, and I was very impressed with how much they stressed attachment and bonding techniques and possible issues. They seemed very big on educating adoptive parents about how your baby may react in the first few weeks or months and how those behaviors differ from what your own biological children were doing at that same age. They followed up later, inviting us to an orientation meeting in our city, but schedule-wise, we couldn't make it work. While the graphics snob in me wasn't overly impressed the visual impact of their materials, the actual content was very good. We do plan to eventually attend a meeting with this agency, and they are currently at or near the top of our list.
More to come later!