The Wait

I really started this blog because of the wait. I needed something to help me with this wait that I've been drowning in. It's been a hard summer for me. I sometimes have fears that China will shut the whole program down. We are in a very long line with many other parents waiting to adopt a child from China. How did the wait get this long? There are lots of reasons that add up to it. First of all, China is changing. China is becoming very quickly a more "westernized nation," and wants to be recognized as a world power. World powers need to be able to take care of their own people. We know China has had overpopulation issues for a very long time, that is how their "1 child policy," resulted. Just recently China has opened up adoption within their own country, where originally it was not encouraged much. The China international adoption program is incredibly popular, and that adds to the increase in the number of families with their paperwork submitted to China. In order to decrease the wait time to referral and also decrease the numbers of dossiers submitted, CCAA(China Center of Adoption Affairs), decided to make some changes in their criteria for adoptive parents. They dropped the age limit from 55 to 5o, and made other specific changes regarding BMI(body mass index), financial stuff, and health issues parents may have. The changes went into effect May of 2007. We wouldn't be affected by the changes fortunately, but we did hear about them coming and got our dossier in by Nov. 2006. So did many other prospective adoptive parents too. So we are in a giantic huge line that we are maybe 3/4ths of the way back. I'm not sure if I explained this very well, there are also other factors that contribute to the wait and lots and lots of really crazy rumors. CCAA doesn't explain how or why they do what they do, and we have to deal with that. Late this spring when I realized that we could be realistically looking at waiting another 2- 3 years possibly until we travel to China to bring back our daughter Lily, Dan and I had a long talk. We are in this for the long haul. Our daughter is in China and she probably hasn't been born yet. We will wait as long as it takes.