More Rumors

Rumors are coming in and its not good. It seems that China is looking for a way to reduce the amount of adoption dossiers(applications) and therefore reduce their wait times. They are currently working on a list of regulations to eliminate some hopeful parents. To list a couple: age limit of 45, BMI or some type of weight restriction, medical history, College degree, higher income. If these rumors are true then we will no longer qualify. In the past China has "grandfathered in" applications that already were Logged in. That is what we are hoping will happen. So....we will continue on and try to hurry up as best as possible. Immigration stated they never received our home study so our social worker resubmitted it. We are hoping to get our I-171 some time next week. It will then need to be certified and they all of our documents still need to be authenticated in Houston. If everything goes as planned we will hopefully be done at the end of this month.

I heard some parents learn Chinese...

It really seemed like a great idea! I mean, with the wait time increasing it sounds like we would definitely have the time to at least get down some basics. Finding the will power and time to do it seemed so daunting. I searched the internet, book stores and spoke to many adoptive or soon to be adoptive parents and everyone agrees that the more we learn and expose ourselves to our daughters culture the better it will be. I'm all for that and fully plan to incorporate my daughters culture in her upbringing. After all my researching I finally ran across a blog that seemed to help me with this decision. I wish I could find it again to give proper credit, but this soon to be mother......... was learning to use CHOPSTICKS! This is something I can do, and with enough time (12-18 months to be exact) I'm sure I can become great at it. I will wow the other traveling families while in China and I will teach this new skill to our daughter. As for the learning Chinese.....I opened a fortune cookie the other day and it had a chinese word written on it and then its meaning. I put it away to look at later and picked up my chopsticks to finish my dinner. I'm getting great!

Meidyn's First Ultrasound

This is her first ultrasound. Isn't she beuatiful! Just thought I would share with everyone. I had it on a previous post but it had a name on it I had to cut out. So here's the rough version until I can fix it properly.

It keeps getting worse

Alright, nothing has changed as far as our paperwork. We are still waiting on I-171 and cannot do anything until we receive that. There are many rumors going on right now that the wait could extend as long as 18-24 months after we send paperwork to China. I can't understand why this would happen. China states it is because there is not enough "paper ready" children for the amount of people who are wanting to adopt, thus creating a backlog. If this were the problem I would think they would have figured out a way to fix this and it would be getting better, not worse. Some think it is China's plan to limit the amount of children adopted internationally for political reasons with the Olympics coming up in a couple of years. I guess it's possible they do not want to give anybody any reason to bad mouth them. There are also some who say their are not as many children being abandoned and therefore a shortage of children. I really don't know and would hate to think that these children are purposely being left in orphanages longer than they need to be. Well....thats it. These are just rumors and I'm hoping they will be replaced by better rumors tomorrow.

We're still waiting

The home study went great and our final copy has been sent to immigration. We should be received our I-171H and then we will almost be done with paperwork. All our paperwork, including home study will need to be certified in Tallahasse ( I think) and then authenticated by Chinese consulate. Then we will send everything to our agency, after making many copies and they will forward it (dossier) to China. We are hoping for early September.