This website will help keep friends and family up to date as we wait for Tyler's little sister! When we finally do travel to China, we will be able to upload photos each day, and you will be able to post comments as well.
As many of you know, our completed dossier was logged in at the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) on March 14, 2006 (after 6 endless months of paperwork and fingerprinting). So, 3/14/06 is our official "log-in" or "dossier-to-China" date. Now, all we have to do is wait for our "referral" package. That will contain photos of our daughter as well as her medical and developmental history. She may not yet be born since she will be between 6-12 mo. when we receive the referral!
Between 2003-2005, that wait time from log-in to referral averaged only 6-8 months -- a breeze! Unfortunately, last fall, that span began to lengthen and the wait time is now 12 months. If we are lucky and that 12-month time frame holds, we will receive our referral next February / March. We will then travel to China approximately 4-6 weeks after that. We will likely go to one of three provinces in the southeastern region: Hunan, Jiangxi, or Guangdong (see province map).
We will be traveling as part of Group 52 with Chicago's Family Resource Center. There are 8 other couples/families in our Group, including our good friends Hank and Carol Gregory (who already have Katharine, who they adopted in November 2004 and who is one of Tyler's best friends). Interestingly, 7 of the 9 families already have biological kids -- a common scenario is a family with 2 or 3 boys who really want that baby sister!
To the right are links you can look at if interested: (1) the Family Resource Center website, which has great info about China adoption and (2) a website that is maintained by Mark Mulert. He is on the Board at FRC and posts photos of FRC travel groups. Just go to "FRC Photos" in the left bar of this home page and you can see some cute kids recently adopted through our agency!
We will keep you up to date via this site as we get more information ... but there probably won't be much to say except "we're waiting" for a while! In the meantime, here are a few recent Montana photos:
