Delay, delays and more delays

Happy new year to all!

FYI, Lunar (aka Chinese) New Year is coming up at the end of January. This year is the Year of the Dog. Seeing as we are both also born in the Dog year (1970) (well, us and Bill Clinton), we are hopeful that 2006 will bring good fortune in our adoption quest.

Thought we'd take advantage of the holiday downtime to bring you up to date on activities of late (or lack thereof). As suspected in our last post, there indeed wasn't a referral in December. Group 229 has just received their referrals this week (week of January 2). So, that means we are one step closer (even if it feels a like a small step).

Unfortunately, there has been a significant slow down in referrals and it is likely that we will have to wait several more months. We hesitate to speculate on timelines anymore, as we have no way of knowing whether things will speed up, or slow down, over the next few months. All we can do at this point is pass along the information provided to us by Children's Bridge:

"Group 229’s files were registered at the CCAA in the latter part of April 2005. The CCAA is only matching two weeks of files per month now, having dropped from two months worth at one stage, to one month, now to only two weeks. This means that in February, they will only match files registered before May 15th, 2005. Our next groups, 230, 231 and 232 were all registered after May 16th 2005. Accordingly, we anticipate we will not receive any referrals in February. This also means that time from registration to referral is creeping up to ten months and we expect it soon will be a year to referral." - Children's Bridge Weekly Update - January 6, 2006

According to the China Center for Adoption Affairs, the number of healthy babies in China is in decline while the number of families wishing to adopt keeps growing. There certainly has been a steady increase in applications over the last few months or so. China, however, is fairly restrained with the amount of information it provides, so there are no details available on the 'whys and hows' of the current slowdown.

International adoption from China made headlines just before Christmas, when an orphanage in Hunan province was found to be adopting out 'black-market' babies. It is possible that the investigation of this has contributed to the slow down, but there is simply no way to know for sure. If it is indeed the case that there are fewer children available for adoption, we can only hope it's because their birth families are able to keep and care for them. While we are dissapointed, believing that fewer children have to endure the loss of their birth families takes away a little of the sting.

As some of you may know, the Lunar New Year is a time of celebration in China. We're starting to learn a little more about it, so thought we'd pass along some interesting websites in case you're also interested in learning more about the celebrations and your sign under the Asian zodiac:

http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/438/CHINA/chinese_new_year.html

http://www.familyculture.com/holidays/lunar_new_year.htm