The end of December we reached our two year mark of being officially approved by ICAB and placed on the waiting list for a referral. I wish I had some good news to share about being close to the end or at least closer. Unfortunately it seems that every time we feel we are finally close the timeline gets extended more and more. The most recent referral that I heard about was in October and the couple had been waiting almost 30 months. I was hoping that they were an exception and that everyone else would be getting referrals sooner, but I know a lot of families who are at 27 months and still waiting. I also heard yesterday that ICAB has said that there are still 10 families with approvals from the summer of 2008 that are still waiting and that they will need to match at least half of those before they start allowing files from Sept.-Dec. of 2008 to be looked at. They said that this should happen sometime around March. What this means for us is that our referral will not be coming until March at the earliest, but that is not likely. It will most likely be sometime this summer and that is if the timeline does not increase anymore than it already has. It is very frustrating and I know a lot of families that want to pull out of the program. The Philippines has placed some more restrictions so that there will be a lot less new applicants but that is not going to affect our timeline any since we are so much farther ahead.
I knew when it took us a year to complete our home study and all the problems we had that this was not going to be easy and that the wait would be long and hard, but I had no idea it was going to be this long. By the time we get our child it will be 4 years from the time we started this adoption process. I remember being told at the beginning of this process that China adoptions were taking about 3 years and I couldn’t imagine waiting that long and how hard that would be. Little did I know that we would end up waiting even longer. I guess I’m at the point now where I just try not to think about it, even though there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it, and try to distract myself with other things to make time go by faster. It has been nice to have this time to focus on the two kids I already have and to spend more time and attention on them, because once this adoption happens I know the new child will demand a lot of our attention. It has also allowed our girls to grow up and mature a little more before the new one comes along. This will help a lot especially with all of the difficulties we have had with Eva. She would not have been ready before now to have a new sibling. I feel she is so much more independent and her anxiety has decreased a lot this year(she is actually going to Primary on her own now with no problems-she even volunteered last week and got up in front of everyone to do something, which is huge for her). Plus, I was spending a lot of time dealing with her special diet and I feel that I finally have that under control. I also feel like I am a lot more organized now and am really starting to get this mom thing down finally and finding balance in my life. I think we still have more to work on to prepare for this new child, but it sounds like we have time.
