Well, we have now reached twenty seven months. I was just thinking last week that 27 months is the same as 3 pregnancies. It seems like such a long time, but I know of people that have waited much longer to be first time parents and I feel very blessed to have two little ones already to help keep my mind off the wait. We are still in the process of updating our home study. Our USCIS fingerprints expire next week and we are not even close to finishing our update. We still have not even been assigned a new social worker. We were told to finish all the updated paperwork, send it in and then we would be given a social worker who would do the home visit and finish the home study. We sent in our updates a week and a half ago and are still waiting. I was getting really anxious because I don’t want to end up paying the refiling fee, an extra $350 or so, for letting our fingerprints expire so I asked the person we have been working with at All God’s Children if we could expedite this as much as possible. I think she realized this was not going to happen, so she told me that we might be able to send in our I-800a extension form with our old home study and they would then tell us we had 45 days to get them our new one without having to refile. I’m not totally convinced that this will work, but what else can we do. I’m kind of wishing we would have just payed the extra money to keep Joann and switch to her new agency, because I know she would have rushed to finish in time. It makes me really nervous to know our fingerprints will be expired when we are so close to getting a referral. If by some strange miracle we did get a referral this month and our fingerprints were expired, we would not be able to accept the referral. This is not very likely but is a possibility, so I am just praying we can get this all finished so I can relax a bit.
I did find out some interesting things about the wait. I was thinking of all sorts of questions, so we decided to talk with our placing agency over the phone. I found out, after she spoke with their liaison in the Philippines, that there are 151 families still waiting world wide who were approved in 2008 (this was as of the beginning of March). They couldn’t tell me the average number of matches they complete each month, but by looking at past statistics, it appears that they do 40-50 a month. I was also told that they typically like to complete one year before moving on to the next year. This means, since we are at the end of 2008, that we should be matched around June or July. The end of March there were 4 referrals that I heard of on the yahoo group for non-filipinos. All of these were from approval dates of October 2008. This also got me really excited because we are just a couple months behind them. I have heard from several people on the Yahoo Philippine Adoption group that are from other countries, and they know of families that have waited or are currently waiting 33-36 months. Our agency told us that they do not think we will have to wait beyond 36 months and that so far none of their families have had to wait longer than 29 months(I’m sure this will change though). At least, I am hoping, that because we are at the end of 2008 and they are getting closer to finishing matching through the end of that year, that we will not have to wait that long and it will be around June or July. My guess is still July, but Jason thinks it will be closer to December. Since there is a big possibility that it could be this summer, that would mean we would travel before the end of the year. Not knowing for sure kind of messes up any plans for this summer, because Jason has to save all his vacation days just in case we do get a referral by August. If we haven’t gotten a referral by then we will be able to use his vacation time to do something fun, but unfortunately by then summer will be over and the kids will be going back to school. I guess we will just have to take a big Christmas vacation trip or something. For now we will just have to plan some fun weekend camping trips or something like that and do a lot of fun local things.
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