Meet the Midwife

When a couple is expecting a new member of the family, there is a conception date, lots of visits to professionals who monitor the situation, preparation for the expected due date followed closely with the arrival of the heir.
However, in adoption, there is a decision date, followed by lots of visits by professionals, approvals rendered and then purgatory, without any idea of an expected date of arrival.
Enter the Rumour Queen at www.chinaadopttalk.com. She is the midwife for all matters related to adoption - international in particular. Adopting parents from all over the world participate in her blog feeding each other information and support.
Our file logged in with the China Centre of Adoption Affairs on March 14, 2006. When we adopted Lil, the wait from log-in date to referral was about 6 months as they were matching 4 to 6 weeks of files at a time. But the politics of adoption in China changed due to a number of factors and families currently logging in can expect to wait many years before they receive news of a referral.
Currently, China has matched files logged in up until March 2, 2006. Some months they match 2 days of logged in files, other months 9 days and every month it is a roll of the dice. RQ has made this a more predictable process by calculating the number of files assigned to log in days and projecting likely referral dates. Then as folks all over the planet get their referral, the information on the cut off date gets communicated to those who are still waiting through ChinaAdoptTalk..
Its all pretty complicated and not quite as predictable as we would like, but it would seem that we're getting pretty darn close and RQ is the reason that we've kept our sanity through all of this. Referrals are expected sometime this week and although it is optimistic to think we will be included in this batch, we remain hopeful. A more realistic estimate would be in the March batch, but no one has ever accused me of being realistic.