31 Months of Waiting Today

I can't believe it's been 31 months of waiting since our paperwork was logged in China. 31 months! I say it and I still can't believe it. Where has all this time gone? Not that we haven't had our days of frustration. But I'm pretty amazed we haven't gone crazy. I think our first year of waiting was actually the hardest, because we were only expecting to wait about 9 months to a year since that was the current wait times in '06. And then when we entered our second year and started to learn that waiting times were beginning to increase, we pretty much decided there was really nothing we could do to get our file ahead of the thousands of families still ahead of us. So we stopped following the rumor sites that were predicting unbelievable wait times, and possibly even a shut down of the program and started focusing on more productive stuff. If we followed these rumor sites, I know for sure we would of already pulled out our hair. But despite the fact that our Homestudy report & fingerprints have already expired once & will expire once again this summer, our agency is assuring us that we are "grandfathered" into the system and that we will get our turn....eventually. But even so, it's still pretty frustrating that we have to keep updating our Homestudy report & fingerprints, which means paying more fees. And this stuff is just not cheap. Our social worker has to make a trip to our home from San Diego to check out our place for ( we're still not too sure why or what they're looking for exactly ) and then makes any updates to our Homestudy report ( like a sentence or two ) and then sends it over to CIS to read through etc.. etc....so they can re-decide whether or not we're still worthy of getting an approval to bring an orphan ( aka: Madi ) into the US. We just sent off our letter to CIS a month ago asking to get fingerprinted locally so we don't have to drive into LA. But we still have to schedule our Homestudy update for the summer sometime. Hoping this economy improves somewhat so we can continue to get some work as we've had one of our slowest months ever in March. We also continue to fundraise for adoption funds through several avenues, like mklittle (blog post coming soon), our ladybug rocks (blog post coming soon too ), and our recycle for madi program. So there will be plenty of stuff to blog about ( if I can only find more time ). But the best part of all of this wait is that there have been so many wonderful people ( including family, friends, and even complete strangers ) who have been incredibly supportive of our adoption journey, helping out in so many ways, -and for this we are just so very thankful for.