Jackie’s been on a blog-writing jag of late. She’s trying to get a record of our process up and up-to-date. She’s also been pulling paperwork, matching dates, and working out the time-line of what happened when. Her blog’s more detailed and researched than mine.
I’m paying more attention to my experience of things, so my posts are more impressionistic, shall we say.
If we disagree on facts or dates (are dates not facts?), I’d go with what she says.
We really sweat this one. After talking with some people, we decided that our criteria was this: big enough to have some clout and resources in China; not so big that it would be unresponsive to our needs; handled adoptions in more than just China, so we would have options if China closed down for some reason; and someone who gave a warm fuzzy feeling, or at least just passed a gut check. Jackie looked up information on-line about a lot of agencies, and we talked to a number of them on the phone. At this stage, we had narrowed things down to three agencies: one top contender and two others. I was OK with the one we’d chosen, but Jackie wanted to think about it. I honestly felt that we would be fine with any of our choices, but Jackie recognized, rightly, that this was a major decision that could color our entire adoption experience. Plus, she’s a comparison shopper; I’m not.
We’re going back and forth, unable to make up our minds. We wanted to have a decision made and our application in before the FCCA Autumn Moon Festival on September 17, 2005. (More on that in another post.) But at the last minute, we decided that we needed to see some physical, paper information packets from the primarily agencies we were considering. I think we may have had packets for one or two, but we wanted to see them for all the agencies.
It was a good thing we waited too. While we were at the Autumn Moon Festival, we talked with a number of people who really raved about the agencies we were looking into, but some were also telling us that Chinese Children Adoption International (CCAI) was very good. We had not considered them earlier, because they do the most Chinese adoptions in the US (too large) and because they only do Chinese adoptions (no backup). However, the people who talked about them thought very highly of them, and everyone said that the Chinese adoption program in general is very stable and that we should not worry about it closing. Based on all this, we thought we should include CCAI in our final cut.
We returned home and ordered yet another information packet, this time from CCAI, and we were really blown away. All of the agencies were very good, and they all have good charities to help the children in Chinese orphanages who are not adopted. But as we looked at the packet and watched the DVD included, we were very impressed by how service-oriented CCAI seemed to be and by how much emphasis they placed upon their charity work and upon helping the children.
Just to be sure, Jackie called some of the references they provided, as well as the Better Business Bureau, Everyone we talked to had only good to say about CCAI.
So less than a week after Autumn Moon Festival, we had decided to use an agency that wasn’t even in the running before the Festival. I still think that any of the other three agencies would have been fine, but so far we’ve been very happy with our choice.
The Chinese government has recognized that they officially have our paperwork, and they’ve finally decided to let our agency (and us) know. This is called our log-in date (LID), and ours is March 3, 2006. The counting for our wait starts then. (It’s not unusual for a long wait between the actual LID to when we hear about it.)
The next thing for us to do is . . . wait. Right now, the wait time is around 10 to 11 months, and our agency isn’t expecting it to change. At the end of the wait is a referral. We get a picture and information about a child. We won’t travel to China to be joined with her for another 6 to 8 weeks.
That is a while to wait, but right now it doesn’t seem too bad.
Oh, and this is not an April Fool’s joke.
