Lazy Days of Summer

It is hard to believe that summer is almost at an end. Although we stayed close to home, the girls enjoyed the beach, water slides, 2 weeks of Power Lab, a visit from Grandma & Grandpa Denis, summer skating school, basketball camp, a Hannah Montanna party and swimming lessons. They even spent a weekend at Grandma and PaPa's visiting the Science Center. Both girls have excelled in their swimming with Madison progressing to Crocodile and Mackenzie in level 6 (she is the smallest and youngest in her class.)

Extreme Makeover BLOG addition

Thank you Judi for helping us with our Blog Makeover...now we have something that is unique and personal! Judi volunteers to do blog designs for an organization called Blogovers with Love. They do fundraising for orphanages in China and Taiwan. Designs done this month will benefit The Starfish Foster Home in China. This is a home that cares for young orphaned children in China with severe special needs. You can see the work they do there by going to http://www.chinesestarfish.org/

Thanks again Judi! We Love it!

6

6 Days!

6 days were referred this month, finishing up January 2006. Yeah! I love it when a month finally finishes up! I think that is pretty good considering most Beijing businesses are currently closed because of the Olympic Games. It does however look like the CCAA was closed from January 28- Feb 5th, 2006 due to Chinese New Year, so in reality this batch really only covers 2 days worth of LID's, but I will happily check 6 days off the calendar. For anyone else who is tracking 'the wait', it took 3 years and 1 month to go from Jan 31st 2005 to Jan 31st 2006. Yikes...we still have a long way to go. We are however exploring our options and have updated our homestudy this past month to reflect a few special needs we have the resources to support, including Club foot, Cleft lip, and some other minor correctable orthopedic conditions. This will allow us to enter a 'second line' while still maintaining our current position. We are hoping to send our updated homestudy to an agency in Ottawa once we have Provincial approval to do so. Maybe in the next 4 months or so this will occur. As for our adoption from Taiwan, we are still number 9 on our agency's list. There have been no recent referrals from Taiwan to our agency for a few months now.

The above photo shows all the files of adoptive parents that have been sent to the CCAA. Apparently each agency has a different colored folder. I wonder what stack our dossier is in?

13 Months!

13 months today our dossier was logged into the Chinese system. No news about referrals this month. Perhaps we will see a batch mailed out before the Olympics start, or maybe we will have to wait until they are over....once again, only time will tell. We are exploring a few more options, and hopefully we will know more by the end of next week. We will post an update as soon as we have news to share.