Where is our baby?!

For those not familiar with the way a China adoption works here is a brief overview: You gather tons of paperwork and documentation including birth certificates, marriage cerificate, police clearance and more. You also have visits with a social worker and a homestudy done. After you gather up all of this, all of the paperwork has to go through a very complete certification process that the Chinese require to proove that you are indeed who you claim to be and that everyone who signed off on your paperwork is legit too. In fact the final step is authentication of all of this paperwork done by the Chinese Consulate themselves, just to make sure all of the Americans who signed off on this were not lying too. Anyway after all of this is complete it is translated and sent to the CCAA, the Chinese government agency that handles all China adoptions and your dossier is logged in. This is when we get the v.v. super important Log In Date (LID) Ours is 5/23.

Then you just wait. It is called the Big Wait. China will send back a group of matches (referrals, a specific baby that your family is approved to adopt and matched with) about once a month. This group includes families that have specific LIDs in a given range. This range is variable, sometimes it is a whole month, sometimes less. Lately it has been about 2 weeks worth, that is why we did not get a referral in late November like we had originally thought.

The last group of referrals was recieved Dec. 10th. It included families who were LID 4/1-4/14.
So that is where things stand. We really just don't know when we will get our referral, but we are looking at March maybe? If the CCAA is only matching 2 weeks at a time then March would seem seem be logical, right?

BUT......the CCAA is pretty unpredictable. Before the October referrals were recieved, the CCAA had been matching whole months at a time and it is a possibility that they could do so again.