Our weather is finally gorgeous. It is days like this that I remember why I love living in the midwest – I truly appreciate a beautiful day. It was breezy and 72 today.
Oh yes, and there was another girl referral with our agency last week – the long no-referral streak has ended.
That is all.
Just because I like to torture myself, I have created several countdown / count-up widgets on my dashboard. These are the categories for my widgets: __ days until I go scrapbooking, __ days until homestudy meeting #4, __ days until Tom’s final, __ days until last day of school, __ days until Alayna’s due date, __days until Little Man turns 4, __ days until Tom graduates, __ days until we might have a referral (I went way conservative here), __ days since our agency’s tracking list was last updated, __ days since the last female referral, __ days since we made it on the official list at our agency.
My dashboard is a sea of countdown calendars. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.
We are a little over a month into the process and I can tell you with 100% certainty that the waiting is going to make me a crazy person. We went into this knowing that the wait for a female referral was going to be significantly longer than the wait for a male referral. I have developed an obsession with checking our agency’s referral / travel tracking website and I figured out that it has been 65 days since the last female referral. I know that they were getting a lot more female referrals a few months ago and yes I know that these things are unpredictable and they may get inundated with them over the next few months. It is just hard thinking about how long our already long wait is going to get. I really need to stop checking the tracking list. I tell myself each day not to check the list. I know that we are not even close to the top of the list and it is ridiculous for me to get so caught up in the list on a daily basis. I know it would be much better to check the list once a month instead of 6,829 times a day. I know this. I do. Yet, I MUST CHECK THE LIST. I must have it in for myself. I have to go now. I am late checking the list.
Last weekend, Tom and I attended our required adoption education class. There were about 30 couples there at various places in the adoption process (most at the beginning of the process). We listened to a psychologist discuss attachment and a pediatrician (and adoptive parent to 4 daughters from China – 2 of them special needs children) tell us about the medical issues that international adoptees face and questions we should ask when we receive our referral. We heard a short presentation from the Early Intervention specialists in our state. There was a required component for the new Hague Treaty given by the social workers at the agency. The best part of the entire day though was the panel of adoptive parents who had recently brought their children home. It was so wonderful to see the families together. The children were adorable and made me want to adopt one from each of the represented countries! There was a family there who had adopted a little boy from South Korea a few years ago and had just brought home their daughter from Korea 4 weeks prior. She was the happiest baby – waving at everyone, smiling from ear to ear, simply adorable.
We also got the chance to meet with several other couples who were adopting from South Korea. A group of us went out to lunch together and exchanged phone numbers / email addresses. It was so interesting to listen to everyone’s reasons for choosing adoption and choosing Korea. I am hoping to get to know some of the couples better. It is going to be an invaluable resource for us to be able to have relationships with other families who will have children adopted from Korea.
