Referrals Tonight or Tomorrow night....and now they say possibly Monday..

Referrals will be out tonight or tomorrow night...they are 11 hours ahead of us in China so the referrals will be released at about 2 am eastern time. There are rumors all over the place about the cut off date...some say the 23rd or 24th and some even say the 28th....we'd be VERY surprised if they made it to the 28th, happy but very surprised. So since neither one of us ever sleep through an entire night (which will come in handy when Aislin is home!), I'm sure we'll log on to the computer and check the CCAA website to see if it's been updated to show the new cutoff date. We'll update this tomorrow or Friday whenever the update comes out.

Looks like up to the 24th so far....

More
and more posts are saying that it looks like CCAA will only get to the 24th...we are the 25th. Either way we will be doing the snoopy dance you see to the left! If we don't make it in this batch we only have to wait four more weeks until we see a picture of our little girl's face, we can handle that. We aren't waiting in the months and months anymore, we are in the weeks. It'll also make the wait much easier knowing that we will definately be in the batch after this one. It'll give me a chance to get more training at work and a little more time to prepare for her to come home. We know you are all anxiously waiting with us, she's not just our daughter, she's also a sister, a granddaughter, great granddaughter, niece and a cousin. This little girl has so many people who can't wait to see her little face! Hang on Aislin, we are almost there!!!

The Stork is in the Air!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Referrals are on their way......the rumor is somewhere between August 23rd and August 29th are included. (We are August 25th). So it's possible though not probable that we will get our referral by the end of next week. We say not probable because I guess we are guarding our hearts. It's easier after this long wait to expect less and maybe pleasantly surprised. So for the next week or so we will be once again sitting on the edge of our seats, with our hearts in our hands all ready to see how close we are to bringing Aislin home. Keep watching we'll let you know what the scoop is as soon as we know.

The Matching Room

I found this information and thought it might be useful to explain maybe why this process is taking so long.

Initially they review the baby dossiers and make sure there are no issues with them. Parent dossiers were reviewed months before, baby dossiers are reviewed when they arrive and then immediately matched.

So now they have a stack of baby dossiers. They look to see how far this stack will go in the month without sending out a partial day and they pull all of those files. That is the likely cut-off date. Sometimes something happens and they don’t get this far. Sometimes something happens and they get farther.

Next they match orphanages up with agencies. This orphanage has six babies, this agency has six families. These two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 12 babies, this agency has 12 families. When they are through with this is when (I believe) some agencies start to get information about the cut-off date.

And then they start matching individual babies to individual families. At some point during this part of the process most agencies hear from their person in the matching room to let them know how many referrals they will be receiving and from what province(s). Some agencies share this information with their clients. Some choose not to.

So here is where we are, our paperwork is in this office somewhere and Aislin's is in this office somewhere too so we are hoping they will manage to match up her paperwork to our paperwork this month and we can all be home for Christmas!!!

Trade Fair Moon Festival

The CCAA was closed this week for the Moon Festival, so there's been no updates from China. This photo shows tourists visiting Yuyuan Garden, one of Shanghai's main attractions, as it rains in China's financial capital on October 2, 2006. China is celebrating a week-long National Day holiday or "Golden Week" holiday, which runs from October 1 to 7.
Chinese people can see the biggest mid-autumn moon in nine years on Friday night. Experts with the Astronomical Association of south China’s Guangdong Province forecast that the fine mid-autumn moon will be seen at 10 p.m. Friday (Beijing Time), when the moon is nearest to the Earth. The last time the mid-autumn moon was nearest to the Earth was in 1997 and the next time will happen in 2015.

So tomorrow night, when we look up at the same moon that she has already seen, we will wonder where she is and find great comfort in knowing we'll bringing her home soon.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and a very Happy Birthday to Mom.