We have our Log In Date!

It's official! Our Log In Date (or LID in China adoption lingo) is December 12th, 2006.
This is the date that the Chinese government acknowledged receipt of our application and paperwork, and the date from which the clock starts ticking.

Our paperwork now needs to be processed through three "rooms":

The Translation Room This is where all our documentation is translated from English to Mandarin.

The Review Room This is where all our translated documentation is reviewed to make sure everything is in order.

The Matching Room In this room, first they match up orphanages with adaoption agencies. If an orphanage in one province has 12 babies available this round and that agency has 12 sets of adopting parents, they are matched together. Then they match the babies with the individual parents.
This article talks about how the Matching Room works.

The next question that comes up is generally how the matchers match families and babies. I’ve heard from several people who have had the opportunity to speak with someone who works in the matching room. The various conversations seem to all agree that they first look for something that stands out: a matching birthday, a baby who looks a lot like a parent, or a baby who likes music and a parent who teaches music. Several matching people have stated they match by bone structure of the baby’s face and the parent’s faces (this is why they need our passport photos, so they can compare our mug shot with the baby’s mug shot). Some have stated that they used Chinese astrology, also. Once they’ve matched the obvious matches they then start to look at things like age of child requested. The age requested is not a priority for them, they feel they are matching families and not filling orders. And I have to say that they’ve done a wonderful job matching us and our Big Girl, and now I trust they will do an excellent job matching us with her little sister.

At the China Centerof Adoption Affairs, they post how far along they are in document processing, though I hear that page is frequently pretty ourt-of-date.

Right now we think we have about a year-long wait ahead of us to get ready for little Buffy's arrival.

One more milestone down!

Still waiting...

So it's now a month later and they're still only processing paperwork from May 15th. Argh!

Karen called the person handling adoptions at CIS six times and she didn't answer the phone once! So Karen left 6 polite voicemails, and she never returned any of them!

Then Karen spent several hours getting the runaround from their 1-800 number, only to be pawned off from one unhelpful bureaucrat to the next and finally told we'd have to drive back to San Antonio for any information. The same place where we'd spent all day in a waiting room just to have our fingerprints taken. There's no question that that would just be another day wasted.

So a little over a week ago I wrote to our Senators (Hutchinson and Cornyn) and Representative (Smith) asking for some help in finding out the status of our paperwork.

Today I got a call back from someone at Congressman Smith's office. I just faxed her my release form, and she said I can expect to hear back in 2 weeks with some info about where we are. She said they can't expidite our case though :(

So we're crossing our fingers that we'll get past this hurdle before too much longer.
Wish us luck!

Howdy!

Hi everybody and welcome to Buffy: the Baby Blog.

For anyone wondering what's going on here, Karen and I decided earlier this year to adopt a baby girl from China.
We are both very excited and anxious about the prospect of becoming parents. Yeek! :)

Our current reading list includes Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care and Caring for Your Baby and Young Child by the American Academy Of Pediatrics.

As Karen said, we've already done a lot of the paperwork. If you look at the average wait times and baby ages, we should be getting a "referral" sometime in the Fall of 2007. That's where the officials in China match you with a baby and send you a picture. Then after another wait, we'll go to China for 2-3 weeks and should be back with Buffy around Christmas!
She will likely be 9-12 months old at that point.

We're using Great Wall China Adoption as our agency, and they're doing right by us so far.
Here are some photo galleries of kids that have been adopted through them already.
In about a year, we should have some pictures in there too!