Happy Chinese New Year

February 8, 2016 ushers in the year of the Red Monkey according to the Chinese Zodiac. Monkeys are considered the tricksters of the Chinese Twelve Animal Signs and this means it is likely to be an exciting and “interesting” year. So Happy Chinese New Year to all of our friends and family.

Although it is technically not the New Year in China, we have already had a fairly eventful beginning to our new year. Due to the unpredictability of our adoption timeline we have recently found it to be difficult to arrange daycare for our 2 1/2 year old daughter. Since we will receive our referral for our son only six months prior to travel and because we have no idea when we will receive our referral we are currently trying to figure out what we can and should do for daycare next year. We adore our current daycare provider and want to keep our daughter (and eventually our son) with her until she goes to school but we likely cannot afford to keep her in daycare full-time while I am off on parental leave. And it is unfair to our daycare provider to pull our child out of full-time daycare mid-year (also she will not allow it). So right now we are trying to predict the future, weigh our options, and try not to freak out. I know it may not seem like this really is an adoption related issue but I am writing about it because it wasn't something that I thought we would even have to worry about. And its adding another layer of things we need to figure out. Luckily we received an email from our adoption agency today that has taken our mind of things...at least temporarily.

The light at the end of the adoption tunnel...today we received the following email from our adoption agency Children's Bridge:

Hi Palmer Family,

I am pleased to let you know we have sent your Waiting Child China dossier by courier to the CCCWA in Beijing today. The CCCWA usually takes 2 weeks to log in your dossier. Once your dossier is logged in, your family will be eligible for the next set of individual children's files form the CCCWA.

Hooray, another step closer! So hopefully that means we can possibly get our referral for our son within the next 5.5 months (when we asked our adoption agency what the average wait time was they said 1-10 months (that is not an average according to my math teacher husband) so we are going to go with 5.5 months). That would mean we could possibly have our son home with us in the next year. So maybe the predictions are true, the year of the monkey may prove to be very interesting.