I do realize it is not the right option for many families out there, and being a mother myself I don’t begrudge anyone whatever decision they come to. I only wanted to share how we came to our decision. If the CCAA miraculously said tomorrow our NSN referral was here, did we want it, I’d take it and not look back. At this point we’re just looking for whatever available avenues there are to finally get our child into our family. And I must say 24 mos is downright depressing.

K LID 12/05

Truer words were never spoken.

Questions, I know that everyone keeps saying that referral times speed and slow and I seem to remember that 19 months had been the longest wait ever. That was during SARS, right? Before adoptions shut down for SARS what had the wait been? How long was the shut down? I’m just trying to figure out, besides SARS, what was the longest wait and what caused it.

Also, when are the Olympics scheduled for? I know its summer 08 for a couple weeks. I would imagine they might shut down a few weeks before and after for a variety of reasons.
LID 2/13/06 and feeling blue.

Some agencies post the list and it’s first person with an interest gets first option to put a LOI in on the child.

Other agencies post the list and have people submit a request for the child and then they decide who would be the best parents (in their opinion) of the child. This requires parents to possibly spend hundreds of dollars in order to compete for the child, as they are expected to have a doctor’s input when they submit their request.

For some families neither of these options is a good fit. For other families they realize that their agency prefers to approve people who do not even have a home study yet for their waiting children, which makes the waiting children have to wait many months longer for their families to be able to come get them. But it also means those already in process likely will not be chosen because the odds are that someone who is not yet a client of the agency will make a request and automatically beat them out.

I really wish the CCAA would come up with some kind of standardized way to handle the SN issue. Ideally they would have all of the children listed on their site and the agencies would be the ones providing passwords to the CCAA page of SN kids. This way all children would be available to all families no matter which agency they are with, and the CCAA would be overseeing it instead of the agencies.

In response to the 24 month wait, I felt like this was in the cards for us too. We are LID 3-28. Doing the math with the current referrals, and I figured we were looking at a 24+ month wait.

I’d like to plant the seed for some of you to consider going SN. Maybe that is playing into what CCAA wants us to do, but hey, a child is a child. Here was our reasoning for why we added our name to our agency’s SN list.

1. You can choose what SN you will accept. Unlike the dossier filtering thru the CCAA then getting a referral “This is your child - will you take her?”, our agency gets a batch and the agency then pairs up families with children. At least in our agency, there is no pressure to have to accept. If you do not accept, it does not affect our standing at the CCAA or at our agency. This was the clincher for me. I was afraid of being given a child our family couldn’t handle, and then being unable to turn it down without detrimental effects.

2. Your dossier never leaves the NSN track until you commit to a SN child. CCAA has no idea you are on a SN list, has no idea if you review and turn down a child’s file. If no child fits a profile that you feel your family can accept, your dossier still continues its process (albeit sluggishly now) thru the system.

3. Some special needs are huge, some are remarkably minor. Several of the last group of children our agency received included things like a small birthmark on a wrist, “pigeon toes”, etc.

4. I realized I did not need to feel guilty about not wanting a large SN. I am continously amazed at the willingness of some familes to accept children with significant needs. I was afraid if I didn’t accept a child, I would consign it to a life in the orphanage, etc. That is not the case. Over the last year, it seems that every SN child our agency received has found a family - including ones with large and sometimes ill-defined SN’s.

5. Age range. We actually have 3 bio dd’s, ages 7 (twins) and 4. We asked for an 2-3 yo in our dossier. Many SN children are a little older, but at least in our agency, it seems that half the SN’s referrals have been for infants under a year.

6. One of our twins would have been SN. She was born with a second thumb on her right hand. It was removed when she was 6 months old. She has a small scar. That is the extent of it. If she had been an orphan in China, she would have been considered initially un-adoptable. Unbelievable to me - she is a joy.

7. At this point, SN will most likely be much faster. This is not a reason in itself, but did tip the scales for us.

When we first started paperchasing, I talked about SN with my sister, who adopted from China 1 year ago. (Her wait was a TOTAL of 12 months - paperchasing to referral. ERGH!) Both of us agreed that SN was not for us - who get’s pregnant and asks for a child with a SN? So who would ask for an adopted child that way? Most of this stemmed from fear and misunderstanding of the process (see #1).

Anyhow, I would encourage those of you who are open to this to consider looking as SN and finding out your options. At the very least, it has given me hope that we will find our child sooner than the open-ended wait that is occuring on the NSN track.

Sorry this is so long. I’ll try to keep the rest of my posts a bit shorter. :)

I saw this wait coming months ago. I kept saying we would be at 3 years, but the optimists around me didn’t want to see it. We are trying to get our ducks in a row to put together plan #2 which will include trying to adopt elsewhere first.