The Waiting Game

We have a new fridge magnet.

Like it?

It's our wait list number. We don't get to erase it and update it nearly as often as we would like but at least we're out of the triple digits.

We've had a lot of questions lately concerning the wait list process so I'll do my best to explain it without boring you all to tears or confusing you even further...

There are actually 3 waiting lists, one for boys, one for girls, and one for multiples. A family can be on more than one list at a time, depending on what parameters they are open to for their adopted child. We are currently #98 on the boy list and #122 on the girl list. We've been concentrating on the boy list number since it is the smaller of the two and we are therefore pretty confident we will be adopting a boy.

Our adoption agency maintains an orphanage in Ethiopia called Hannah's Hope. The Ethiopian government places children into orphanages all over the country, including Hannah's Hope. The tricky part is there is no real system to why or where or how many children they place in each orphanage. It is completely arbitrary and at the whim of the Ethiopian government. That is the frustrating part. Hannah's Hope may receive no children one month and 10 new children the next. There is just no way of predicting.

When orphans are placed in the orphanage by the Ethiopian government, our adoption agency case workers and orphanage workers examine the families at the top of the waiting list and the needs, age, and gender of the child in question and suggest a match. This is called a referral. The family will receive all available medical information, including photos, birth family background information, physical examination, development assessment, blood tests, and court documents concerning why the child is being placed for international adoption. Then the family may choose to either accept or deny the referral. Once accepted, the family moves into the paperwork of officially adopting that child and their name comes off any of the three waiting lists they were on. The waiting list shrinks and our number changes...

The initial paperwork process was hard but this waiting is a whole different kind of hard. We expect to be on the wait list another 12-18 months. We're trying to just think of it as an epically long pregnancy. Kind of like a spiny dogfish...