No longer Decemebr DTC. Now January DTC.

The boys and I were coming back from shopping at Target and a run through McDonald's drive-through for Flushed Away toys when my cell rang that I had a message. It was our social worker (SW) from our adoption agency asking to give her a call at our earliest convenience. Something in her voice told me she didn't have good news...

There is a company called Gracewood Inc in NY that translates your dossier (all your adoption paperwork) and then takes it to the Chinese consulate in NY to get authenticated. All dossiers that are recieved by Gracewood by the 10th of the month will be translated and authenticated and sent to China by the first week of the following month. When your "dossier gets to China" or DTC as the adoption folks call it you get your offical log-in-date (LID) soon there after. Your LID is your critical date because now you are officially in the Chinese Adoption system and your wait for your child begins. (The avg wait from LID to referral or being matched with a child is now is 14.75 mos) So we got our dossier to Gracewood the week before Halloween...way before the 10th of November hoping for a December DTC and LID. We got a call from our SW today that Dave's birth certificate got bounced back from the NY Chinese consulate because it has to go through the DC Chinese Embassy instead. Our SW didn't offer a lot of clear explanations as to why this had to be done this way, why we weren't told ahead of time and why we are finding out 2 biz days before this has to be done in order to have our dossier sent to Chian with the next batch. She offered sympathy for the delay and said Gracewood has been busy dealing with a "crisis" that had taken up much of their time. That being said I am awaiting Dave's BC so that I can send to it DC via courier to get authenticated by the Chinese Embassy and send it back to Gracewood in NY to be placed in our dossier in anticipation for the next batch of dossiers to got to China. Because Gracewood only sends dossiers to China in batches, we cannot expect our dossier to be sent with the next batch on Monday. Instead it will be sent in December and we are now awaiting a January 2007 DTC/LID.

When I first got the call I was kind of annoyed and then kind of disappointed because it just makes for a longer wait. But then I thought back to a few months before Evan was conceived and I remembered that I was disappointed when I was not immediately pregnant. I got pregnant with Evan in Dec. 2000. If I got pregnant in November we wouldn't have had Evan. And I can't imagine not ever having had Evan. He is the perfect son for us, as are both Ryan and Derek. I have faith that we will look back at our timing and think, thank God we had that slight delay or we would have never have gotten "name TBD". She is the perfect daughter for us.