Guess our Referral Date!

At referral time I think about our wait to bring Magpie home. Sometimes referrals leave me lonely and sad, other times, I'm elated.

This month I decide to 'mess with the data' to make predictions but I leave out all data before Oct 05’, the wait was a steady 6 months for years, things have changed.

With the most recent date I tried to ‘guess at the future’. The chart shows what % of wait time we have completed as the months pass, after Nov 05' it's a WAG. Did you notice we continue to get ‘close but not quite there’?

Sure, someday the curved line will hit the goal, but we’ll be collecting social security. Do I think this will happen? Social Security could happen, depends on whether or not the folks in Washington screw up the system or save it. Oh, you mean the referral taking that long,... no.

That chart sucks, so I trudge through the data with hip waders, the sign of an engineer, manipulate the data till you get what you like. I plotted the % wait we’ve had left each month as referrals came, through Nov 06’ and let the computer guess at the future instead... Predicts our referral next fall, a 16 month wait. Compared to having waited 6 years to bring a child to our life at that point, not so bad huh?

The computer imparts a bias, assuming the wait stays a constant ~15-16 months, what it is right now... not realistic unless for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/CNY, our gift from the CCAA is revving the referral engine into high gear... anyone care to wager on that one?

Yeah, that's what I thought...

So, I yank the hip waders up to my chin... Since Oct 05’ they’ve processed, on average, 13 LID’s for every 30 days between referrals, adding 17 days to the wait/month. So I compare the average 13 LIDs/month to and increase of 18 LIDs/month.

@18 LIDs/month, referral = Dec 2007
@13 LIDs/month, = May 2008.

When are the Olympics?... oh yeah, they start 8/8/08, uhhm, that comment from the CCAA ‘...no adoption travel ‘just before/after’ the Olympics...’, my interpretation, early July - Sept. A referral in May of 08’ is cutting it close to the lock down. However, we have an extremely small (but incredible) agency, the benefit... they normally get RAPID assignments for dates and travel once the referral is accepted... sometimes half the time of the larger agencies, they have less to coordinate and fewer appointments to get slots for!

The bright spot:

If 13-18 days on average happens, the vacation we’re required to hold all through 2007 ‘just in case we travel’ (ie, no days off next year) can be used at the end of 2007 on anything. Once Oct/Nov 2007 rolls around, we’ll know for sure if we’re going to China or not. Use it or lose it vacation... I love Corporate America, if we could roll it, that’s less time unpaid (yeah, that’s right, we don’t get maternity leave when adopting, as if the day we get back from China we could just plop her in a daycare, no sleep issues, no adjustment trauma, no health issues).

We’ve talked about this possibility, of a non-China babymoon Nov/early Dec 2007... we ache to go back to Belgium to see the canals of Brugges and Gent again, but we have so many places we want to see, central Spain, or Germany at Christmas time. Though it would be an awesome time together for sure, we had hoped to take those trips with Magpie and quite honestly we’d rather be in China.

Bottom line, my guesses on Referral Dates for a 5/8/06 LID:

September 2007 - May 2008... so when family and friends ask, “any news on when you’ll travel”, and wonder why we say “not sure”... hopefully this helps...

We really don’t have a clue, nor does anyone else