A " Predictable AND Stable" program?

So, if you read or hear from many parents who adopt from CHina you hear one theme ring true. Many of us, decided on China, partly or mainly due to the PREDICTABILITY AND STABILITY of the program and the FAIRNESS of the program.

Once your Dossier is logged in, in China, your wait begins. There is no preference in timing or health of referral or anything else given to one person over another (ok, I'm excluding expedited referrals for people of CHinese descent). This means the system is fair, it's equitable and 'stable'.

Stable? Could mean in terms of how long the wait takes or in how the rules are applied. The Wait? Yeah, we know, it's not stable unless you call the amount in which the wait is increasing each month stable... then ok, yeah, the increasing wait is stable!

The rules? The rules were once logged in, you were in line, no bumping, etc. Here's some things that have happened in the last few months:

People who should have received their referral in the previous batch (up to 8/25/05) did not. THey were asked questions in the review room, and even if they answered them in days, they lost their spot in line... in some cases being bumped by LID months.

For this referral batch, per the CCAA posting, it included only people through 9/8/05. I read online that some people were skipped, in other cases, a few agencies received referrals for people with Log In Dates of 9/10/05, 9/12/05 and 9/14/05, after the cut off.

And lastly, some of those agencies who got referrals that weren't supposed to be included, had earlier people who were not included.

What's going on? What happened to the system, the idea that when the cut off was announced, that the cut off date was in fact the cut off date... not some estimate of the date.

For those of us waiting, these are nervous times. Things have changed with regard to the length of the wait and no sign of let up on that end and the rules appear to no longer be followed. And that's their right, it's within their power to do that, but for God's sake, why post to the world what the cut off date is, if it really isn't that? (see posting to the right from their website)

Signing off... LID, sometime 2006...

I must remember that this is just the 'noise of life' (see last post) and that in the grand scheme of life it's really gonna be ok... maybe tomorrow I'll convince myself.

(as an after thought... perhaps this happened routinely over the last 10 years with China but the lack of both a flow of information from the CCAA to agencies AND a lack of flow between parents didn't allow us to realize it was happening...)