Ending the adoption

Dave and I have decided to end the adoption. Some potential changes to the program have come up that I am not at liberty to discuss in this public way, but that triggered us to evaluate staying in the process.
While I have wanted to adopt for as long as I can remember, this just isn't the right time for us to continue pursuing the adoption. We are both in our 20s so we always have the future if we decide to try to adopt again. I am very sad about stopping now, but it is the right thing to do for our family at this time in our lives.

new number update

Since they changed the way they giving out numbers to give just the spot on the overall list rather than your spot on just the girl or the boy list I decided to ask Nikki what our current spot was.
We are currently #41.

Wow I almost missed the month anniversary

It almost is like when you have a baby, all those months at the beginning seem like huge milestones and then when they have their first birthday the months are less important. Last week marked the 13th month of waiting. It seems like so long, with so much left still to go.

Lunch with other adoption families

This last Sunday we joined other Kansas City families associated with international adoption for lunch. This group is called Inter Country Adoption, http://kansascity.ica.googlepages.com/home , and the children are from many different countries. We ate at New Cafe Tandoor where the Indian food was great and we got to meet other families, there were 11 of us all together. Shawn was the youngest child, but we weren't the only family still waiting to bring home children. It was a nice mix of folks and the buffet was great.

One year!

Yesterday was our 1 year anniversary of waiting for our daughter. To commemorate the date we all tried out a new Vietnamese place in Shawnee. Our course Shawn didn't believe us that there was a city with his name. But Cafe Song was a decent meal. The food was good and although the service was lackluster at times we had a good time. Shawn got the Mì Xào Gà, noodles with chicken, and he liked it a lot, although of course he got full before he was anywhere close to done with what was on his place. We did get dessert though, and they had green tea ice cream, it was yummy.

Hopefully we have less than a year to go!

negative news story about our agency

http://www.ksdk.com/news/cover_story/cover_article.aspx?storyid=134134

Apparently no agency is perfect. The wrongful employees were fired and it sounds like it was more to speed up the adoption process (which takes so long) than for malicious reasons, but still unfortunate to know it happened at all.

some clarifications and updates from my agency

I found out that they changed the policy about expediting Vietnamese families. All Vietnamese families that are currently waiting (around 30) will be expedited, but all future families will not. So there are still a lot to be expedited, but atleast no new ones will be.

Also enough people emailed and called about not being able to find out their number on the list that they decided to keep their old policy and allow us access to our number. I like statistics and trying to figure out how much waiting is left. So I am really glad to have this remain available to us.

One last thing. They (the US government) are changing another policy where you file a form, I-600, before you leave. This allows you to skip the UCSIC interview in HCMC, you still have to do the one in Hanoi for your visa though. But this will make the time required time in Vietnam even less. They estimate 8-10 days total. We'd still probably want to stay longer, but it is nice to know there is less time dealing with paperwork in country.