The waiting begins!

It's official! We confirmed today that all of our paperwork is in place with our agency and the only thing left for us to do is wait.

Ok, that's not quite true. As always, there may be just one more thing to do. Apparently, my physician failed to sign the three copies of the documents required for my physical. There must be an original floating around in his office somewhere, but I don't even have one, let alone THREE. Instead, I naively sent three copies of his copied signature to my agency, not realizing that they were copies. Why should I have suspected? After all, I had a professional notary NOTARIZE his signatures!!! Aren't those guys supposed to authenticate the signatures?! And, they were notarized at great inconvenience, I might add. The traveling notary charged me an exorbitant $30 travel fee (to travel about 1.5 miles), plus $10 per copy to notarize what weren't even original signatures. That's a grand total of $60 for doing a VERY bad job. If the documents get rejected based on the negligent notary, you can bet there will be a traveling notary providing some complimentary services to me. For his sake, I hope the papers pass. I can assure you I will not be pleasant if I have to make an appointment to inconvenience myself and my physician one more time.

So...back to the wait. It turns out Taiwan is becoming a much more popular adoption program that it has ever been before. I think we largely have China to thank for that. As China's program slows down and timeframes continue to stretch out, people are finding that Taiwan offers a wonderful alternative. The children are of Asian descent; you can get a boy or a girl; the children are well-cared for; and the timeframes have been much shorter than those for China.

That said, as Taiwan becomes more and more popular, the timeframes for Taiwan are stretching out as well. We are lucky to have hopped on the waiting list with our agency when we did (a few weeks ago). I was told today that those completing their paperwork for Taiwan currently are facing a likely referral time of about 6 months from now! For us, we should receive our referral in about 5 months, which should be somewhere around February or March. From there, we will have another 4-5 months of waiting before we can bring our baby boy home.

It's funny...had we decided to adopt from Taiwan when we began the process in June, we would likely have already had our referral pictures in hand, and in just a few short months we would be parents. Our detour to complete the paperwork for adoption from Kazakhstan meant that instead of bringing home our baby in time for Christmas this year, we will be lucky to have our baby by the end of summer next year. It's funny how things work, but this is the path we were meant to take and we know the wait will be worth it.