In the Matching Process

I am not pleased with our agency right now. We really expected more communication then what we are going through right now. Dean called and left another voice mail with our caseworker. So when the phone rang with their number on caller ID, I thought to myself, finally!. But instead got a BIG surprise - A Referral!! Not the one we were expecting though. A sibling group of a 3 year old boy and a 2 year old girl became available and we were asked if we were interested. My heart stopped, I could not breath for about 3 seconds. I looked at Dean and give her the 'no thank you' and asked her about the status of our Dossier. The lady told us that it has obviously been released and we are in the status of finding a match. We went over our request for a boy between 9 and 18mo's.


So here we are waiting for our caseworker to call and I can't wait to hear her answer as to why we were not told our Dossier had been accepted and released. Nothing like having your life hanging in the balance.

After Holiday Update

We were having problems communicating with our caseworker during December so I sent out an email on Wednesday night addressing our concerns. I guess that did it! She called later that night to go over them and answer pending questions.

Here's the update she shared with us:
The average wait time currently for a referral is around 5 months (that gives us around 4 months to go). Better then the huge range of 2 -12mos they state on the website.
This will give us lots of time to work on the Nursery.

We have to go through more medical exams at home and in country. This will possibly include a psychiatric exam depending on the region (which we won't know until we accept the referral).

The medical we receive on the child is not a complete medical, we will not get that until we are in country. On our first trip we sit down with the orphanage director and go over biological parent info and medical concerns and are able to ask more questions then.

There is now a 3 trip requirement with the second trip being up to 30 days.

1. First trip (7-10 days will be time spent with our little boy and our medical exams.
2. Second trip is our court date and the 10 day wait after court. This will let us enjoy our child's birth country. We hope to do a lot of sight seeing.
3. 1-2-3 strikes we're out of there and on our way home with our new baby!!!