We have a Group Number!!

We are now almost completely officially a waiting family. Read on for the letter we received this morning!

PLAN Loving Adoptions Now Inc.

1975-2005 Celebrating 30 Years of Excellence

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Dear Patrick & Shula,

Your dossier was sent to China 4/21/06! Your group number is 127B and it looks like you will be traveling with about 10 other families. Three of them are direct PLAN families. The wait is still about 9 1/2 months from your official log in date. Your dossier should log in with the CCAA in 2-4 weeks, but we won't know what the exact official date is for several months.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Congratulations!

Susan

Adoption update

Our dossier was received by the translator yesterday. This is the last North American stop before heading to China. I guess everything went smoothly at the state and national levels because all our approvals, signatures, stamps, and seals are in!
The latest is that we should expect our paperwork to be sent to China on or around the 25th of April - just another couple of weeks. Our agency said it will probably take 2-3 months once it is sent before we are "logged in" and are given an LID (log-in date). This is an ever so precious time because it is the start of our *real* wait and we are then considered a "waiting family" by the International adoption community. Kind of silly, since we feel like we have been waiting since we started this whole process, last September. The current "wait" to referral from China once a family has a LID is 10-12 months, followed by a 2 month wait until approval for travel. This time frame could change at any time, but we hope it gets shorter and not longer. So, folks, we are now looking at bringing home our daughter sometime mid to late 2007, if we are lucky. It's like the gestation period of an elephant.