The Conference

Apparently, at Disney, the housekeeping staff play with your toys! We returned to our room to find this set-up in the window. I especially liked the bear wearing E's PJ's. Still, it's a little weird.

For those of you wondering how the conference is going, let me give you a brief overview: after being here for two days, we have not seen 1 data point. Not 1. Not even in the two presentations labeled as "research". We did however get this assessment from the researcher (that is, the person who was repeatedly referred to as their Ph.D. in charge of research, who was called upon periodically during the presentation to describe the results): "we don't have the data, but we have a gut feeling that it's working".

This is E, approximating what I looked like by the end of the presentation:

We did, however, get shown this video. I thought I should share:

In this house, we snuggle when we're sick

We also watch Over The Hedge and read Harry Potter...

Les Parties

We had a great time with our friends at the "Celebration" party! I really like inviting people over and requiring that they bring food :-) The Wii was a hit with the kids and a certain graduate student, who went down in Wii Tennis in record time. I won't mention names or gloat , but we all know who the winner was :-)

The reading party was bitter sweet. Cristina, Cara, and I waited until about 1:30 am for our books. Little did we know that we could have gotten bands earlier during the day and been way further up the line! We got together Saturday to read (special thanks to Han for the food and coffee, and to E, for being so understanding). I won't spoil it for those still reading...

On Sunday we went to see Ratatouille. Very cute movie (here's a warning though: you may come out craving really good French food!)

Our Place in the Longest Line EVER!

Now that we have our LID, estimating our wait time until we are matched to a baby has gotten just the tiniest bit easier. For those who don't know, the Chinese match by Log In Date (LID), which is basically your place holder in line. A very slow moving line. They "match" as many parents within a certain number of LIDs as they can based on the number of available babies. If they matched 30 days worth of LIDs per month, the wait time would be what it is now: 19 months. But, they have been matching only about 6 days a month lately, so it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that we're in for a long wait. Most agencies are estimating a 3 year wait for those of us with July 2007 LIDS.

I'll be looking at the data each month while we wait. As much as I love crunching numbers...this data set is down right depressing. So, here is the July 2007 wait time update.

Latest referral batch: up to LID 11/14/2005

Rate of LIDs matched per month: 6 (ave of the last 3 months) to 8 (ave of the last 6 months)

Tend in days of LIDs matched: 6, 6, 7 for the last 3 months

Days in between our LID and the latest matched: 595
Estimated wait time: 6.2 to 7.8 years
Estimated referral date: 9/13/2013 to 5/1/2015

OK, so that seems a bit long, right?? I've read that the Chinese are saying that the current referral trends (6 days!) is temporary and they will go back to 15 days per month in January (still, we'd be in for a 29 month wait if that's true). After they have reached the May 2007 people, things should speed up, as the new guidelines will cut approximately 40% of the eligible parents. However, unless they get more babies available for international adoption (or a bunch of parents decided to step out of the line), things aren't going to be speeding up much until then.

That's my bummer of an update. I hope I can report better news next month...

Family Fun

We're back from Biloxi, where we all go together and had a great time! Elijah already misses his cousins and his Aunt Alex. It was great to see Grandpa, who is still the coolest Van Camp ever!

Our LID is 7/2/07!!

We just heard today that our log-in date for our Chinese adoption is 7/2/07. That means our paperwork was in order and we now have our place in line. They just finished matching parents with log-in dates in November, 2005 (and they have been taking 3 months to finish one month of log-in dates). I think we're in for a very long wait...probably 3 years at least. I'll update the blog with some stats as we go...