Of lengthening time lines and lack of pictures

Well it has been a bit of a disappointing few days recently. I am an avid snoop of any adoption related info that could shed some light on our process. Part of that snooping means that I religiously check another agency's website to see what is happening with their Vietnam program. This agency, also located in Ottawa, publishes biweekly updates of all their programs and every second Friday I am on the site eagerly reading their Vietnam info. The updates include where in the process families are and what is happening re: time lines. This past Friday I dove in hoping to read that this agency's post-referral families had received their travel dates. Well, they haven't and, sadly, some of them have been waiting 7 months! There are also now some families with our agency that have been waiting for more that 7 months. It therefore appears that this is the new standard of time. If that is the case then we cannot even hope to travel until at the earliest March and perhaps even April. When we were first matched to Van he was only a couple of weeks old. We thought we would be for sure meeting him at 6 months or younger and prepared accordingly. It now appears he will be 8 to 9 months old. This may mean we will have to reassess his whole wardrobe, baby car seat etc. One of the many difficulties of adoption I suppose. On the up side, we are very lucky that he was so young when we were matched to him. There must be families now who prepared for a baby but will be ending up with a toddler. I can say from all of the research I've done that there is a big difference between welcoming a baby versus a toddler both in terms of home preparation and emotional preparation.

On another note. I received an email from a family that did a home country visit to Vietnam with their two children in December. While there they visited Hoa Binh as that is where their son spent the first months of his life. The family gave me and other waiting families the link to their shutterfly account in case our children are in some of the photos (they took a bunch of pics of the orphanage and some pics have some of the children in them). Well I eagerly went on and scoured the pics but alas little Van was not in them. This is the second time we've received a batch of pics from Hoa Binh. Unfortunately neither batch produced a much hoped for pic of Van. So we continue to wait for any updated pics so that we can see what he looks like now and so, frankly, we can see that he still exists! We have placed all our hope on the family from our agency who leave for Vietnam next week. They should catch sight of our little Van on January 20th. We can't wait!!

Meg