Surprise in the Mail!

On Friday, we received the infamous brown envelope in the mail! AnnaClaire's didn't come until months after her homecoming, but this time we got two! Not like it means anything for now, just an exciting landmark in the adoption process :). All we do with it: bring it to China and don't open it! Speaking of the brown envelope... Kate's adoption is going well. As of now we are still waiting. We've been logged in almost 4 months and have been on the IF list for 7 months. Initially, we were hoping to have Kate's referral by now. However, as the nsn wait gets longer, the sn wait increases, too, as people switch from nsn to sn. We really are still hoping to receive her referral this year. Of course then there is this whole "shared list" thing. There really isn't a ton of concrete info out there about it, but it sure doesn't sound great. In case you are unfamiliar with it, the shared lists are when a couple of agencies get referrals for the same kids. They make calls to their families, if the child matches their criteria. Well, more then just that family could be called on the same child, so it's basically whoever acts first. One family we know was called about a baby on a shared list, and less then 12 hours later, she called back but the baby already had a family. Basically, you are competing for the kids. Although atfirst, the shared list was for older and harder to place kids, it might now be for all kids. Our FC told us that AWAA had not heard anything about only getting shared lists, so they might not all be shared lists. We'll have to see. I think it would be really difficult/heart wrenching to receive a referral from a shared list and literally risk loosing the referral if another family said "yes" quicker. But... Kate will come to us in whatever way God has planned.. we'll just wait patiently for our time!

So that's pretty much it. I cannot wait to post about Miss Katherine Mei's referral; but for now, we wait... and enjoy our first blessing from China!