Photos from Dinner with China Travel Group

We had another really nice get together with the other two families in our China adoption travel group -- at Jim and Debbie's house. In addition to having a really nice dinner and comparing notes on projected referral dates, we got our first two fabric squares from Jim and Debbie and from Elaine and Scott. Here are the photos.

Update on Status of Referral

Here's a piece of the adoption update we sent last weekend to family and friends with an update on where things stand with the referral:

So far, China has issued referrals for families with log-in dates (LIDs) up to November 1, 2005. Our LID is November 7, 2006. Now the big question is how long it will take for China to process another 6 days of LIDs. The answer is: it depends. China typically issues referrals at the beginning of each month and most recently they have been issuing referrals on only a few days worth of LIDs. We are hopeful that we will get our referral in the beginning of June or July. If that’s the case, we hope to be traveling to China this coming August or September. However, the one thing that has been a constant in this process is the difficulty of predicting anything – so this anticipated timing could change.

Good news -- and everyone in our China travel group is trying to predict when the referral will happen. Here's the quote from Jim Heverin's blog:

As of May 7, 2007, the dossier date processed by China is now NOVEMBER 1, 2005!...six days away from our dossier date (Nov 7, 2005), so we expect a 90% chance of getting the referral in June 2007.

Jim has done an analysis of the probability of the various referral dates. I'm not so sure about the 90% chance thing but hopefully he's right. Believe it or not, there are a number of people who are into predicting China referral dates and other statistics and Jim was happy when I give him a link of a site that analyzes and summarizes past referral data since it does a good job of showing trend lines. The link is:

http://people.wwc.edu/staff/stirra/china/stats/statsdisplay.htm

This link has info on how referral wait time have changed over the past few years (big surprise - the wait has gotten longer).

Another interesting site with information predicting referral dates is "Rumor Queen". The link is:

http://chinaadopttalk.com/

My reaction to reading this site is: "someone has a LOT of time on their hands." But it's a good source of info if you're into that sort of thing. For example, the latest Rumor Queen post says the following:

We are also told that matching has already begun but that the batch is expected to be on schedule (i.e. not an early batch).
If you want to see what my predictions for this month were you can see them here: http://chinaadopttalk.com/2007/05/01/analysis-3/

- Scenario based on April: November 5th
- Bad (but not worse) Case Scenario: November 8th
- Good Case Scenario (recent history): November 13th
- Good Case Scenario that hasn’t happened for a while: Nov 16th
- Most Likely Scenario: Between Nov 8th and 13th

Again, this is just based on what they did last year and this year. They are capable of getting far past the 16th. Something happened in September of 2005 that literally cut their work in half from the month before to the month after. As I’ve recently explained, my theory is that this made people switch to SN and then we saw things further crumble in March of 2006 as a result of NSN families switching to the SN program. So, while it is possible for them to go farther, my predictions show what the new “norm” is and do not take into account what they are actually capable of doing.

This kind of rumor and prediction stuff goes on and on and a little bit goes a long way for me. But the bottom line is that we're all feeling good about the fact that China is now in the same month as our log-in date. So if we don't get the referral in June, hopefully we get it in July. Ok - enough for now.

Joseph