The light at the end of the tunnel?

Just to catch you up a bit on how adoption matches from China work...

Matches of babies to their families are made about once a month. Once the matches are completed, the CCAA (China Center for Adoption Affairs) ships them all out at once to all agencies around the world. They usually arrive at the agencies a day or two later, and each agency verifies the info (may take a few days) before they start to call families with the good news.

For the past few months, the matches have come out at the end of each month. The matches for December were shipped out late last week and just started arriving at agencies today. Once that happens, the rumor sites on the Internet start to go into a frenzy about the "cutoff date". This date is actually called the LID, or Login Date. It's the date your application was officially added to the waiting list in China. Matches are made in order based on your LID.

As of early December, matches were made for applications through Sept 8, 2005. Rumors today are indicating that matches for this month are going through at least Sept 27, 2005. Our date is Oct 26, 2005! That means that there will only be about 29 days of applications ahead of ours. IF (and it's a very big IF) the matches would keep up at that pace, we could have a match as early as late February. While I hope that happens, I think it is far more likely that we'll be in the March group. Why? Well, the number of applications logged in Sept '05 was lower than average, while the numbers in October were a bit higher. The CCAA doesn't match a consistent number of days each month; they do match a consistent number of applications each month.

Another possible glitch is the timing of Chinese New Year on 2/18. Many business are closed during at least a part of the two week celebration, and many workers take vacation. Last year, the CCAA surprised everyone by releasing matches in early Jan, late Jan, and mid-Feb, but as we have learned during this LOOOONNNNNGGGG wait, there are no guarantees.

Will hopefully post more tomorrow once I know the cutoff date. Because of the uncertainty of the information, I don't trust any dates from the rumor sites until I get the monthly update email from our agency. They send an update to all waiting families after they have made phone calls for the new families that month.