Okay, life is NOT all about "woes" at the moment, but I thought I'd stick with the theme and write about all the troubling thoughts we're having lately about our plan to adopt from China. We've actually been struggling with these thoughts since late summer, but I'm just getting around to writing about it.

If you've read my previous entries about our plan, you will know that we chose adoption, and specifically China, with the idea that we were helping out a child who needed it at the same time as fulfilling our own desire to have another child in our family. Lately we've been feeling like the babies in China don't "need" our help as much as we thought they did. I mean, I believe that any child who is in an orphanage situation would be better off with a loving family. The problem with China is that there seem to be tons of people lining up to give these babies homes.

Our troubles started when we began closely watching the successful adoptions being completed in China, and realized that the timelines have been starting to lengthen considerably. When we started the process we were told it takes about a year. Now it is up to about 18 months and is only showing signs of lengthening even further. The CCAA says this is because they are getting more adoption applications than they have babies to match them to. They say the reasons for this are, 1) less babies are being abandoned, and 2) more domestic adoptions are taking place. Those are two pieces of great news for babies in China! To me, this tells me that the "crisis" in China is over. Yes, there are still babies there to adopt and it's great news that there are enough families to adopt them. But if there are too many families, the wait is just going to keep getting longer and longer. On the adoption chat groups and stuff, everyone is waiting and hoping for things to speed up - but I don't see how that is going to happen unless it's because less people are trying to adopt.

Another thing that is happening to make us wonder about our plan to adopt from China, is that there have been rumours (and in some cases, announcements) that China is tightening the restrictions on who can adopt. There have been rumours that they are going to begin being more strict on potential families' financial situations, health background, etc. In particular, our adoption agency has told us that families where a parent is in a wheelchair will not be eligible. I felt really sad about that, because it's making it harder for families who perhaps can't have birth children to adopt.

This is getting long. In summary, what I'm trying to say is that we've started feeling a bit guilty for "getting in line" to adopt from China. We feel like we are contributing to the longer wait times and stricter regulations that will make it harder on other families who really "need" this option (as opposed to us, who - at least hypothetically - should be able to have another baby the "usual way").

In addition, that longer wait time is troubling for us too. We thought we were timing the adoption process so that we could have a 2 - 2.5 year age difference between Peyton and her sibling, probably getting our referral sometime in the summer or fall of 2007. If the process stays constant (where it takes the CCAA about 2 months to get through a month of log-in dates), then it will be August 2008 before we get our referral! That is way longer than we expected to wait!

So what are our options? We could try to switch to another country instead of China. Vietnam has just opened to Canadian adoptions again which is very interesting. However, we would have to re-do a lot of our paperwork and it's looking like the wait could be quite long there too. But we have been reading up on adoption from other countries to see what our options are.

There's also the option of adopting an older or "special needs" child, from China or pretty much anywhere, even domestically. I don't think people are "lining up" in quite the same fashion to adopt those kids. However, I do think we have to be honest about what our family can handle. I know there are no guarentees that any child will not turn out to have "special needs" in the future (and some adoptive parents say that all adopted children could be considered to have special needs in some sense). So, if we end up with a special needs child, however he/she joins our family, we will do our best. But, I really don't think I can knowingly sign myself up for that. I'd rather do what I can to try to add a healthy as-young-as-possible baby to our family.

Of course, there's always the "usual way" of adding a baby to the family to consider. But I was really hoping not to go through another pregnancy, and especially another birth experience.

So... I'm not saying we're dropping out of the China program at this time. I'm just saying, that we have some concerns and we're currently "in discussions" to try to figure out what would be best for our family.