What's going on...

Obviously, I have not blogged for almost 3 weeks. We've been a little busy. Thanksgiving dinner went very well. Bill's side of the family was here. Dinner was delicious.

Brian has been potty training for the last three weeks. Willingly!!! He is doing great He is still very busy. He does very well with brother in school. He has always played very well by himself though. Every time he saw a girl toy on tv, he would say "I want to buy that for my baby sister". Now he says he wants to buy it for his girlfriend. I haven't asked who is girlfriend is yet. He loves taking Lucas to school every morning. The preschool class is right next door to Lucas' class. The teacher allows him to come in every morning and play while I am getting Lucas settled in class. He seems to really like the teacher as well. She will be his teacher next year (unless she leaves).

Lucas is doing very well in school. He is still antsy, but his teacher seems to be accustomed to it. He loves school and has a hard time "turning it off" when he gets home. I had to call the school this past Wednesday, because Lucas was out sick. The admin that answered the phone made the statement: "Lucas loves life". He most definately loves school. He got 2 green jewels in Awana. We are working on getting a red one.

Both are very excited about Christmas. We have our tree and outside decor up. I have wrapped some empty boxes and put them under the tree. I do this to get them accustomed to seeing them and not open them. Except for the first day, they have not touched them. Hopefully, I will be able to add more without the boys opening them. I have pretty much finished my shopping.

Nothing new on the adoption. The last batch of referrals start coming out yesterday. From the statistics I have seen for this batch, they referred about the same number of referrals as the previous 1 or 2 months. Every month there is talk of a speed up and of the wait time increasing. The CCAA's year ends on November 30th. Their year end meeting is, I believe, December 8th. Hopefully there will be some information coming out of that meeting that will give us some idea of what is going on. I think the questions the entire China adoption community wants to know most are... why the slow down?...are they going to speed up or will the waiting continue to increase?... and if the wait is going to continue to increase, are they going to continue to accept applications. I was reading my favorite blog today (Rumor Queen), which is a great source of information. She gave me a different prospective about the wait time being extended. The way I understand it is... even if the CCAA stopped accepting applications today, if the referral rate continues as it is, it will take about 30-40 months to match all of the parent dossiers they have now. This means the parents that have their dossiers logged in and through review are being "promised" a baby that is not only not conceived, but the mothers are years away from pregnancy. I haven't wrapped my mind around that yet. So at this point we will continue to wait whether there is a speed up or the wait continues to increase. We know it is in God's time and we will have our Jade (oh, by the way, we picked a name) when we are suppose to.

It is almost 11pm. So more next time.