Seminar

Saturday we went to our agency's adoption seminar. We wanted to attend a seminar before officially applying as we had some questions. All of our questions were answered and then some. We learned a lot. Our facilitator had just returned the previous week from picking up her 2nd daughter in China, so she was full of fresh info. Two other families came in with their adopted kids, one from Guatemala and one from Kazakhstan. Lots of good info and adorable children.

Some interesting facts that we learned about adopting from China:
-There are over 1000 orphanages in China.
-Only 2% of all the children in the orphanages get adopted. 2%!
-Apparently some parents can develop post adoption depression. Like post partum. Who knew? (that can happen no matter where you adopt from)
-Unless Ling Ling is re-adopted here in the US if she ever needs a certified copy of her birth certificate she'd have to write to China!

Hearing from parents who adopted from countries other than China was very helpful. With Kazakhstan you have to stay in country for 6 weeks. Whoa! Who can do that? And in Guatemala you get your referral very quickly. The babies are in private foster care- very well taken care of. But things can go wrong and the mother that was there had her referral for over a year (!!!) before she could go get her son. I would die from the torture of waiting and knowing what your baby looks like and not being able to go get him!

We also learned that Chinese adoptions are taking right around 13 months. Which is perfect- right around the time we'd predicted. We'll still add a couple of months to the timeline to allow for anything to go a little awry. So now we're more comfortable in our decisions- China, our agency, everything. And more than just being comfortable, we're even more excited!