ten and a half-ish

Hello there readers (are there any readers left??).

It seems that my ability to blog gets worse and worse, even as my intentions to blog more frequently get greater and greater. Alas, life is often crazy-busy, the adoption process is sometimes emotionally draining, and I can't seem to find more than 3 minutes at a time to spend at my computer.

But here I am.

As per the (not so original) title of this post, it's been almost ten and a half months since we were officially put on the waitlist for a referral. You remember, right? Back in the days when referrals were expected approximately 8-9 months from that exciting day when one was officially "on the waitlist" (which, ironically seemed soooo long in light of the 3-4 month wait we expected when we were put on the waitlist in 2008 and even compared to the 5 1/2 it actually took for Simon's referral). Oh how things look different in hindsight!!

Well, 8-9 months clearly was not to be. And neither was 10, and now we don't really expect 11 to be it either.

The good news is that things are starting to move again - more slowly than in the recent past, but not as slowly as we had started to fear. And while we expect delays to continue and suspect additional changes will be made to the Ethiopian adoption process, it does continue to be a strong and viable program, and for that we are grateful.

So maybe we will celebrate a year on the waitlist (though I'm hoping maybe we won't celebrate 13 months) and quite likely we will have to wait until 2012 to travel to Ethiopia. But somehow that actually seems okay right now... believe it or not, even pondering 8-10 more months in process doesn't seem so bad (I'm not saying it's great, but...) and we can actually see the end in sight (okay, just barely, but we can).