Yep, today marks two hundred and seventy five days on the waiting list. Why is 275 days significant? Great question, I am so glad you asked! (You know you were wanting to ask, unless you had already done the math in your head.) Today is a BIG day for us, it marks 9 months on the wait list. Yep. 9 months is how long we have officially been hanging out and counting down to Lando. That is the same as: 6,600 hours; 396,000 minutes; or 23,760,000 seconds. (Anyone else humming “Seasons of Love” from Rent? I am, but I also heard a parody to it earlier today from Thursday night’s The Office.) FYI- It has been 492 days since we first met with “L” from The Baby Fold to begin the adoption journey.
So why is 9 months significant? It marks the entry into the threshold of when we were told to expect a referral. One of the things we liked about All God’s Children International (AGCI) is when we “interviewed” them; they told us they could give us an average of most people’s wait time, but not a specific one due to it being international adoption. (Others had flat out told us we could expect a referral within “x” number of months.) So when we decided to go with AGCI, we were told the average family was looking at 9-12 months on the waitlist, dependent upon their specific parameters.
Side note: I am not a fan of the term average. I understand the value in averages, but to be honest, I am not a fan of any of the measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode, or range). It doesn’t allow for individuality and it doesn’t make you feel good when you are the outlying data point. At the same time, I am so hoping to fall within the range of 9 to 12 months, closer to 9 months, when it comes to waiting for Lando. To be even more honest, I was hoping to be one of the outlying data points that didn’t have to wait 9 months before a referral.
The adoption path to Lando really has been a journey and unfortunately our Garmin, Daniel, so doesn’t help in getting us to our destination. You get a map of the path you are supposed to take, but it is a really bad map. Silly cartographer. (Okay so now I am thinking about the West Wing episode where the fictional group, the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality, discussed the “Peter Projection World Map” which shows the continents in their true proportions. Please don’t think I just happened to know the name of the organization at the top of my head, I recalled the episode and then had to Google the rest.) In our map, everything is laid out very linear, as you go along the adoption journey you go from point A to point B and so on. The problem is that the cartographer didn’t denote on the map the amount of space time between the points. Everything looks equidistance, but it isn’t, the map doesn’t have those little marks that say how many miles months it is between points.
So what destinations have we already covered in our journey to Lando? Well we went through the busy city of “Homestudy,” which for us was a twin city to “Determine Agency and Apply Land.” Once we exited this destination, we journeyed to “Illinois needs to approve our Homestudy” which did take a bit, before we got to the village of “Submit your Dossier.” Luckily for us, this was a quick voyage and we didn’t have to redo bits of that portion of the journey so that we could get to the land of “Waitlist” on July 23rd. While in the land of “Waitlist” we have gone down the street of “USCIS Fingerprinting,” which led us to the avenue of “Favorable Determination Letter.” The avenue of “FDL” is the last official item we have done, but we have done a lot of sightseeing (9 months worth) while in the land of “Waitlist.” So hopefully we get to leave “Waitlist” soon to go to “Referral,” because that would mean we would have seen a picture of Lando. Granted, there is more waiting in “Referral,” which I suppose is even harder since we would know what Lando looks like, but at least it would be progress and be closer to our goal of having a son/daughter/children.
Have we come a long way since being place on the waitlist? Yes. We have moved 32 spots on the boy’s list, 54 spots on the girl’s list, and 34 spots on the siblings’ list. So there has been movement, but there needs to be more!
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