How long to wait?

Now that we've finished all of the paperwork I find myself wondering how long the wait is going to be. I read the yahoo groups - everyone seems so "concerned" about this uncontrollable wait period. Although we don't feel like we are going to get upset about the wait- we have so much to do before our life with children starts- but we are currently figuring on 1 year.

Some of the families ahead of us asking for the same age range waited 10 months and the shortest I've seen for a wait in the past 6 months is 7 months. Our Age range is a single Infant under 12 months, Siblings (one an infant, one under 3 years) or twins under 24 months. The only way I see the wait being potentially shorter is on the twins side.

My research indicates-
1) there are many more agencies working in Ethiopia to place children than there were a year ago and I'm guessing this staff is working very hard with not many more resources.
2) there are a lot more Adopters going to Ethiopia to adopt then there were 10 months ago when these individuals that waited 10 months started waiting.

So of course I ask - do we plan 1 year, do we plan 15 months, 18 months. I wish our agency would say- in December of last year- we had 20 applicants that met your criteria and those applicants waited 6-10 months for a referral- now we have 40... It would be very helpful. But that's just my analytical side stepping up and out.

It amazes me that people are questioning this wait with out looking at and analysing the information already available to them and expecting to wait 6 months even though the latest letters (from our agency anyway) have read 10 months.

So instead of focusing on this- we're just keeping busy. We've started Networking with in the Ethiopian Adoption Community, we're making a list of all of the items that we need to fix in the house before the kids come, we're working on a playroom and we're getting rid of our clutter for the kids clutter. We just put up a train around the ceiling of the playroom and now we are going paint a mural. They have these cool paint by number murals out now. We're going to give it a shot and see how it comes out.

This past week we attended a CPR/Choke save class and the required Older Child Class our agency asked us to attend. Next week we are volunteering at the Ethiopian Cultural Camp in NH. Then we're free of adoption activities for a month while we visit with family, babysit our friends kids and have some summer fun!

Of course- I'm starting to think about putting all of the information for the children together in a scrapbook. Like the newspaper articles, our experiences-etc. I know I'll want to have it all when the kid/kids are older.

There's not much more to write but I thought I'd keep the blog alive so that when it gets interesting there will be some history to preview.

Have a great few weeks.