Nothing much new to report! Garry has one coat of paint on Claire's closet. He says one more coat should finish that project and then I can start organizing! I'm not sure just WHAT I'm going to organize but at least it will keep my mind occupied and perhaps fool myself into thinking I'm making progress! Hope has already volunteered to help Daddy put the crib together. It's early, but I feel good about it. The room no longer holds dread...only excitement.

Anyone wishing to look at a few pictures of the current group of new families in China can go here: http://qzhou.photosite.com/ These deliriously happy folks received their babies last Monday. God bless them and I am sooo jealous.

No new updates at CCAA...hopefully a new batch of referrals will be coming out soon.

Some information from Dr. Jane Liedtke, the CEO of Our Chinese Daughters Foundation who is raising her Chinese daughter in China...I have copied and pasted the following text from the Ask Jane in China Yahoo group as Dr. Liedtke says it better than I could:

"I don't believe domestic adoptions are on that big an increase to impact international placements/referrals. What I do believe is that the new move to put all institutions under CCAA for the purpose of coordinating adoptions is causing a shuffle of employees, training, restructuring to accommodate and how to handle within new offices, etc. This could cause temporary delays but not likely long-term. Also, all the press about adoptions from China always tends to cause things to slow down and I suspect the recent Hunan investigations are creating some of this as well - imagine you are sitting on an office of files from Hunan orphanages and other places under investigation. Those files are getting sent back to the orphanages. Then other children's files have to come forth from other orphanages to fill in the gaps on referrals that could not go out as anticipated. This will cause delays for sure but not permanent delays as eventually other orphanages would be sending more children forward if they have them. If fewer children are being abandoned in some regions then of course processing of referrals will be slower than in the past. Hunan is the largest province for international adoptions with something like 2,000+ kids per year so that number if bound to change in the short-term and have some impact on speed of referrals. I don't think people should panic about it. My suspicions are that "slow" may be a good thing for the system inside China in the short-term as they have a huge public perception problem to deal with domestically and internationally. No country doing international adoptions wishes to appear to be "babyselling"."

Also, according to Dr. Liedtke, these investigations into babyselling aren't new. Apparently there is a history of this in Anhui, the province Hope was born in as well. As I told Garry yesterday, "I don't care...they're not getting her back." Dr. Liedtke has also stated that the move to CCAA's new building still isn't complete. Apparently they are having a terrible time with their wiring etc.

C'MON REFERRALS!