Baseline Informed Speculation

Wait Times as of May 2007

Even though we know that it will be *years* until we are matched with our Chinese daughter, we still like to speculate sometimes. Various people come up with tools to crunch numbers or calculate with some degree of well, something similar to informed speculation or wild guessing, the date of our match referral. Here's my current list of speculation, informed and otherwise:

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Someone (anxiouslywaiting) on RQ has come up with a handy chart to show number of dossiers per month and number of months AND the number of dossiers they have been matching per month.

http://chinaadopttalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=4784.0

Granted, this does not take into account people who are later in the process and not yet being counted, but...


Number of dossiers to our LID (people ahead of us in line)
divided by 27.39 LIDs (average number matched per day, aka 833 per month)
= the number of days we will wait based on the snapshot of the poll
= 1817.93975... (days left to wait)
Divided by 365 days per year (not worrying about leap years)
= 2.609158 months until we are matched.

To make a long calculation short, they say we are looking at

2.6 years (2 years and 7 months), putting us at late Oct, early Nov of 2009.

As anxiouslywaiting says, "It is math and not necessarilly reality but it is the best I can do realizing that the poll is not perfect."

He also says, "It is still just a guessing game and this is only an educated guess based upon a snapshot in time with a lot of data collected from rumors over the months. it is probably as reasonable as we can expect to get at guessing ........ but anything goes really."
So there you go: informed speculation.

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Now, there's another tool on the web at the chinaadoptionforecast website.
http://chinaadoptionforecast.com/

They say the time of our referral is likely to come somewhere between a minimum of August 8, 2008 and a maximum of July 16, 2031 (ha! that's why they call it the maximum!).

But wait; they have a better idea, and another calculator that does not require me to slave over my calculator.

"Our best guess - a weighted average of recent CCAA velocities, guessing that the CCAA will perform as well in the future as they are performing now, but might return to previous trends:"

April 27, 2010

Without putting too fine a point on it, that's a little over three years, one month, and one week of a wait. *sigh* At this rate, I will be happy if the wait doesn't go over THAT.

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My agency's updated website is still saying 18-20 months wait to match, between Sept and Nov of 2009.
At this point, I am guessing they don't want to come right out and say "up to or beyond three years." They'll raise the numbers slowly, that's my guess.


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The Long Wait

The Long Wait (TLW) as of May 2007

Well, for those of you out of the loop of China Adoptions, the wait times (from Log-In Date to Match) have been extending and extending far beyond our initial ideals.

When we first started the process, we were told it was 8-12 months til match. Then the official paperwork from our chosen agency was indicating 12-14 months. We were okay with that, so we started on the application and dossier process, which in itself could take 3-5 months (ha! It took us what? 7? 8 months? It's a blur.)

While we built our dossier, the waits started creeping upward. I was hearing rumors of two years fairly early (18-24 months), so I started telling people the wait could take up to two years, although that didn't stop some people from dancing about with glee and proclaiming it would take us "hardly any time at all" and that "the wait goes quicker than you think." ha! ha! Yes! They said that! hahhah

Okay, seriously, with times creeping further and further out, we are now hearing of possibly *three* years wait! I am trying to not feel too depressed about that. We have our spot in line and I'm holding on to that.

I do start worrying that the wait will extend to even longer and weird things will happen to the situation before we have our daughter matched and home. I have a dread of having to explain the situation to others. It's painful to have to somehow justify the long wait to others when we are even more frustrated and pained by the slow down. I am even more glad now that we haven't made any general announcements and having to deal with remarks from a larger pool of uninformed people. It's hard enough already with the people I keep in the loop asking "how the adoption is going." Well, I say, our paperwork is still sitting in a stack somewhere in China... Like, excuse me, it's not "going" anywhere; it's sitting there in line!!!!

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On a related note, I have found out in the last couple of months that some of our friends who wrote us reference letters have not been keeping it quiet as I had originally requested. We have random people offering us "help" and even our car mechanic (!!!? WTF?!) remarking that they had mentioned it to him... They even mentioned something in front of another acquaintance that we would never go out of our way to share personal information with. This is very disconcerting. Do they not think that our information is worthy of discretion, especially since we asked them to be discrete? I start feeling very irritable and a little panic-y that the info is being flung willy-nilly around the area.

On top of that (being confronted with people we don't know being privy to our private lives), I don't know how to bring this up with our friends. I am baffled that perhaps, somehow, they did not understand that we were not sharing this at random and would prefer they NOT share this with other people. !!!! For God's Sake! Even if someone is pregnant, they don't usually (often) immediately share the news with the entire god-d*mned world. Wait, there was that one acquaintance who had to share to the ENTIRE world when she was merely a month pregnant--you can imagine my self-restraint at that announcement-- But anyway! :) hehehe

Anyway, we hardly see these folks in private... and our shared couple time has shrunk. So when do I have a spare quiet moment to say something to them?? I also don't want to hit them over the head with it. I just want to inquire about what they thought we wanted them to do with that personal information, and ask them, politely, to restrain themselves...

*sigh* It's not as if my mother doesn't also talk to her friends. It's not as if I don't also make my own decisions about who to share this with. It's partly that I *am* private about my life. I have had too much of people talking about my life as if it belonged to them. It's also that we will wait two to three friggin' *years* and I don't feel like putting up with sh*t from nosy people while we wait and wait and wait and ...

It makes me sympathize with all those famous people about whom it's said," they are a deeply private person." Yeah, I get it. Just because somebody knows who you are or thinks they know you does not give the right to every last iota of personal information about you. If you have been reading, you know I hit on this topic a lot. I'm sure this won't be my last. :)

But how to redirect my well-meaning but apparently clueless friends? Maybe they didn't get the memo I thought they did? Maybe by "not sharing it with everyone," they thought, like, we meant every last person on the earth. Only a few hundred or so... Okay, I know my secrets are *not* safe with *them*...


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