Monday, October 4, 2010

And the prediction is……

Ok, many of you have been asking “When will you get your referral?”.  There is no easy answer to that.  My predictions have been based on a “not-so-scientific” but “eerily accurate” method.  I’ll explain that now.
We have officially been waiting 1,537 days.  For adopting families, they refer to this as being “pregnant on paper”.  I’ve been “pregnant” for a very long time.  The African Elephant has an average gestation period of 660 days.  So, to put this into comparative terms, we’re working on our third elephant!
There are 39 LID’s before our LID. 
A website that I frequent, mainly to get updates on the China Adoption rumor mill, travel tips, etc, is called Rumor Queen.  She takes semi-annual polls to see how many families are in a certain LID.  She complies the information and posts it on her blog.  I take the data that she’s so generously complied and plug it into a spreadsheet that I’ve been maintaining for about the past three years.  I average the data in each LID.  When the CCAA posts their latest batch, I look at the number of families that were included in that batch.  I then calculate to see how many days will most likely be included in the next batch.  For 2010, I’ve been wrong once.  And that was this most recent batch where the CCAA referred more than I expected.  Friends, that threw my calculations out of whack!  Based on this latest batch, if the CCAA continues with batches of a similar size, we should be getting our referral with the January batch.  If they go back to the sizes of their previous batches, then we’re expecting a February referral.  I don’t have a prediction of when we’ll be seeing January or February referrals though.  I’ve not been keeping up with that data.  All I care about is how soon we’ll get that call…and picture. 
What does a January referral mean?  Late February, early March travel.
A February referral means late March, early April travel. 
So NEXT SPRING!

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