China

Since I've been bad at keeping in touch of late, some of you may have last heard that we were adopting from China (some, I'm afraid, may not even have known that we were adopting at all). The China adoption is still happening, but the wait to receive a child from China has grown quite long. We completed all our paperwork for China last July (before we'd ever even heard about Svetlana). The Chinese government has completed referrals only for people whose applications were on file before October 15, 2005. That means they've got 9 1/2 months of applications in line ahead of ours, and they've been moving less than one month's worth of applications per month of real time, so the wait keeps getting longer. At the current pace, we likely won't be going to China until mid-2008 (by which point Svetlana should have been home for a year or so).

On the plus side, that gives me more time to learn Mandarin. Thanks to the ability to take lessons on a tuition-waived basis, I've got almost two semesters under my belt already. I'm told one needs to be able to recognize about 2,000 characters to achieve functional literacy. I've got about 20% of that . . .