Happy New Year and back to work

Happy New Year to everyone! Oh dear, I haven't been very good at keeping my new year's resolution so far. A whole week has gone by and this is my first real post! Yikes! I promise I will try to post as often as I can. I wanted to take a moment to thank my nephew Matthew and his friend Kristin for helping me set up the blog. I probably never would have gotten to it if I hadn't forced them into helping me, so thanks guys! Sean was there too with a few words of wisdom from the sidelines!
For those that aren't familiar with how the China adoption process works, I will post in the next few weeks some information about that, but basically once my paperwork was approved and sent to China I received a log-in date, which for me was September 13, 2006. Yes, that's almost five and a half years of officially being in process so far. I've actually been waiting since February 2004. Because I was single, I waited an additional couple of years on a waiting list before I could even start the process, since China has a limit to the number of single women it will allow to adopt each year. So, patience has become my closest friend, you could say!
About once a month or so, China will process and send out referrals to waiting families. A referral means that they have matched a family's file with a child who is available to be adopted. Generally this is done chronologically, according to the date of log-in, and as of now, they have processed files that were logged in up to August 10, 2006. So that means, there are 21 days left in August plus 13 days in September to process before I receive my referral, 33 days in total. That doesn't seem like much to me (when I started there were well over 300 days ahead of me!) but unfortunately they only refer a few days worth of files each month, so 33 days could still take a while. More about this process at a later time.
They almost always send out referrals just before Chinese New Year as it is custom to clear away old work and start fresh in the new year, so it is expected that referrals will be sent out again in the next couple of weeks. It's an exciting time as everyone speculates on how far they will refer and who will finally get to see their child's face for the first time. So, as I head back to work this morning in our North American new year, I look forward to a fresh start with my students, and wait patiently for the next set of referrals, bringing me one step closer to meeting my daughter.